by Lila Veen
I watch Theo as I lay catatonic on the sofa, as he gracefully gets up to plant a chaste kiss on Olivia’s black mouth and continues to walk away and out of the ballroom. I glance at Olivia, who has tears flowing down her cheeks, dragging black lines over her white skin. Her eyes are closed, and her lashes are long enough and black against the tops of her high cheekbones. I curl myself into a ball and allow Ash to pull me close to him and stroke my hair, soothingly. I can’t talk, I can’t ask him what happened, and watching Olivia makes me want to cry too.
I don’t know how long I’ve been lying on the sofa, curled against Ash, but when I am finally able to lift my head, I feel the wetness of his shirt lift away from my cheek. He is awake, and looking down at me. His face is serious and full of apprehension. The ballroom is quiet, though I can see that a few people are strewn about, some sleeping and some awake. The smell of a cigarette makes me turn my head to see Ash’s nephew Alex sitting on the top of a baby grand piano and smoking. “Where is everyone?” I ask Ash in a whisper. It doesn’t feel right to talk.
“It’s past their bedtime,” Ash replies. “Do you need me to carry you upstairs?”
I shake my head and sit up slowly. My breasts are still loose and I self-consciously attempt to pull up the straps over my shoulders, but they’ve been ripped on one side. “I’m sorry about the dress,” I say, feeling sorry for so much more and feeling the ache in my chest rise into my throat.
“I don’t care,” Ash says. He stands and pulls me up. I sway slightly and he catches me in his arms. “Hey,” he says, bending down to look at my face. “Are you hurt?” I shake my head no. He nods and holds his arms open to me and folds me into his embrace. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I whisper, feeling new tears form and fall. “I don’t think so.”
“Me neither,” he replies.
Chapter 23
I can’t talk, I can’t explain, I can’t stop crying. Ash has brought me up to his room and undressed me. I’m lying down in his bed, sobbing against his grey pillowcase, leaving a mess of makeup. He doesn’t undress himself. Instead, he sits up in bed next to me, still in his now-rumpled black tie, outside of the covers. I wonder if he’s slept at all. The clock in the room says it’s almost four in the morning.
“Does it have to do with Michael?” Ash asks me. “Is that why you’re upset?”
I sit up on my elbow and look at him. The moonlight behind him frames his profile in a soft glow. It’s not a perfect profile like the ones you see in those old fashioned silhouettes but flawed. Ash’s is all nose and lips and angles. “I thought about Michael when you and Theo were…on me.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
“Did you plan that?” I want to know. “Did you know that was going to happen?”
“How would I have known?” Ash says. “It just happened, didn’t it? I told you dinners at Normandy are unusual to most people.”
“Unusual is an understatement,” I interject. “You didn’t tell me it would be a full on orgy.”
“It’s whatever you make of it,” Ash explains. “Or whatever it makes of you.”
“What do you mean by that?” I ask him. I don’t even wait for an answer. I just want to talk. “I felt like I was in a trance. Like I didn’t have control over myself and what I would normally do. It was like something taking over me.”
“Your inhibitions.”
“Yes, exactly,” I say. “What did that to me?”
“The wine,” Ash replies.
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I,” he says. “You were served Lavanne Vineyard wine. Not the kind that we sell. The kind we keep and drink for ourselves. It’s enchanted. The Lavannes have every elemental working at Normandy. Between the four elementals, we have the ability to do some pretty twisted shit to our wine.”
“So I was drugged?” I ask him flatly.
Ash shakes his head. “Not drugged, but certainly stripped of your ability to not realize what you want.”
“And I wanted a threesome?”
“No,” Ash replies quickly. He finally turns to look at me. “You wanted Theo.”
My breath catches sharply in my throat. I feel my heart pounding anxiously. “I didn’t want-“
“Didn’t want him?” Ash interrupts. “Bullshit, Leah, the moment you saw him I could feel it leaking from your pores. I could practically smell you wanting him, like a freaking cat in heat or something.”
“Very poetic,” I snap. “What I was going to say to you was that I didn’t want to hurt you.”
Ash leans forward, resting his arms on his knees and cradling his head in his hands. “I knew you were too good to be true,” he says quietly. “I knew that it was impossible to expect that you would be mine.”
“Ash,” I say, throwing the covers back and crawling so that I am directly in front of him on my hands and knees. “You are my catalyst. I am yours.”
“And Theo’s,” he says. “Not just mine. You’ll never just be mine. I’ll never have you to myself.”
“Stop it!” I say pushing his head back and out of his hands so he’s forced to see me. “This is ridiculous. I don’t choose who my catalyst is. You didn’t choose either. You and I were drawn to each other. We found each other. That will always be ours.”
“At least Theo has Olivia,” Ash says, pulling back from me and pressing himself back against his headboard. “You have Theo and me. I only have you.”
I sit back, feeling offended at his words. “That’s not enough for you, I take it?”
“No Leah,” Ash says. His voice, normally so deep and rich is now cracking at every word that escapes his mouth. “You don’t understand what I’m feeling. It’s everything for me. You’re all I want and need, but I’m not all you want and need. I can’t expect you to understand now that you’ve met my brother, so I won’t bother explaining to you.”
“That’s not fair,” I say softly, looking down at my hands. Ash doesn’t say anything. “So what are we supposed to do?”
He shrugs. “I know what I should do, but not what I want to do.”
“What do you want to do?” I ask him.
“Throw you down on the bed and make love to you and then take you far away from here where no one will ever find us.”
I stare hard at him. “Why don’t you?”
“I can’t,” he says, looking away from me, with the intent to hide his face from mine. Instead, the moonlight catches his face and shows me he’s crying. “You would suffer away from Theo.”
“But I would have you!”
He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. Now that you’ve met Theo, you’re connected to him. You’ll feel a pull to him for the rest of your life – or the rest of his. Do you want to end up like Olivia?”
“What do you mean?” I ask him. I have an idea of what he’s referring to but I need to hear it out loud. What I saw from tonight told me everything, the way she was on the couch watching me with Theo.
“I mean her catalyst – her only catalyst, as far as she knows – is her twin brother. She can’t marry him, she can’t make love to him, she can’t touch him. She obviously has a deep attraction to him, but there isn’t a thing she can do.”
“Not to sound gross,” I say, “But why not? I mean, if they feel the way they do about each other, why don’t they just say ‘fuck you taboos’ and spend the rest of their lives together? Run away or something?”
“Two reasons,” Ash says. “One is Maman. She is a huge enforcer of keeping things within the family…civil, so to speak. If Olivia and Theo were caught outside of the home together even so much as holding hands in public, do you think no one would notice? The way they look like two sides of a mirror?”
“No,” I admit. “I would probably think they were some weird alien pod twins or something.” I take a deep breath and sigh. “So what’s the second reason?”
Ash looks at me. “You are the second reason. Now that you’re in the picture, Theo won’t go anywhere.”
I understand what he means. Even now, I feel like I want to be close to Theo, and I know he is somewhere in the house, breathing, sleeping, maybe not sleeping and thinking about me like I am about him.
Outside of Ash’s window, I see a streak of lightning cast itself across the sky. The inevitable boom of thunder follows a few seconds later. “I do love you Ash,” I say softly. “I never lied to you.”
“I know,” he says. He gets up from the bed as I try to come closer to him and stands at the window. “Come outside with me.”
I look at him, afraid he’s lost his mind. “Now?”
“Now.”
I stand up and follow him to the window and look outside. Raindrops begin to show up on the window, a few drops slowly, and then more fall in line quickly. Within a minute, the rain is blasting against the window in sheets. “Give me something to wear,” I tell him.
“No,” he tells me. “Come outside now.” He holds out his hand to me and leads me to his bedroom door. We walk down the long hallway, past room after room, making me wonder if people are in them or if the hallway is empty. The window at the end of the hall lights the way for us, illuminating our path with a flash. We turn and go down the staircase at the end, spiraling down two flights to the ground floor. The air is colder down here, and I shiver, but Ash doesn’t notice and I’m too afraid to say anything. He must know I’m freezing, I think, and he’s making me suffer. Something about creeping through Normandy without any clothes on makes me feel as though I’m being punished for something I can’t control. As though Ash can hear my thoughts, he opens up a glass French door that leads to a covered stone patio. The patio would normally overlook the vineyards and be a beautiful backdrop, but at this hour with this storm, it’s simply darkness covered by sheets of rain.
“Let’s go for that run,” Ash shouts to me over the storm, and takes off into the vineyard, out of the covered porch and directly into the rain. I watch him for a few feet, astounded, and then see him disappear into the darkness.
“Ash!” I scream out into the rain, but I can barely hear myself. I hold my arms over my naked body, feeling slapped by rain and bitten by cold. “Where are you?” I’m overcome with the fear that he’s trying to kill himself, and I take off into the vineyards after him and into the storm. I choke and gasp as the rain pelts against my face full blast. I am instantly drenched and hurting in a million places on my skin from the impact of the downpour. My body had time to grow numb on the porch, but it’s reached a whole new level of cold. “Ash!” I scream again, running forward. I keep running, turning my head in all directions and trying to listen or see, neither sense working very well at the moment. Then I stumble on a vine, so low to the ground, placed there as if to make me fall. Wet ground smacks against my breasts, which are the first part of me to feel the impact. I lay my head down, defeated, and begin to sob.
Rough hands push me over on to my back and I see Ash’s black eyes glowing in the darkness, only inches from my face. “You’re mine!” he shouts against the wind. “I’ll make you mine tonight!”
I scream as he parts my legs roughly and tears me apart by plunging into me as hard and as deeply as he will go. He presses against me and pulls away furiously, making me tear and sting. His hands squeeze my breasts, and he comes within seconds and collapses on top of me, sobbing. Mud streaked on my skin is plastered to his shirt, and I hold him against me to avoid feeling the cold.
*
I’m in Ash’s bed when I wake up, with mud everywhere around me – streaked on the sheets and plastered to my hair and embedded in my nails. I look around the room and notice the open armoire, the discarded tuxedo on the floor and the note taped to the footboard of the bed. I don’t even need to read the note to know that he’s gone.
Chapter 24
I don’t have to ask how Theo knew to come find me. After I woke up and realized Ash was gone, I got up and showered. I didn’t shed any more tears – I had cried all I could last night.
When I come out of the shower, Theo is waiting for me on the sofa in the sitting area. I sit down next to him without a word, wrapped only in a towel. I don’t have anything to wear except for the dress I came in the night before. It was stupid of me not to bring a change of clothing, considering I knew I was going to end up spending the night. My lack of foresight makes me question whether I actually do have any of the water elemental in me, but when I see Theo I toss that thought aside.
“How is this going to work?” I blurt out suddenly. He sits looking casual in a crisp white oxford shirt and jeans. I notice he is barefoot and his hands are the same as Ash’s.
He doesn’t respond at first, but he looks at me wearing my towel with my wet hair combed back from my face. “How can I know the answer to that?” he finally says. “You appear out of nowhere the night I get back from France. I was hardly expecting you.”
“I wasn’t expecting you either,” I agree. “But now here we are and Ash is gone.” I choke back a sob and feel like I might fall apart. “When is he coming back?”
“He didn’t tell me anything,” Theo replies. “But he won’t stay away forever. Maman might know.”
“Lisette knows everything,” I say, not without sarcasm.
Theo laughs and shakes his head. “Maman knows what she thinks she knows, which is to say, she will tell you she knows and she may or may not be right.”
“Is she usually?”
“Yes,” Theo admits. He turns to me and smiles softly, not touching me, for which I’m relieved and grateful. “I feel responsible for being the cause of your pain right now, Leah, and Olivia’s. I don’t know what to do because I feel like I’ve hurt everyone when all I’m doing is existing.”
He’s right, I think. Theo did nothing other than make his presence known to me. I notice he looks exhausted. “Did you get any sleep last night?”
“No,” he tells me. “Mostly I stayed up trying to comfort Olivia.”
“Oh.”
“That’s another thing,” he continues. “You probably hate me right now because I drove Ash away. Ash hates me right now because I’ve shown him he’s not the only one in your life that will help you define your elementals. Olivia hates me because my attention is divided and all she’s done for the six months while I was in France was ache for me.”
“And she probably hates me too, based on all that,” I suggest.
“Of course she does,” Theo says, causing me to smile and groan at the same time. “She actually despises you! She told me she wishes you were dead! She plans to poison you and hit you repeatedly with a blunt object. All of that good stuff.”
“Jeez,” I say. “Maybe I should go home now.”
“I’m only teasing,” Theo admits. His pale eyes glance over at me and his pink mouth turns up at the corners. “Well, maybe not about her feelings. But she’s not going to do any of that, because she knows she’ll lose me if she does.”
“Well that’s a relief,” I reply, smirking. “So what can I do to help? Obviously Ash can’t be helped right now, since he’s gone and we don’t know where he is. You and Olivia are here. While none of us can change how things are, at the very least, we should try and repair anything that’s broken.”
“Oh, I agree,” Theo says. “So why not start off as friends?”
“Friends?” I repeat.
“Absolutely, friends.” He smiles even wider, making himself beautiful and showing off his perfectly even white teeth and a dimple. “Friends help each other. Friends also don’t make stir crazy twin sisters jealous or throw entire bottles of wine at their brothers. At least not from what I hear. Every family is different.”
“Olivia threw a bottle of wine at you?” I ask him, finding it very easy to picture. “I’m glad she didn’t hit you.”
“She throws like a girl,” he replies, making me laugh.
“So here’s what you can do for me as a friend,” I suggest. “Get me some damn clothes. I can’t go home in a towel and either you or your brother ripped my dress.”
<
br /> “Sounds fair,” Theo says. “I can certainly do that for you. What else?”
I think and then recall I have someplace to be today, and I was supposed to go with Ash. “I could probably use your help with something else,” I tell him. “How would you like to visit a dear friend of mine who could really use some friends right now?”
“As your friend, I feel it’s my friendly duty,” Theo replies. “We’ll talk about that in a bit. First I have to go steal some clothes from my sister without letting her know they’re for you. Her carpet really can’t take another broken bottle of wine.”
*
Theo’s car is a tiny white Renault with white leather seats that can uncomfortably seat two, which makes Ash’s black SUV seem like a tank. I note with dismay that the SUV is gone when we come outside. My fox fur has been left behind at Normandy for a more practical beige pea coat. Theo lent me a pair of Olivia’s jeans and a winter white cashmere sweater, as well as a pair of brown boots that fit me perfectly. “The boots are actually my niece Melanie’s,” Theo says. “Olivia has a very small foot.”
“Are you saying I have big feet?” I ask him.
“I’m saying that you could drive this car like Fred Flintstone,” Theo replies with a completely straight face. I smack him and regret it immediately as the backlash jabs my funny bone into the passenger door.
“Your car is pathetically small,” is my retort. Not very clever, but it’s all I’ve got. “So have you met Eleanor or Andrew Laurent before?”
“A few times,” Theo says. “I don’t know them very well. How do you know them?”
“Eleanor was my best friend since forever and I lost my virginity to Drew,” I say.
He looks over at me. I notice Theo drives incredibly fast and I like it. “This is going to be really awkward, isn’t it?”