Burning for You (Blackwater)

by Lila Veen

  “You practically are a teenager compared to me,” I snort.

  “Not true,” he says. We are sitting and facing each other on the sofa and he takes my outside leg and pulls it around his waist. He leans back and expertly unhooks my stocking from the garter belt and pulls the stocking slowly down my leg. He pulls it off along with my shoe. “Your skin is so soft,” he tells me, his hand moving up my leg and making me shiver from his hands so close to where I want him to touch me. He does the same with the other stocking and then pulls my legs around his waist. We’re close enough to have our faces are touch. “Age is all about attitude.”

  “See, the fact that you just pulled that phrase out means that you’re younger than I am,” I taunt. “I’m an old married lady and you’re a kid who doesn’t have a job. Why am I here?”

  “Because you want to be,” he breathes, catching my lower lip in his teeth with his last word. I feel the familiar wash of desire melt through my limbs, pooling toward my center. He gently pushes me back against the sofa and covers my body with his own. I put my hands on the sides of his face and kiss him back. My need is obvious by how forcefully I take his mouth with my tongue. His mouth opens and I feel his tongue respond to mine by exploring back into my own mouth. He breaks the kiss and I lean back as his lips travel down my chin and onto my neck. “Sit up,” he orders me. I comply and feel him take the hem of my dress in his hands and pull it up. My arms raise in the air and I feel like a child as he undresses me and tosses the dress aside. He unhooks my garter belt and tosses it aside onto the coffee table. I make a motion to begin to take off my mask and his hands cover mine. “Let me do it,” he says. He seems to know exactly how to remove it, which is good because I would have needed a mirror. The bobby pins and mask are placed gently on the table. He slips his own off and rests it next to mine, two hollow faces looking back at us side by side. “I’m taking you to bed,” he says. I nod and he scoops me up from the couch, making me yelp in surprise. I circle his neck with my arms and he carries me over to the huge king sized bed and sets me down gently. “You’re beautiful,” he says, standing over me. “I want to see all of you.” There’s not much left, of course, except my bra and panties. “But first I need to catch up. It’s not fair that you get to be comfortably naked when I’m still wearing this dumb costume.”

  “Next time just specify naked costume party and we can save a ton of time,” I suggest.

  “Good idea,” Ash agrees, unbuttoning his white shirt. His chest is perfectly smooth and tight, showing me he’s not entirely lazy. Seeing every muscle bunch in his shoulders as he unbuttons his pants and pulls them down makes the pit of my stomach tighten in anticipation. When he’s only in boxer briefs I can see he’s anticipating the moment as much as I am.

  “Come here,” I say. “Now I think we’re caught up to each other.” He crawls over to me where I wait in the center of the bed. We press against each other, the hard maleness of him firm between my legs and driving me insane. His hand reaches behind my back to unclasp my bra and my breasts spill forward once they are free. Ash immediately brings his hands up to them, teasing my nipples and making me arch my back and moan.

  “How did that bra even fit over these?” he wonders, making me laugh. “Why do you women torture yourselves with underwear that looks ridiculously uncomfortable?”

  “Because it’s sexier than what actually fits,” I confess. He responds by bringing his mouth down and kissing the rosy end of my breast. Heat rises to my cheeks from his lips against me. His hands graze over my breasts and down to my waist, his lips travelling simultaneously lower down my stomach to the top of my panties.

  “Can I kiss you everywhere?” he asks me. He is poised just at my belly button, his fingers brushing over that part of me that very much wants to tell him “yes”. I can feel his breath through the thin lace. I nod, unable to speak. He presses his lips against me, making me jump. “Easy,” he purrs, every word and breath coming out of his mouth driving me insane. “Just relax.” I feel him pulling my panties down my legs and lay back against the pillows as he slips them off. Ash climbs up the length of me, lying astride me with his own body. Somewhere he’s lost his boxer briefs and I feel his hot maleness pressing between my legs. Something snaps, and suddenly I’m gasping and wheezing and fighting for a breath of air. “Leah? Leah! What’s happening?”

  “Inhaler,” I gasp. “Purse. Table.” He leaps off of me and grabs my gold clutch off of the coffee table where I left it and finds my inhaler inside. He rushes over to me, looking ridiculously long and gangling as he leaps over the sofa and over to the bed. I put the inhaler to my lips and puff once, twice, and I feel my airways open and I can breathe again.

  “Hey,” Ash says, rubbing my arms comfortingly as he lies to my side. “What happened?”

  “Asthma attack,” I say, putting my hands over my eyes. “There’s always a fucking asthma attack, ruining every good moment of my life.”

  “Are you okay?” he asks me. I nod and he starts to coax me back into where we were, covering my body with his. I begin to stiffen.

  “No, actually, I’m not okay,” I confess. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.” I push him to the side and sit up, covering my face with my hands.

  “Leah, what’s wrong?” Ash says, sitting up next to me. I feel his hand rubbing my back comfortingly and I choke back a sob. “Talk to me,” he says softly. “Tell me what’s going on. Leah, I won’t do anything you don’t want to do, but I was under the impression that you’re aching for me as badly as I’m aching for you.”

  I nod. “You’re not wrong. I want you,” I confess. “I really do. But right now I’m going through some shit and I need to get over it.”

  “Well that’s not exactly descriptive,” he replies. “Could you be more specific?”

  I sigh, flopping myself back against the pillows and looking up at the ceiling. “I can’t let you have sex with me,” I tell him. “I want to. I want to desperately, believe me, but I just can’t.”

  “Okay, tell me why you can’t,” he says. He rests his head in my lap, cheek settled on my thigh, halfway hanging off the bed. I can’t resist running my fingers through the lock of his dark hair that always seems to be in his face. “You can talk to me.”

  “Something horrible happened to me before I left Chicago,” I tell him, unable to look at his eyes when the words leave my mouth. “And when you’re on top of me like that, it all comes back to me to the point where I can’t breathe.”

  He turns his head so he is looking up into my eyes. His own face is cast in shadows, so different from when he was seducing me. “What happened before you left Chicago, Leah?” he asks. His words sound clipped and threatening. I notice his jaw clenching against my leg. His eyes, normally so sleepy looking, are narrowed and alarmed.

  “It’s what Michael did to me,” I whisper. “My ex. Or rather, what he had done to me.”

  “I’m listening Leah, but you have to keep talking.”

  “I need a drink first,” I tell him. Ash nods and gets up to walk over to the mini fridge. “Something stronger,” I clarify. He gives me a funny look, but nods again and straightens up to pour me a drink from his makeshift bar.

  “Bourbon,” he says, “is the best comfort drink there is, I think.”

  “I agree,” I say, nodding and taking the tumbler from him. “Thank you.”

  “Let’s move to the sofa again,” he tells me. “If we’re in bed I won’t be able to keep from touching you.”

  “You had your hands on me when we were on the sofa, too,” I claim.

  He grins. “In case you haven’t noticed, Leah, I’m six and a half feet tall. You’re not exactly petite either. There’s not much we can accomplish on that sofa together.”

  I laugh, feeling the burn of the bourbon at the back of my throat and crawling up to my nostrils. “Stop that.”

  “Stop what?”

  “You make me laugh,” I tell him, “That’s good. I need to laugh. I’ve spent too long not laughing about
anything.”

  “You mean with your ex?” Ash asks me. I nod. Ash pulls me off the bed and walks me over to the sofa. We settle down, naked and entwined with each other, as comfortable as if we’ve been together for years. “So tell me what happened? Why did you marry him?”

  I sigh dramatically. “It was one of those things that seemed right at the time. I was young when I met him. I started working at Trustwell Care when I was twenty. He was my supervisor when I started working as a claims adjuster. He purposely got me promoted to an analyst so he could begin dating me, so I would be in a different department. At the time I didn’t realize that’s what was happening, but he planned it all along. We dated for a few months and moved in together, and then got married a couple of years later. We were both superstars at the company, making good money, kind of like a middle management power couple.”

  “How romantic,” Ash says, smirking. I shove him playfully away from me. “So it seemed like a good idea to marry him because it was convenient? What about love? Lust? Anything?”

  “Lust at first,” I say. “He’s strong, and I think I was attracted to his strength, stupidly assuming that he was strong emotionally as well as physically.” I shake my head. “You need to understand that it was just me, my mother and my sister for a few years before I moved away. I wasn’t exactly too clear on what a strong male role model really meant.”

  “But he wasn’t?” Ash strokes my hair as I take a large swig from my glass. “Strong, I mean?”

  I shake my head. “No, he was pathetic. It started when I discovered he was cheating with me. He was fooling around with some backstabbing skank from billing that was too stupid to keep anything straight. She actually got herself fired for not understanding the difference between a CPT and a HCPCS.”

  “I must be the dumbest man alive,” Ash says. “Who the heck knows what that even means?”

  “If you work in a healthcare billing environment you would. That’s like claims 101,” I reply, smirking. I tend to forget that claims talk only makes sense to claims people. “Anyway, he fucked her maybe a month after we were married. That’s all – just a month. Who knows what he was doing the two years we were together before that. I found out through the gossip grapevine and threatened to leave. I should have but he stopped me.”

  “How did he stop you?” Ash asks me. “What did he do?”

  “He played a song, actually,” I say, feeling my heart ache as I think about it. “Wild World, by Cat Stevens. Have you heard of it?” He shakes his head. “It’s old. It’s like something from the 60’s or 70’s. It’s basically about a woman about to walk out on a man and it’s devastating.”

  “So he played you a song and you stayed?”

  “It sounds dumb, but yes, he played a song and I stayed.” I feel like an idiot and put my face in my hands. Ash rubs my back.

  “Hey, sometimes we don’t know why we do what we do,” he says comfortingly.

  I shrug and finish my drink and hand him my glass, indicating silently that I could use another. He complies and strides over to the mini bar to fill my glass with about four fingers of bourbon. My eyes rake over him approvingly but I realize that ship has sailed for the moment. “It was also the thought of me coming home. I think he knew that I didn’t want to come back. I moved to Chicago because I thought my dad had gone there. He’d left that impression when he left us. My mother continued to give me that impression. After speaking with my mother when I came back to Blackwater, it seems like he was trying to shake whoever was after him off of his trail.”

  “To protect the Legend,” Ash says, nodding. “And maybe to protect you.”

  I sigh. “Why does everyone know about the Legend except for me?”

  “Because I grew up in this world, while you were shielded from it,” he explains. “There are things you will learn, and things I still need to learn. Now that we’re ignited, we’ll learn them together.” I lean back to rest between his legs, settling my head back against his chest. His fingers trace the sides of my breasts. I feel like we were always meant to be together, this comfortable with each other. It just seems like such a natural fit. I rest my glass on the coffee table and put my hands over his, lacing my fingers through his. “So keep going,” Ash says, pulling me back from my thoughts. “You didn’t leave the bastard after he cheated on you.”

  “No, I stupidly stayed,” I continue. “And he did it again. And again. I started pretending not to know or care. I was lying to myself, telling myself I was just being paranoid after the first time, but it kept happening. It seemed like he was flaunting the fact that he got away with it the first time.”

  “He was trying to see how far he could push you,” Ash suggests.

  I nod. “He was, and then one day I called in sick to work. I think I finally grasped the idea that I was depressed. I hacked into his email and found all sorts of bullshit from several women he was sleeping with.”

  “Hacked into?” Ash asks. “Are you good at that sort of stuff?”

  I shake my head. “No, I’m awful with technology, but it was easy. On his email, you can click the ‘I forgot my password’ button and it will ask you a security question. I think they design those so that any spouse can figure out the password of their cheating spouse’s email account. Mother’s maiden name? Green. Name of favorite pet? Tiger. City you were born in? Evanston. In the years we’d been together, I’d learned enough to be able to answer three basic questions.”

  “Clever girl,” Ash says. “By the way, mine would have been ‘Sargent’, ‘Cookie’ and ‘Blackwater’.”

  “Cookie?”

  “We had a cockatiel named Cookie,” Ash explains. “We were never allowed any pets other than birds, which Maman loves. Cookie was great because Aspen and I taught him to swear.”

  I laugh. “Aspen is a brother?” Ash nods. “Your family confuses me.”

  “I know nothing of yours,” he says. “You have a sister, right? She is not a crafter?”

  “Heidi,” I reply. “No, she isn’t one. My mother says she isn’t. Her husband Jack is as straight and narrow as they come. They seem to belong together.”

  “I see,” Ash replies. “So you broke into his email. Messages from women. So what then?”

  “I confronted him,” I say. “He came home from work late. He’d been drinking, and I confronted him. I told him I’d forwarded every email of his to my own and I had everything I needed to get a divorce and use the emails as evidence of adultery. It also would have incriminated some of the women. I knew some of them personally and some of them were married.”

  “I see,” Ash says. “So he didn’t like that, I take it?” I shake my head, swallowing hard. “Did he hurt you?”

  “Not that night,” I say quietly. “I moved out of the bedroom that night into our spare. We had a two bedroom apartment less than a mile from the office. I woke up the next day and went to work, and all day I was trying to figure out in my head how I was going to do it. I decided to call a lawyer and maybe find a friend to stay with. Michael and I had different schedules and I started and came home earlier than he did.” I tip the entire glass of bourbon back into my mouth, feeling the searing pain of it burn the back of my throat comfortingly. “I came home that night to find three men waiting for me. They were wearing masks and I thought they were going to rob me.”

  Ash breathes in sharply. “What happened?”

  “They grabbed me by the mouth and dragged me to our bedroom,” I say. I sound very matter of fact as I talk, like I’ve detached myself from what happened, yet I can see it all in my head, as if I’m watching the whole event happen all over again. “Two of them held my arms and legs on either side of me while the other one…fucked me. Then they switched. And again. I’d passed out midway through, I guess, and came to and it was still happening. I closed my eyes because I couldn’t fight them, and it was better to be detached from what was happening then to live through it.” I turn to face Ash, who is visibly shaking with what appears to be rage behind me. H
is hands clench into fists, letting his knuckles turn slowly white. “I’m sorry,” I say, noting his reaction. “You wanted to know.”

  “Why are you sorry?” he finally says evenly.

  “He says he recorded the whole thing,” I tell him. “He could show it to my job. He could show it to my family. You could see it.”

  Ash is silent for a long moment. Finally, he says, “Michael is going to be the sorriest fuck there ever was when I see him. No one will ever see that video.”

  “He’s gone,” I say. I tell Ash about the scene in my mother’s living room and the chandelier. His face darkens considerably.

  “Your mother invited him into her house?” he asks incredulously. “After what happened?”

  “She didn’t know,” I tell him, but there is doubt in my voice. How could she not have known? When has my mother not known everything there is to know? “She wants me to leave Blackwater.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of my father,” I reply. “And because of you.”

  Chapter 13

  I wake up in Ash’s bed, not recalling how I got there. When I open my eyes, he’s lying down on his side, facing me with his head propped up on one arm.

  “What are you doing?” I ask him.

  “Watching you sleep,” he replies. “You wrinkle your nose a lot when you dream.”

  “Funny,” I reply, rolling onto my back and stretching my limbs. “What time is it?”

  “Just before six in the morning,” he says. “Somewhere you have to be? Church?”

  I laugh, knowing the ridiculous nature of that question. “Yeah, I need to go to mass. Know of any?”

  “Catholics in Blackwater fit in about as well as a pork roast at synagogue,” Ash replies. “So good luck with that.”

  “I’m going to sneak out and do the walk of shame home in my flapper costume,” I say. “Except it’s a long walk, so can you give me a ride?”