by Lila Veen
“What do you mean, afflicted?” I want to know.
Theo looks at me curiously. “Didn’t you know?” he asks me. “Gabe is stone deaf.”
Chapter 26
I’m reeling from the day, and Theo has taken me home and brought me up to my room, after saying hello to my surprised mother. She doesn’t say a word about where Ash might be, or why I’m with his brother. It was her prediction that I had another catalyst. She probably heard from Renee already that I was traipsing around town with Theo. I want to tell my mother about Heidi, but Theo has asked me to just spend a few moments with him to talk. I feel like there are some things about my life I need to sort out first, before I can begin to worry about other people’s problems. We picked up some pizza on the way back to the house. We’re starving and don’t want to really be out in public any more. I feel like a kid sitting on my bed with Theo and a pizza box in between us, plus a roll of paper towels and a bottle of wine. I purposely chose a Cabernet because Theo’s choice of Merlot reminds me of Gabe. I don’t want to think about Gabe, but I have to.
“Do you have a salt deficiency or something?” Theo asks me as I take the side of anchovies I ordered and lay them in oily lines along the square of pizza. He refused to let me put them on the actual pizza. “I’ve never seen anyone want anchovies when there’s already olives and pepperoni on a pizza.”
“You have no idea what you’re missing,” I tell him. “Anchovies are pure deliciousness.” I do cringe as I take a bite. He’s right – it’s too salty, but I can’t back down now.
“You’re really doing everything you can to try and get me not to want to kiss you, aren’t you?”
My eyes widen and my pulse quickens. “How’s it working?”
“Badly,” Theo says, seeming to purposely hide behind his piece of pizza, though I still see his cheeks are flushed. “I want to taste the salt off of those lips of yours.” Instinctively my mind wanders over to Ash, wishing that he didn’t leave, wishing that I could be in my room with both of them, eating pizza and getting salt licked off my face by the two of them. When in all of history has that ever successfully worked out? Three’s a crowd, right? “He’s going to be alright,” Theo says, knowing my thoughts as well as I do. “He’s not gone.”
“He sure seems gone to me,” I say. “He left me. He didn’t say anything, he just left me.”
Theo nods. “He needed to leave, Leah. Soon you’ll know why. For now, since we can’t fight powers, we can spend the time getting to know each other.”
I shrug. “My body wants it, Theo, believe me. My heart feels differently.”
“Olivia is hurting right now,” he says, “For thirty three years, it was just us. And now you’re here. Half of my heart wants to cling to you and know you. The other half feels like it’s being squeezed by Olivia and she won’t let go.”
I nod, knowing exactly what he’s implying. “I feel like shit, and all I did was show up.”
“What can you do?” Theo asks. “There’s no way to fight your catalyst. Maman tried to keep them at bay, and my father and uncles died from it.”
“You’re in my head now,” I say. “But just because you are doesn’t mean we have to act on it.”
“We have acted on it,” Theo argues. “Ash knew exactly what was happening. He saw it for himself. You felt it. Olivia felt it through you. We’re all connected.”
I want to ask about Olivia, but I can’t. He knows what I want to know, but he just looks at me and won’t say. He carefully moves the pizza box and paper towels over to my nightstand where the bottle of wine is. “Come here,” I hear him tell me, even though his lips don’t move. I move closer to him and feel his arms tighten around me. I can hear his heart pounding under his shirt, and I reach up to unbutton it and peel it back on both sides so I can press my face against the cool skin on his chest. I feel his fingers push back the hair from the side of my face and his lips tracing the top of my forehead. My breaths get shorter and more urgent, knowing that I’m going to succumb to him. My hands trace the lines of his abdominal muscles and around his navel, exploring him, comparing the paleness of his flesh to the goldenness of Ash. Like Ash, Theo is almost hairless on his chest, except for a thin line of gold hair from the bottom of his navel going down. I trace the light hairs with my index finger softly and feel his stomach clench. “Leah,” he whispers, the sound of his voice sending soft chills through me. “You won’t be able to stop me if you don’t want this.”
“I don’t,” I whisper back. He pulls me up so that my face is level with his. This close, I get lost in the paleness of Theo’s iris, so reflective I can see myself in them. They have just a tiny hint of blue, like a cup of ocean water, but colorless, bleak, and daunting. “I don’t want this,” I repeat, and in response, his lips graze the small spot where my ear meets my neck, sending shivers through me, like tiny shards of ice falling against my skin. I come up to straddle his waist and pull off my sweater, tossing it off the side of my bed onto the floor. “I don’t want to be with you at all.”
He sits up and I feel his fingers dig into my back, his lips continuing to explore my neck and lower themselves to the tops of my breasts. I press my hips against his and feel his cock pressed against me through the fabric of our jeans. Our chests are bare and our hearts beat against each other. My hands push his mop of hair back on both sides of his face. I grind my hips against him, wanting to feel him in me but feeling so guilty about the wetness that’s developed between my legs. I know Theo feels the same, though his hands deceive him as they unbutton the top of my jeans and his hand lowers inside to touch me. I wince and moan when his fingers part me to make contact with my clit. My back arches to press his hand closer. He pushes me back savagely to make me lie down and pulls my jeans off viciously, throwing them across the room and burying his face savagely between my legs. I cry out in surprise, feeling his warm mouth press against my center. I raise my hips to push my clit harder against his mouth, which sucks voraciously at me as though he’s hungry for the taste of me. Within seconds I’m coming, crying out despite the fact that I’m in my bedroom in my mother’s house. When I’m done, he doesn’t stop, and the orgasm progresses to an intensity that causes me to push his head back from me. I lift myself up quickly to pull him down over me. We kiss and I taste myself on his lips. My hands busy themselves with his belt and yank his jeans down as far as I can push them. I gasp as he plunges into me almost instantly.
Theo is rougher than Ash usually is, with the exception of Ash with me early this morning in the vineyard. While the passion between Ash and I is intense, Theo almost appears desperate. It’s as though he is aching to satisfy something that has awakened inside of him that needs to be fed and probably caged. My legs tighten around his waist and I push him against me with my hands pressed against his shoulders, feeling the length of him split me in two. I can’t help but compare the brothers in my head as he enters me again and again, and find that while both brothers are similarly sized, everything is different about how they move with me. Ash and I have developed a rhythm over a short period of time, but Theo’s lustful lovemaking seems more erratic and less controlled. When he comes, his teeth plunge into my neck and draw blood, which I only know when I push his head back from me and see his pink lips stained with it.
“Are you okay?” he asks me breathlessly, looking concerned at what he’s done. He brushes a finger against my neck and rubs his bloody fingers together. “I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
I shake my head. “You couldn’t hurt me,” I tell him, stroking a strand of hair back from his forehead. “I wanted you.” I see a single tear escape out of the corner of Theo’s eye and touch the end of it with my fingertip. “What’s wrong?” He tries to pull away but I stop him by wrapping my arms around his neck. “Talk to me, please. I feel like I just cheated on the man I love with the other man I love,” I tell him. Everything about that sounds wrong. “What are you feeling?”
He sighs and buries his face in my neck. “Like I can finally
have something I want.”
“What, me?” I ask him. Then it dawns on me. “You mean Olivia,” I say. “You can’t have her, but you can have me.” He doesn’t reply, and I let him lay pressed against me for a few minutes and listen to him quietly breathing. “Are you sleeping?” I ask him.
“No.”
“What are we going to do about Heidi and Gabe?” I want to know.
Theo rolls away from me, letting the cold air press against all of the wet places he’s left on my body. “Tomorrow at the hospital,” he says. “Find out what the process is for newborns. Discover what they do to make sure they stay with the mother and don’t get switched or anything. Baby switches aren’t unheard of. Blackwater Memorial must have something in place to prevent them from happening.”
“True,” I agree. “But what will that tell us?”
He shrugs. “Maybe nothing or maybe everything. We won’t know anything until we ask. And if we can figure out how it happened, maybe we can prove to someone that it did happen.”
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll ask around tomorrow.”
He nods and sits up. “I should go home and let you sleep,” he tells me. I nod and watch him get up and button up his shirt and pull his jeans back on.
“Theo,” I ask him. “Tell me what you meant exactly by finally having something you want.”
He scowls. “Are you going to make me say it?”
I nod. “Say it. Now that you’ve said that I need to hear it.”
He sighs and rakes his long fingers through his hair and plops down on the edge of my bed. “There’s never been anyone but Olivia for me for my entire life, Leah. It’s hard to grow up and live with that. Especially when your mother and everyone else tells you that it’s wrong to act on that. Which I know it is.”
I nod, horrified at the idea. But I’ve felt the pull of my own catalysts and can’t imagine being apart from them.
“For thirty three years I’ve been holding myself together. Olivia and I have often been sent away from each other for months at a time. When she was younger, my mother sent Livvy to France to stay with my aunt Simone. Simone and Maman have always exchanged children back and forth from Normandy to France, where Simone stays. When Olivia came back, I would be sent to France. We were almost never allowed to see each other, and so for years we spent our childhoods apart, always needing each other but unable to fulfill that. We could communicate, though, even overseas, so while we were rarely physically in each other’s presence, she was always there for me. As long as she is alive, she will always be with me.” I nod, understanding that Olivia and Theo have one of the deepest connections I’ll likely ever know.
“When we became adults,” he continues, “Maman stopped sending us away. She told us that we were old enough to know better, and she trusted us to make the right choices and not do anything that would taint the family name.” Theo stops and looks at me. “You seem freaked out.”
“No,” I say. “I just feel sad for you and Olivia. I wouldn’t judge you if something had happened. Did anything ever happen?”
He shakes his head. “No, it never has,” he assures me. I admit I am breathing a little easier when I hear this. “Even as adults, though, things became dangerous. I would go to France to escape the tension. Little things would happen that would scare both of us and one of us would inevitably be gone the next day. Last night, at Normandy…it’s never gone that far before.”
“But you and Olivia didn’t even do anything!” I exclaim. “I mean, I guess in retrospect it was a strange scenario.” I think of Olivia watching me, everything she did echoing what Theo was doing to me. “She can feel you through me? What about now? Do you think she felt that?”
“I know she felt that,” Theo says. “You’re connected to me as I’m connected to you, and Olivia is connected to me. Everything I do for you is also for her without intending to be. She feels everything I make you feel, Leah. She is always going to be a part of this.”
I put my head in my hands, trying to understand where all of this is going. I can’t even swallow, though my breathing seems okay. I throw myself back on my bed and begin to rub my eyes, escaping as I did like when I was a child behind the colorful patterns that emerge from the pressure of my hands on my eyes. “Leah?” Theo says. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I say. “But I think you’d better go home so we can sleep. I need to think and process some stuff and I need to figure out how to ask questions about newborn security without pissing anyone off.” I’m still on my back with my hands over my eyes, but I hear Theo shuffle toward the door and stop.
“Just so you know,” he says quietly. “I wasn’t using you just now. I wanted you. It wasn’t for Olivia, it was for me. She just happens to be involved.”
Chapter 27
Monday morning my mother and I are sitting and having a very silent breakfast. It’s almost as though we know each other’s thoughts, but refuse to voice them. I’m not sure how much she knows about Heidi and Gabe, and I don’t know if I should tell her what I saw. She is likely horrified by the loud sex I was having the other night with a man who wasn’t the man I was having loud sex with the week before. I could mention how her older daughter is cheating on her husband, but it really does seem like I’m cheating on my boyfriend at the moment. I want to talk to someone about it, and I need to, but right now I can’t even look at myself in the mirror without thinking of some awful name for myself. “Will you be home tonight for dinner?” she asks me. I nod. “We can talk then,” she says. “Right now let’s just go about our day.”
I’m relieved, and wonder when things became so easy living with my mother. I recall what Theo mentioned about when he and Olivia became adults, Lisette began to treat him like one. I suppose that’s exactly what my own mother is doing.
I turn on some very loud music to drown out my thoughts during my ride to work, humming along to The Pixies “Where is my Mind?” The song seems fitting for today. It takes all of my strength not to burst into tears during my ride to work, but when I pull in to the employee parking lot, I see Erika getting out of her car and lose it. I quietly sob in the comfort and seclusion of Betsey, thinking about Ash, wondering where he is, and then I look at my phone. Duh, why don’t I just call him and see if he picks up? My hands shake as I go to my contacts and speed dial him.
“Hello?” I hear him say gruffly. My heart leaps into my throat. His voice sounds tinny and far away, but it’s him, and I want to scream.
“Where are you?” I ask him. “What happened?”
“Leah?” he says. “Is that you?” There are sounds in the background, almost as if he’s in a windstorm or something, even though in Blackwater it’s perfectly still and very cold.
“Ash! It’s Leah,” I repeat. “Can you hear me?” There is a long pause, and more background noise. “Are you on the wing of an airplane or something? What’s going on?”
“I can’t talk to you right now, Leah,” he replies. “Please don’t call me again.”
“What?” I say into the phone. I’m about to go off on a tirade of emotions but the call is disconnected. “He fucking hung up on me!” I shout, smashing the palm of my hand against the steering wheel and crying out from the pain. I can’t help it, though. Feeling pain on my hands is a lot better than feeling the pain of being rejected by Ash, and so I continue to pound my hands against the wheel until the heels of my hands are bruised and sore. I want to die, like half of me is gone, and the other half of me is still here but distant and sad. Why does this all have to be so difficult?
I pull myself together with some tissues to touch up my eye makeup before getting out of Betsey and on with my day. I have some business to attend to that I can’t back out of. I can’t be entirely selfish when my friend is at home missing her baby. I’m a married woman with two boyfriends, and when I put it like that in my head, my problems seem trivial and ridiculous. “First world problems,” I say to myself, and then laugh. “You can do this. Don’t run away, Leah, fight.” I
step out of Betsey with a renewed strength in my shoulders and walk with long strides through the front entrance to the hospital.
Apparently my renewed confidence is not meant to last very long, because Gwen is waiting for me at my workstation with two uniformed police officers. “Leah, good morning,” she says nervously. “These policemen were looking to speak with you.” She gives me a look with raised eyebrows and a shrug from behind the two officers. “You can use my office.”
“Okay,” I say, eyeing the two officers. One is a short stocky man who looks like he achieved his short and stocky physique at a very young age. He doesn’t look like he’s from Blackwater, with dark brown skin and a huge crop of black hair that holds a swoop that some figure skaters in the eighties would have envied. He’s probably around my age. In Gwen’s office, he introduces himself to me as Arthur Bautista. The other man is Bill Cousineau, who introduces himself as the Chief of Police, making my blood turn cold. “My father was the Chief of Police before,” I remark, eyeing my father’s replacement. He is tall, and probably in his mid-thirties, with broad shoulders and a buzz cut to hide the fact that he’s pretty bald on top. We all sit around Gwen’s small table used for intimate conferences, and now, police interrogations.
Police Chief Bill nods. “My wife was the maid of honor in your sister’s wedding. I don’t recall seeing you there.”
“I just came back to Blackwater a few weeks ago,” I reply. “I hadn’t been back here in over ten years.” I wonder at what point will I have to stop providing that explanation to everyone I encounter?
Bill nods. “I see. And what brought you back to town?”
I blink. “I’m sorry?”
“I mean why did you come back?” he asks. I notice Officer Bautista is taking notes, though I’m not sure I’ve provided him with any relevant information yet. “I’ve noticed you seem to be putting roots down here again. You’ve moved in back home, you’ve gotten a job, you’re taking up with the Lavannes.”