Halloween Heat VI: Contemporary Erotic Romance

by Brooklyn Wilde Mina Carter

  “And they didn’t mind you taking off down here like that?”

  “I didn’t really ask them.”

  A kind of reckless honesty had taken me over. It went on like that for hours. He asked me about my secret dreams, and when I told him, he just nodded quietly like I was telling him my favorite color or my shoe size. As if there was no wrong answer. I found myself telling him about how I’d always wanted to be a civil rights attorney, but had given up the “dream job” for the “right job.” I even told him about my sort-of fiancé, James, and the messy way we’d left things. Things I never told anyone just flowed out of me, and it felt so good.

  As we finished off a second bottle of wine, Milo talked about growing up in the Bayou. He told me about how he used to want to move away, but that he hadn’t understood the depth of his roots. Now, he said, he didn’t think he could ever leave this place. I’d never felt that way about a place, or anything really. He didn’t talk about Katrina, and I didn’t ask, but somehow I understood that the storm had shown him just how strong those roots were. By the time Milo started telling me about his music, the place had all but cleared out. Milo’s band mates clapped him on the shoulder as they filed out, and the manager tossed over the keys for Milo to lock up.

  Since we had the place to ourselves, I asked Milo to play for me. After leading me onto the tiny stage, Milo picked up his trumpet and silently fiddled with the keys. Sitting next to him, I could see how the muscles in his neck tensed and his eyes glistened with intensity as he glided over the difficult runs. After a few minutes of improvisation, he settled into a slow and moody rendition of Billie Holiday’s “The Very Thought of You.” He looked at me while he played it, drawing me into his private world. He held onto the last note before gently placing his horn down beside him.

  Without a word, I stood up out of my chair and climbed onto his. Milo seemed surprised by my boldness. To be honest, I was too. In New York, I had a system: at least three successful dates and three follow-up phone calls before sex. And even then, it wouldn’t happen until I had time for waxing and Pilates and new lingerie. Sex, just like any other form of “fun,” was something to be planned, calculated. Never like this, never spontaneous and wild, never just because I wanted it.

  I was straddling him, my long skirt bunched around my waist. Twining his fingers through mine, he took each of my hands into his. For a moment we just sat that way, faces only inches apart, looking at one another. Mingling together, his breath became my breath. I could hear my own heart beating, and in the instant that he leaned in and softly kissed me, with lips still tasting of sweet wine, I could swear I heard his too.

  Milo lingered, taking his time. Somehow I understood that he was also giving me time, time to think about what I was doing, about what I wanted. He was asking permission. This would have to be my decision. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t even struggle with the choice. In three years, I had never felt as connected to James as I did to Milo that night.

  Unlacing my fingers from his, I reached for the top button of his shirt. Carefully, I undid each one, revealing his lean, muscular body. I ran my hands over a chest formed by work, by construction jobs and hard labor between gigs instead of trips to the gym before heading into the office. For once, my only thought was of how to use that body to make myself feel good, instead of the other way around.

  When Milo traced his tongue down my neck, my breath caught. Fingers delicately slipped underneath my skirt. Inch by excruciating inch, he slowly made his way up my thighs. When he reached the place where underwear ought to have been and found none, a low moan escaped his throat and I felt him swell beneath me. My whole body was thrumming. Every sound, every touch was amplified. When Milo slid down the straps of my tank top, the cool night air pricked up goose bumps on my bare breasts.

  Nuzzling into his neck, I fumbled with the buttons on his pants. Milo gently tugged at my hair until I raised my face back up to look at him. Steadying me with his gaze, he guided himself inside me. I cried out, without fear that my neighbors would hear through the paper-thin walls of my shoebox apartment. I’d never had sex outside before. As we rocked gently, slowly building, my instinct was to lean back and look up at the stars.

  “Stay with me, cher,” Milo would say each time. Each time bringing me back to him, forcing me to be present in the moment and share it with him, forcing his way deeper inside me. In every way. As I came closer to the edge, he took my face in his hands. Somehow looking at him like that felt even more intimate than the act itself. It was disorienting and thrilling. Our eyes locked, our bodies moving rhythmically together, sweet release washed over me like a flood. Shuddering and spasming, I collapsed onto him. He held me tight as he struggled to slow his own erratic breathing.

  I wanted to hold onto that moment. The honesty of it, of the whole night really, was staggering. For the first time in my life, there on that stage, I finally stopped performing.

  “Feel like going for a walk?” Milo asked.

  * * *

  I’ve heard that New Orleans is a dangerous city, but walking along the levee in the dark early hours of the morning with Milo, I felt safe. We walked down streets lined with historic mansions and streets filled with tiny shotgun houses that were just as pretty. Milo showed me the little bar where he played his first gig. Just before dawn, he led me down into a section of homes badly damaged by the storm. Plywood still covered most of the windows. The only signs that anyone had even been back were the high-water marks and spray painted signs left by emergency crews on doors.

  Finally, we came to a small yellow house with white scrollwork trim. Rusted and overturned planters littered the porch. A once-white picket fence surrounded the postage-stamp yard. Despite the mess, I could tell that at one time it had been lovely.

  “Whoever lived here took pride in the place,” I said.

  “This was my momma’s house.”

  I looked up at the door. In the bottom quadrant of the spray-painted “X” were the numbers 0/1. The air went out of me, and I wasn’t sure my knees would hold. I didn’t have to ask what it meant; the code had been explained to all of us on arrival. The first number indicates the number of living victims found inside by rescue workers; the second number tells how many bodies.

  “Oh Milo, I’m so sorry,” I managed to say in between shaky breaths.

  The words sounded so small and inadequate. Milo reached down and straightened the hand-painted “Welcome” sign, now faded and hardly legible, that still dangled from a wire on the front gate.

  “I don’t know why I brought you,” Milo began, “I’ve never brought anyone here since… I just wanted to show you.”

  After a long silence, Milo slipped his arm around my waist and asked if he could take me for breakfast before work. I told him I had to run an errand before heading to the job site. Instead, he walked me to my door. I was sorry to let him go, but there was something I needed to do.

  When the post office opened its doors, I was the first customer of the morning. With great care, I slipped the two-carat diamond ring off my finger, wrapped it in tissue, and sealed it inside a padded envelope. I mailed it to James priority, without so much as a note.

  * * *

  As I made my way to work that morning, I wondered if I had lost my mind. James and Milo had both been right. I was running away from something in New York, and maybe that something was James. I should have felt guilty for blindsiding him. Instead I felt…light. I was actually smiling. Maybe I was a lunatic. I had just thrown away a perfectly good three-year relationship for one night with a man I hardly knew and might never see again. Even if I didn’t, it was worth it.

  Turning into the driveway of the workhouse, I was met with a scent that my sleep-deprived mind equated with heaven. There, on the porch, stood Milo handing out cups of coffee with chicory and sacks of beignets.

  “Don’t be mad, cher.” He grinned sheepishly. “I couldn’t have you out here working all day on an empty stomach.”

  Guess it wasn’t a
one-night stand after all. We sat next to each other on the steps, and Milo taught me the fine art of eating beignets without getting powdered sugar all over yourself. After breakfast, he followed me up the ladder and spent the day helping me finish the roof. Ms. Anita, the woman who owned the house, stopped by at lunch to bring us a big pot of gumbo she cooked up in her FEMA trailer. She and Milo got to talking about some of the neighbors and where they had been scattered to, and I finally understood. This was why we were doing it. Rebuilding, whatever the cost, was worth it.

  When the sun went down and it was too dark to work, Milo asked if he could walk me home. Taking hold of my left hand, he ran his thumb over my ring finger, silently acknowledging my engagement ring’s absence.

  “I’m leaving in the morning. We’ll be traveling for a few weeks on out of town gigs, but I’ll be back in time for St. John’s Eve. Will you save the date for me?”

  “What’s St. John’s Eve?” I asked.

  He laughed sweetly at my ignorance.

  “Just say yes.”

  “Yes.”

  * * *

  Part of me expected James to fly down to New Orleans to try and save the relationship, but that never happened. James was too busy studying for the bar exam to make the trip. I didn’t even get a tearful phone call to ask why. My vanity was hurt, but that’s all. The day I received delivery confirmation from the post office, I got a short text message:

  “We’ll talk about it when you get back.”

  That’s it. I was a teenager out past curfew, and he was letting me know that I was going to be grounded when I got home. It stung, but I didn’t have time to fret about him much. I was too busy for that.

  I was falling in love. Falling in love with New Orleans. Falling in love with the locals who came out to help us work or feed us. And oh, how they fed us—tasting pralines for the first time was life changing. Louie was trying to teach me about all the holidays and parades and celebrations, but I could hardly keep them straight. There were so many! He told me that St. John’s Eve was significant in many religions. Celebrated by Christians the night before the Feast of St. John, the date lines up with the solstice and is also important to Voodoo practitioners. It was all very foreign to me, a recovering Episcopalian.

  In the weeks since Milo left, I had received post cards from each city where his band stopped. Photos of Galveston and Dallas and Biloxi were tacked up on the wall above my pillow. During the day, my hands worked methodically while my mind went back to that night on the stage. My one-night stand had turned into a summer romance, and it was all I could do not to spend every minute of it worrying about that day in September when it would all end, when I would get on a plane and leave this place and these people. All of these people.

  * * *

  Milo picked me up just after sunset on St. John’s Eve. He looked even better than I remembered. We washed down mufalettas with Abita beer before heading over to Saint Louis Cemetery Number One just as the sun was setting. The place was humming with energy. Revelers geared up for a party, dancing and running through the rows and rows of monuments. The scene was so different from anything I’d ever experienced; cemeteries were always such somber places. Not this one, though. It was pulsing with frenetic activity. It was a celebration of life and of what was beyond.

  “This night is special, cher.” Milo looked around, taking it all in. “Some say the ghost of the Voodoo Priestess Marie Laveau returns to perform the rituals of St. John’s Eve with her followers.”

  “What kind of rituals?”

  “They say she holds wild ceremonies and orgies that go on until dawn.”

  I raised an eyebrow, and Milo chuckled.

  “Don’t worry, that’s not why I’ve brought you here.” He took my hand and led me to a monument with a white stone facade.

  “Here,” he said.

  I leaned in and saw a familiar name.

  “Homer Plessy?” I asked, recognition sparking in my brain. “Wait, is that Plessy as in Plessy vs. Ferguson?”

  “I thought you’d know it.”

  “Are you kidding? That was a landmark case. It’s one of the reasons I went to law school. To do better. To make sure things like that never happen again.” I reached out and ran my fingers over the cool stone, over each carefully etched letter.

  “Thank you,” I said, “for showing me this.”

  The last rays of sunlight faded into the darkness as we walked through the rows. We came to a small clearing between two mausoleums where a group of people had built a bonfire. On the other side of the flames, drummers were banging out a pulsing rhythm with their hands. In front, a couple danced wildly, grinding their hips against one another as sweat rolled down their bodies. As we watched, shielded from view by an angel carved out of white marble, the male dancer ripped open his partner’s shirt, revealing her nearly sheer slip.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I whispered.

  “Anything, cher.”

  “Do you really believe in all this?”

  “All what?”

  “This. Everything. The rituals and the spirits and the voodoo.”

  “In a way I do. When I’m here, I feel connected to my past, my ancestors, in a way that I don’t feel when I’m out on the road. I feel it most of all on All Hallow’s Eve, when the veil between our world and the spirit world is said to be the thinnest. Maybe that’s just superstition or maybe there’s something to it. Either way, I feel something.”

  The drumbeat grew louder, and the female dancer pulled up her skirt and wrapped her leg around her partner as he pawed at her breast. They were practically fucking, getting off on the crowd watching them. Turning to face me, pulling me close, Milo asked:

  “Don’t you feel something?”

  “Yes.”

  In an instant, his lips were on mine. He pushed up against me, his body heat a sharp contrast with the cool stone on my back. Urgent and violent, that kiss was nothing like before. Milo was no longer asking permission; he was taking control. With a flick, Milo undid the top two buttons of my dress. His mouth searched for my nipples. He licked, then nibbled, then bit, then licked again. Pleasure mixed with pain, sending a wave of hot wetness all over me. I lifted my leg and wrapped it around him, just as I’d seen the dancer do. I could feel how hard he was. Almost without realizing it, we’d begun to move to the rhythm of the drumbeat. Though no one could see us, I felt completely exposed. And it was exhilarating.

  Milo slid his hand down between us, pausing to flick my clitoris. I instinctively pushed against him. Moving his hand in painfully slow circles, he pushed his mouth to my ear and whispered:

  “Tell me it’s my pussy, cher.”

  I hesitated, unsure I wanted to say anything that sounded like a grant of ownership, unsure I could even bring myself to say the word “pussy.” His hand moved faster and he slipped a finger inside me, and I instinctively clutched at his back to steady myself. Almost against my will, I moaned.

  “Say it,” he demanded. “Tell me it’s mine.”

  I surrendered.

  “It’s yours.”

  “Say it.”

  I liked the surrender.

  “It’s your pussy.”

  With that, he fell to his knees. Before I knew what had happened, his tongue found me. I had to choke back a scream. Teasing and tasting, he seemed desperate to take more of me into him. I frantically grasped the stone behind me for something to hold onto, and finally found a ridge above my head just in time. I could hardly hold myself up. The drumbeat pulsed faster and faster, as if driving me onward toward the brink. When it finally came, everything went black. The sounds of the drums receded into the darkness, and when my vision came back Milo was there, looking into my eyes. My vision.

  * * *

  That night, I stayed with Milo in the house he bought when he was nineteen years old. A “fixer-upper” was what the realtor had called it. Milo quickly learned that “fixer-upper” was real-estate-speak for shithole, but he loved restoring the place. More th
an a little pride shone in his eyes as he pointed out the original crown moldings and the claw-foot tub. Miraculously, the little house had survived Katrina with only minor damage.

  Milo led me past a living room that had been converted into a practice studio and back to his bedroom. On a workbench in front of the window, there was a beautiful Venetian mask perched on a stand under a magnifying glass and task lights. Surrounding it were tiny brushes and an array of glittering paints.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “That’s the mask I’m working on for the All Hallow’s Eve Ball.”

  “Is it a costume party?”

  “Not hardly, cher,” he said. “It’s a formal masquerade. Invitation only. Everyone wears a mask, so if the spirits choose to join us they may do so unnoticed.”

  “Do you go every year?”

  “Always. Last year was the first year I didn’t get to go because of the storm. I worried I’d never go again, but I started work on my mask in November just the same.”

  “You work on it all year long?”

  He pulled out the magnifying glass closer for me to look through. I gasped. What had looked like solid color from far away was really an intricately patterned design, layer upon layer of different colors creating a shimmering effect.

  “Just like my momma taught me. The work takes time, and only someone this close can appreciate it, but it’s a gift for your dead.”

  “Your mother painted masks too?”

  “As long as I can remember.” He smiled sadly. “My mother used to work on her mask all year, and dress in the prettiest… My first Halloween without her, I couldn’t—”

  “It’s stunning,” I said, delicately stroking the long black feathers while I gave him a quiet moment to recover.

  “I don’t usually let anyone see it before it’s done.”

  “I’m honored.”

  “No, cher,” he said softly as he tipped my chin up and kissed my lips. “I am.”