by Fiona Zedde
“Stephen swore to me it wasn’t true,” her mother said softly. She blinked at the now-blank wall where Xóchitl had disappeared with Ethan as if it held all the answers to her questions.
Mai staggered back as if Mandaia had actually struck her. Then she swallowed thickly and shook her head. “It’s fine!” Her voice cracked through the air like a whip. “It doesn’t matter now.”
But her mother didn’t seem the least bit impressed or intimidated by her outburst. She stepped closer, a hand on Mai’s elbow. “At least let me take care of you now. It shouldn’t be like this between us.”
The difference between the woman she had known most of her life and the stranger who stood before her was too much for Mai to bear. Then she realized what was different. She was different. She had power now, and now her mother wanted to mother her. She straightened and pulled away from Mandaia, ignoring the pain that ignited through her body.
“Things are the same as they’ve always been,” she said.
Then she left the warehouse under her own power, not expecting her mother to follow.
Chapter 11
Almost six weeks passed before Mai saw Xóchitl again. A colleague took over her classes after the university issued a statement about her having some sort of family emergency. Mai rolled her eyes when she heard. She’d been the one with a real family emergency, but that didn’t stop her from going to work.
But so much time passed, she thought she’d never see Xóchitl again. Although Denali and the others must have known where she was, Mai didn’t feel right asking them anything. Mai didn’t want any suspicion to fall on Xóchitl’s head just because she couldn’t keep her sadness, or her curiosity, to herself. And so she stayed quiet and wondered. Until the morning she received an e-mail, along with a plane ticket to Mexico.
I’ll tell you everything, the e-mail said.
Mai had never been able to resist the lure of answered questions.
She’d been to Mexico at least a dozen times before, mostly for academic conferences and once for spring break, enough that she spoke decent Spanish and knew how to get around the country. But the place Xóchitl’s directions guided her to was as foreign to her as the Nahuatl language two women were speaking as she got out of the taxi and approached the large, yellow house.
On the Caribbean side of the country now, Mai felt like she was in a postcard, with the swaying palm trees, purple and yellow hibiscus lining the walkway, and the intrigued toucans perched on the low trees overhead.
On the wide verandah of the house, two women sat shelling peas and exchanging laughter between their words, barely stopping their beautiful rhythm when Mai approached, although the taxi pulling up and then away from the gate must have been sign enough of her presence.
“Good afternoon,” she greeted the women with a wave. “Can you tell me where Xóchitl is?”
The woman on the left, older and with her short hair sprinkled with tiny pink flowers, laughed at Mai, maybe at her pronunciation of Xóchitl’s name, and made a welcome gesture with the hand not busy holding the wide, silver bowl in her lap. “She’s inside. Follow the music to the kitchen.”
“She’s expecting you,” said the other, also beautiful but with a tower of silver hair.
Mai thanked them and made sure to wipe her sandaled feet before stepping onto the verandah. The house wasn’t small, but it was nowhere as massive as Mandaia’s mansion. Once inside, she heard the faint echoes of far-off conversations.
It didn’t take her long to find Xóchitl. She sat in a pool of sunlight at the kitchen table and slowly ate from a bowl of sliced mangoes while staring off into space. Tejano music played softly from the radio. A sea-scented breeze slid in through the open windows.
Mai caught her breath. Xóchitl looked like a completely different person from the enforcer she saw last. Or the professor she’d known first. A yellow sarong tied behind her neck left her shoulders bare and highlighted the glowing deep gold of her skin. Her short coils were wilder, gleaming from a recent shampoo and some sort of oil. In the kitchen of her house on the Caribbean coast of Mexico, Xóchitl chose to look harmless, a beautiful woman surrounded by color and warmth. But she didn’t hide the hum of Power radiating from her, an electric crackle in the air that brushed against Mai’s skin and seduced her closer.
When Mai had thought about this moment—and she’d had a long enough time between the six weeks in Atlanta and the three hours on the plane—she imagined letting loose her own anger, her accusations of betrayal—how could you sleep with me to get the information you wanted?—and even indifference. But she never thought she’d feel this overwhelming sense of…relief. Xóchitl was in her own home, not taken away by the enforcers as Ethan had been. She was free. She was safe.
“You came.” Xóchitl put down her fork, surprise in her voice.
“The women outside said you were expecting me.”
“I was hopeful.” She smiled briefly and gestured to the fruit. “Would you like some?”
“No, thank you.” I’d rather watch you eat. “All I want right now is answers.” Mai took the empty seat across from her and dropped her small bag under the table. An irrepressible fountain of gladness bubbled up inside her.
“And that’s all you came here for?” Amusement shimmered in Xóchitl’s dark eyes.
Mai would rather bite off her tongue than confess she’d been dreaming about Xóchitl for weeks now, wondering where she was, waking up in the middle of the night and gasping her name. “Answers would be a good start,” she said.
The last few weeks had been frightening for her, a time of change and of wondering in what direction she should now take her life. She finally took her sister’s advice and started seeing a therapist. But she still wasn’t ready to deal with the new version of her mother who wanted to be in her company, who asked questions instead of issuing orders. Who talked about loving Mai and wanting to protect her.
Mai couldn’t help but think her new manifestation of Power had something to do with her mother’s sudden desire for a better relationship. She wasn’t as weak as her mother had thought, so now she was actually worthy of respect and warmth.
Mandaia insisted, though, that Mai had been the one to pull away first all those years ago, railing and cursing at the family until they finally gave in and sent her away to boarding school and away from Stephen. Too late.
They both had a long way to go. And speaking of which…
“So. An explanation?” Mai prodded Xóchitl, who gave that nonsmile of hers again.
“I think you already know everything.” She tilted her head, and the sun fell across her face, turning one brown eye into molten gold.
“But I’d like you to spell it out for me so I’m not operating purely on assumptions.”
The truth was, Mai only had guesses about what had happened to bring Xóchitl to Atlanta. Why she ended up teaching at the university. Why she deliberately antagonized Mai, seduced her, and then stopped her from killing her cousin.
“Six years ago, Ethan killed my sister in San Miguel de Allende.”
Mai nearly choked on her next breath. That wasn’t what she expected.
“Ixchel was Powerless. She was staying with her human mother at the time.” Xóchitl, her voice leeched of all inflection, speared a piece of mango with the fork but didn’t eat it. “Everyone knew Ethan Redstone did it. But even as an enforcer, I couldn’t touch him.” Xóchitl’s hand tightened around the fork. When she seemed to realize what she was doing, she abandoned it in the bowl with a clang of stainless steel against ceramic. “His family—your family—was too powerful. He was too careful.”
“Because I couldn’t kill him, I killed someone else. Another predator. But it didn’t feel like I changed anything, so I killed another, then more.” She finally met Mai’s gaze, and the pain Mai saw there made her chest hurt. “It wasn’t going to end. My grief for my sister. My powerlessness.” Xó
chitl curled her fingers into loose fists on the tabletop. “I saw myself on that hamster wheel for the rest of my life, taking out substitutes while the man who’d fractured my family carried on like usual, all because his father protected him.”
“So you got rid of his father.”
“I got rid of his father,” Xóchitl confirmed. “He was my hardest kill.” She bared her sharp teeth. “But the most satisfying.”
“Why? Because it brought you to Ethan?”
“Yes.” Xóchitl’s voice was like a flash of lightning in the room. Powerful and sure. “And it brought me to you.”
The words washed over Mai like a heated caress. They were what she wanted to hear, but did they mean anything? She’d spent so much of her life being unwanted and unloved that she needed to hear it all.
“Tell me,” she whispered.
Xóchitl didn’t need any more prompting than that. “You took revenge on the people who made your life hell by saving humans and caring for your own needs, instead of becoming filled with poison. That’s what surprised me when I found you. Seeing you with your ideals and your drive to make a difference made me want to be a better person.” Xóchitl’s eyes lightened again. “And then I just wanted to fuck you.”
Mai blushed. “You did do that.”
“And I want to do it again.” There was a fierce sensuality to the look Xóchitl turned on her, voracious and volatile, her face fully in the sun now and her eyes molten enough to burn through to Mai’s very core.
Mai should have been frightened. She should have wanted to run. But this sign of Xóchitl’s force only made her more certain of where she wanted to be. This woman knew her and still wanted to stay. She knew about Stephen’s abuse, that her own cousin had tried to kill her. She knew about Mercy.
Still, Mai hesitated. “And what about what you said before, about wanting to know me? Do you still mean it?”
“Yes,” Xóchitl said. Her gaze was unwavering.
Mai took a trembling breath and looked away. Xóchitl was strong. She was the kind of warrior and protector Mai wished she’d had as a child growing up in a household that failed to keep her safe.
“If you want me, you can have me now.”
Mai startled. It occurred to her suddenly that she hadn’t known until now what Xóchitl’s power was. “Get out of my mind,” she said.
“I’m not in your mind, at least not right now. I don’t need to be. You’re as transparent as your pretty blouse.” She waved a hand at the pink camisole Mai wore with her white linen pants. “You’re not even trying to hide what you’re thinking.”
It was true. She was tired of hiding. And though she might have fooled herself into thinking she was coming to visit Xóchitl for answers, she was actually on her doorstep to be herself, to take off all the masks they’d both worn and finally lay them aside.
“Let me be that for you,” Xóchitl said, her voice low and throbbing with tender emotion. An echo of her words slid into Mai’s mind like the most intimate of caresses. “Let me be your Mercy.” She left her chair to walk toward Mai, the sarong swaying on her body with each step, her scent wrapping Mai in comforting notes of citrus and spice.
Mai shook her head, but she was already leaning back into the arms encircling her from behind, into the steady warmth she’d once mistaken for cold. She melted into Xóchitl and felt like she’d traveled a very long way to end up at home. Finally.
About Fiona Zedde
Jamaican-born Fiona Zedde currently lives and writes in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of several novellas and novels of lesbian love and desire, including the Lambda Literary Award finalists, Bliss and Every Dark Desire. Her novel, Dangerous Pleasures, was winner of the About.com Readers’ Choice Award for Best Lesbian Novel or Memoir of 2012.
Her short fiction has appeared in various anthologies including the Cleis Press Best Lesbian Erotica series, Wicked: Sexy Tales of Legendary Lovers, Iridescence: Sensuous Shades of Lesbian Erotica, and Fist of the Spider Woman.
CONNECT WITH FIONA
Website: www.fionazedde.com
E-Mail: [email protected]
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Also available as paperback.
Published by Ylva Publishing, legal entity of Ylva Verlag, e.Kfr.
Ylva Verlag, e.Kfr.
Owner: Astrid Ohletz
Am Kirschgarten 2
65830 Kriftel
Germany
www.ylva-publishing.com
First edition: 2017
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rt of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Credits
Edited by Gill McKnight and Michelle Aguilar
Proofread by Paulette Callen
Cover Design and Print Layout by Streetlight Graphics