by Aya DeAniege
“Grace.”
I turned and ran back to the dining room, stumbling to a stop as Mike and Gabe looked up and frowned. The two of them had likely just felt the devil struggling to find a handhold in the physical world.
As one, they turned to me.
“Grace!” I shouted.
“The garden,” Mike said, standing as I turned to run.
I was out the door and barrelling toward her and Ralph as she laughed. He was smiling, completely unaware of the devil. I pinpointed the exact moment he felt it, saw the little frown as he tried to continue smiling, to keep her from being concerned.
Then he looked past her, to me, and his eyes went wide. He reached for Grace at the same time I did.
I yanked her around and in a moment that seemed to last forever, weighed my choices.
Do it, for Lilly.
She may have found friends in the past, but I hadn’t been aware of them. I didn’t feel like it was my place to remove Grace. For Lilly, I’d do everything in my power to save Grace.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
I pulled Grace into my arms, capturing her lips with my own. The electricity that crackled through the air as my tongue slipped into her mouth was addicting. The heat that flooded me, the way my nerves lit on fire… I could describe a million different and yet little signs that almost drowned me in sensation as I claimed her mouth.
My fingers tightened, holding her close against me as I deepened the kiss. Everything in me screamed in need for this woman I had just met.
As I broke off the kiss, I saw the tremble roll through her. Her eyes opened slowly, a fogged look to them as she smiled, just barely, and wavered before my eyes.
I reached up, grazing the side of her face with my thumb to reassure myself that she was real and true. Wholey and entirely there.
The presence of darkness was completely gone. Under the giddy sort of feeling that still rode along my nerves, there was an unhappiness, sadness, and longing.
I turned my head and caught a glimpse of Lilly turning and leaving the garden. Her anguish was clear and present.
Had she changed her mind?
I almost went after her, but instead found myself rooted in place, turning back to Grace and smiling. She smiled back up at me, and I felt the sort of twinge that I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Of course, I banished the thought almost immediately. It was no longer appropriate to claim a woman like that. She would want flowers and slow romance and light words.
I wasn’t even certain that I knew how to do any of that. Did I read a romance book to catch up? Watch romance movies? Or just make it up as we went along?
Realizing what I had just done, mauling a woman without warning, I struggled to come up with words. Some explanation for Grace as to why I had done what I had done.
“I apologize,” I said. “I find myself unable to keep my hands off you.”
And then I kissed her again to reinforce the words in her mind.
At least, that’s what I told myself, again.
The second kiss was just like the first. My whole body vibrated with that need again. I wanted to cross that boundary then and there. To toss her over my shoulder and find the nearest bed.
Why do I feel this way?
I broke off the kiss again, finding my hands tangled in her hair with no awareness of when I had done it. We both breathed heavily, not quite panting, as we studied the other. When our eyes locked, my will to resist vanished. I trailed my fingers down her cheek and neck, then slipped them onto her shoulder. I moved to a more acceptable position, with my arm around her waist as she seemed to blink and come back to herself.
Even in the twilight of the garden, I could see the blush that came over her. She looked away, embarrassed and I drew her face back toward me.
“May I have your number?” I asked.
She laughed. It was a genuine, yet embarrassed, sort of thing. She covered her mouth and lowered her head as the laugh passed over her. Then she looked back up at me and blinked several times, her lips pressing together in a thin line.
“I suppose, if you prefer someone else,” I said.
“No, no, it’s not that,” she said with a shake of her head. “I’d be happy to give you my number. Just, normally people ask for a number, then kiss you.”
“Oh, well, if it goes number, then kiss.”
I captured her lips again. Again, still, the reaction was the same. As we kissed, I pressed close to her, drawing her right against my body. I could feel her all down my length. The heat of her body against mine made me burn with a need that could not be sated with a kiss alone.
It was she who broke off that third kiss. She touched her lips with one finger, as if considering how that had gone, then smiled again.
“I should probably go,” she murmured. “Can I see your phone?”
“My phone?” I asked, bristling at the idea of someone with access to my phone.
“To put my number into?” she asked.
“Oh,” I said.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the phone. I unlocked it and pulled up the contact list and new contact before handing it over to her. She wrote in her number and then held the phone away from her face and smiled. The flash went off, and I frowned at her.
Grace slipped the phone back into my hand, then rose up on her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek.
“Goodnight, Samuel,” she whispered before she slipped away.
Her hand grazed over the fabric of my suit jacket, fingertips dancing over my arm as if she didn’t want to let me go but knew she had to. As she walked away, I stared after her, unable to find my voice to call out a goodnight. Grace stepped out of sight, and I sighed, closing my eyes as I was finally able to grasp what I had done.
What Lilly had done to me.
But if ever there was someone who would know what I preferred in a woman, it was Lilly. Her judgment was spot on about just about everything in the world.
I turned toward the garden and stiffened at the sight of Raphael. Who was staring back at me with wide eyes. He was stiff, feet spread, and hands curled slightly at his sides. Readied for a fight, Ralph knew that I hadn’t recalled he was there, and was waiting for me to lash out.
It wasn’t like he could have just slunk away. If he had, I might have had my way with Grace then and there in the garden. It may very well have been his presence which had kept me sane enough to recall how to be polite to a woman.
“Lillith is in town,” I said.
“I saw,” he said, relaxing only slightly. “Sam…”
“Don’t.”
“I’ve never seen that look on your face before.”
“I said don’t,” I repeated.
“Say it all you like, I’ve never seen that look on your face,” Ralph said. “What did she whisper to you, to make you blush so?”
“She called me Samuel,” I said with a frown and a shake of my head. “I don’t understand why, though.”
“Sam is short for Samuel or Samantha,” Ralph said. “Given your gender, it’s not difficult to make the leaping conclusion as to which would apply to you.”
“Lilly hasn’t told her.”
“They didn’t have the opportunity to speak at dinner, if you saw,” Ralph reminded me. “And she took a picture with your phone?”
“Hm?” I asked.
Then I remembered and swore. I pulled up my contacts as Ralph came to stand by my side and look at the screen. Grace had added her number and an email address. The picture she had taken had been saved to her contact information. Every time she texted me, I would see that smile.
“It looks like she saved a ringtone too,” Ralph said, sounding puzzled. “She didn’t appear the type to be like that. Even at the club.”
“Maybe the wine made her bold,” I said.
“She did have two glasses,” Ralph muttered. “Text her.”
“Text her? It’s too early to text her,” I said. “If I text her now, I’ll seem nee
dy.”
“Trust me, brother, you are needy.”
“There’s no need to bring that up now.”
“I meant that you need her, you certainly want her,” Ralph muttered. “Text her now. It shows the need. Trust me on this. I’ve done a bit of a term recently, recall?”
“The poor woman never recovered,” I said.
“I know, but I also know that look. I’ve seen it on a man’s face before. Text her now.”
“Text her what?” I demanded.
“Something flowery and adorable,” he said.
“Flowery and adorable,” I muttered under my breath as I entered my text messages and stared at the screen. “I’ll flowery and adorable you. Good and hard.”
I sent the text off as Ralph groaned.
“No, saying you enjoyed dinner tonight does not count as flowery and adorable!” Ralph protested. “Tell her that she made your evening. That you can’t wait to see her again. Something, quickly, before she responds and your window is closed.”
My phone went off with a ringtone I had downloaded and then forgotten about. In my defence, I downloaded a lot of different ringtones because I had a lot of contacts. I liked to assign a different tone to each contact. That way, I could decide whether I wanted to answer it, or just ignore it. The one that Grace had selected for herself was titled ‘giggle,’ and I knew that she hadn’t played it for herself. She must have guessed, but it was the voice of a woman giggling.
The sound of it made me stiffen. Ralph made a sound and put a hand over his mouth to stop himself from laughing as he turned away.
He took a moment to compose himself as I read the text.
“What’s it say?” he asked finally.
“I enjoyed it as well. We should do it again sometime,” I read out. I frowned at Ralph. “Is that good, or bad?”
“Not a clue,” Ralph said. “Since you’re going with quick but stupid, text back and ask for coffee tomorrow.”
“Coffee?” I asked.
“Normal people drink coffee,” Ralph countered. “You drink the coffee and talk about stuff at the coffee house. It’s the new first date thing. No more expensive dinner and movie, now it’s coffee.”
“Oh,” I said, sending off the text before I recalled one very important problem with that. “Ralph, I don’t drink coffee.”
“It’s called coffee, but they also offer hot chocolate, tea, and a variety of other drinks. You can’t call it a hot beverage, though, that sounds weird. You call it coffee instead.”
“I’m too far behind for this.”
“We can catch you up,” Ralph said, patting my arm sympathetically. “It’s not that difficult at all.”
“Fine, but first I need to talk to Gabriel. I think I need his special… skills.”
“I’m going for coffee with him tomorrow,” I said, staring at my phone, utterly terrified as Lilly arched an eyebrow at me. “Why would you do that? Set up coffee for me, with him?”
“Because, you used your balls for the day to give him your number,” she said.
“Yeah, but you were clearly upset about something at dinner. You saw the others at the club, so… You and Sam?”
Lilly made a face and looked away as the car pulled to a stop just outside her apartment building. She had told the driver to drop us off there, where there was wine and coffee.
And she could try to talk me into sleeping on her couch again, most likely.
She didn’t say anything as she got out of the vehicle. I thanked the driver awkwardly before I rushed to catch up to her. We were in her apartment before she turned to me finally.
“Yeah, me and Sam. I saw his brothers in the club, of course, but I didn’t think that it was really them. The lighting was different and they didn’t look like them.”
“Then why would you set me up with him?” I demanded. “Isn’t that like an unwritten rule or something? Don’t fuck your friends’ ex-boyfriends?”
I had been told that I was a social retard—yes, they used that term—and even I knew that unwritten rule.
“It is, yes, but that’s for normal people,” Lilly said. “You didn’t react to him the way you reacted to his brothers. And I know Sam. He likes you. He’d be good for you.”
“Except that’d hurt you, Lilly. There are, like, a million guys in the city. I’ll find another one. I’m pretty.”
For a second, I almost believed my own words. Then the self-doubt set in and I suspected that I would count as nothing more than homely.
“I like how you managed to say that without sounding like a poor little orphan girl this time,” Lilly said with a bottle of wine in one hand and a cork screw in the other. “I’m not going to hear any complaints from you.”
“You don’t think it’d be awkward for me to have sex with a guy that you had sex with?”
“Oh… oh no, we never had sex,” Lilly said. “I will do anything but sex.”
Which took me a moment to comprehend. My head just couldn’t wrap around that fact, yet slowly, very slowly, I did. I had watched Lilly dance with men and women, to have strippers dancing up on her. But while I had found her girls grinding and having sex with others, even watched them in the back seat as I tried to see the cars behind me, I had never seen that with Lilly. She would touch and smile and get close. I had even watched her kiss a few of them, but never anything beyond that.
“I,” I shook my head. “I thought you two were together for years.”
Lilly told stories all the time about sex.
“We were, years,” she said. “We didn’t break up because he wanted sex. It was… Completely mutual. We both knew it was time and that it had to be done. Doesn’t mean you can’t be hung up on the only guy who didn’t try to jump you when you told him that you’re an asexual.”
“When I think asexual, I think, like—” I struggled to finish my sentence.
“A nun?” she asked, then shrugged. “It’s a mistake many make. I just happen to be the style that enjoys the male form, touching it with my fingers and even dancing with it. I do not like it unclothed and fully nude, little thing trying to get on up in me. I’ve never been interested in that.”
“It’s just hard to comprehend, that you and Sam never did anything. I mean, he’s so… and the two of you separate are just… It’s, I mean, his brothers are—”
“His brothers are very sexual beings, Sam is also heterosexual. Wipe that look off your face,” Lilly said, setting the wine bottle on the counter. “He has sex, but just not with me. From the look of him, it’s been a while.”
“Wait, did you two have an arrangement?”
Lilly smiled as she set the wine glasses down.
“He’s very accommodating when he’s interested in someone. But still a sexual being.”
“Shouldn’t he have just stopped while you were together? Relationships are about compromise.”
“He made compromises, as did I,” Lilly said with a shrug. “Look, my man having sex with another woman doesn’t bother me. He’s still coming home to me. And he doesn’t end up humping my leg in his sleep.”
She poured wine for both of us, nearly filling the glasses, then came around the counter and handed me one of them. She smiled, then shrugged again.
“You never wondered why I always go home alone?” she asked.
“You surround yourself with women who have sex in bars, at the tables you sit at, in my back seat, against the club, in the bathroom, and in the back alleyway.”
“With the men I’m with, with the dancers, with strangers. Annie last week even got the bartender to do her behind the bar.”
“With a reputation like that, I think everyone else just kind of, you know,” I said with a shrug.
We moved to the couch, where Lilly sat and I sighed, then sunk down to my seat slowly. My dress hiked up as I bent to kick my shoes off. Groaning, I sipped my wine, then looked at Lilly.
She shrugged again. “All’s well in love and war.”
“That’s not the saying,” I
responded. “And I don’t even think that pertains to this situation unless a war is about to start. In which case, you and I have some serious issues we need to work out.”
“Yeah, there’s a war about to start over your soul,” Lilly muttered to her wine glass.
I laughed and sipped my wine again, then shook my head.
“War over my soul,” I muttered with a another shake of my head.
“Hey, I believe in Heaven and Hell, God and that whole lot. You don’t?”
I didn’t like talking about religion. It was one of those topics that you weren’t supposed to bring up. Sometimes, though, Lilly wanted to talk about strange things when she started drinking wine.
Do it for Lilly.
I tucked my ego and all the rest off in the furthest corner of my mind and tried to act normally and not confrontational in the least.
“God? No. He’s all about being a good person, and good things will come to you, that doesn’t happen. Picking up litter doesn’t get you a good job. Smiling and holding the door for strangers, doesn’t get you a nice apartment. You work your ass off to buy a shitty place, and you work your way up from there, being abused every day by drunks, addicts, and just mean people in general who look at you and think that you’ll only ever be the servant at their feet because you aren’t their ideal of perfect.”
“No, that’s what people say that God says. Words that men have put into His mouth.”
“Which means you aren’t Christian or Catholic, more like theist?”
Lilly shrugged, it seemed to be her go-to motion for the night.
“Whatever you want to call it. I just don’t believe that God should be held to the words that men placed to Him. Just like I wouldn’t hold you to the words a man wrote about you. I’d take you at face value.”
“What the hell did men write about me?” I asked.
“All the drivers are reviewed online,” Lilly said, whipping out her phone. “Mind you, these are drunk men who are all under the belief that a woman is a bitch unless she smiles and drops her panties for them. But they also said you don’t drive straight there, steal money instead of returning change.”
“It’s called tipping. Drunk or not, you’re supposed to tip. And if they ask for change, I give it to them.”