Again (14 page)

“Are you ready?” His breath tickled her lips. She didn’t have a chance to answer as his tongue pushed into her mouth, as his penis pushed into her body. A double invasion. He lay still for a second, his body embedded in hers. Then slowly, slowly he began to move inside her. The bed springs echoed his tempo, trilling a chorus as he began moving a little faster, thrusting a little deeper. She had known the feel of men inside her before, but what she felt now defied the history of every lover she had ever had. The sensations were too varied, contradictory. Inside, the ribbed sheath of his penis raked against her walls, causing a friction so good it bordered on pain, while his thrusting punished her clitoris with nerve-screaming pleasure. He sucked her tongue, swirling the taste of her sex in her mouth, while his fingers clutched her ass, his fingernails imprinting themselves in her bountiful flesh. There was no relief, no chance to catch a breath, to escape the rapture.

His thrusts demanded her capitulation, her temporary relinquishment of her humanity. Trembling beneath him, she was no longer Tyne, an educated, self-possessed, independent woman. Instead, she was an extension of his body, a capillary through which his need, desire, even his life, flowed. He was the same for her. His hunger scared and exhilarated her. Her hunger frightened and enthralled her. She clutched the firm mounds of his ass, unceremoniously pushing him even farther up her canal. The moan that escaped this time was from him.

They drank each other, grinding their hips together, demanding a denouement that was swiftly rising, threatening to sweep both of them out on its tide. Saliva, sweat, heat, tears mixed and fused the air with the smell of sex, an amalgam of their essence, a child born of their desire and need.

A sensation started moving from her crotch, moving upward to her stomach, outward to her limbs. It was more than she could hold in her body. She released it through the scream against his lips, through the nails that ran streams of red down his back. Soon, the smell of blood joined the other smells. She didn’t care to see sunlight again if she could keep this moment. No food or water would ever sate her. Just him inside her.

A violent convulsion shook his frame against hers, and he buried his face in her nape, his rapid breaths burning through her skin. His weight went dead and settled fully on top of her, making it hard for her to draw in breath. But if she had to die like this, so be it.

An eternity of seconds passed before she realized she would have to move or suffocate for real. She began to sidle from beneath him, and he responded by shifting his weight off her to lay beside her. His breathing sounded like an asthmatic foraging in a field of poppies. Or the screeching blurt of bellows. For a moment, she wondered if he was going to hyperventilate.

After a few seconds, his breathing became less agitated.

“You’re all right?” she asked between her own shaky breaths.

He said nothing but she felt him nod. A sliver of sexual pride ran through her at the damage she had done. He was a quivering mess beside her. But then again, she wasn’t in any better shape.

She raised up to get off the bed, but he reached out a hand to still her. It slowly moved up to cover a breast, began a slight caress. The twinge in her crotch took her by surprise.

“What?” she asked incredulously. He couldn’t possibly…. But then she noticed he was no longer limp, the crown of his head growing darker.

He winked, smiled, then reached over and licked her lower lip—and began where he left off.

New York—July 1879

It was just a rose. A beautiful yellow rose waiting for her on the doorstep. Thankfully it was early yet, too early for Lawrence to have come home and discovered it there on the porch to their brownstone. She would not want to raise his suspicions when she could not name her suitor, nor allow for a time for the two men to meet. She picked up the flower and looked around, knowing that he was no longer there, but wishing that he were. She smelled the flower. The scent was heady in the heat of the early afternoon. It would die soon.

The gesture was sweet and unassuming, somewhat contrary to what she had come to know of him in the three weeks since he had found her again. He did not seem one for simple gifts. He had been very disappointed when she refused the emerald necklace he tried to give her on their last meeting. There had been other attempts at gifts, none accepted.

He did not seem to understand that this could not be, this association he was so desperately pursuing. Anything between them, any more than what had already gone before, would be the unraveling of them both. They had their places in this world…and it wasn’t together.

And yet…She stroked the petals. So soft, one slightly bruised, but this did not detract from its beauty.

She must put a stop to this courting.

Because it could not be. This hope for more.

Still, she couldn’t help the smile that touched her lips, nor the warmth that ran through her as she remembered how first his hand, then his lips had covered hers, and how his brown eyes had nearly swallowed her whole.

The ringing phone pulled her reluctantly from her dream. Half asleep, Tyne wrestled with the sheets, blindly reaching for the nightstand lamp. The clock said two-forty. She picked up the receiver, hoping bad news wasn’t on the other end.

“Tyne?”

The sound of David’s voice woke her fully. She sat up, pulled the sheet around her, feeling self-conscious, wondering why. Then remembered the very intimate dream she’d been having about him, in a place that seemed from another time.

“David, hi…what…what’s going on?”

“I know, I know…it’s late…too late to be calling, right?” He laughed softly, warmly.

“Well, no…is everything all right?”

“Yeah, it is. I just…I was just dreaming about you and I woke up needing to hear your voice.”

Tyne felt a warm surge. “Funny, I was just dreaming about you, too.”

“Was it a nice dream?” The purr in his voice made her take an unsteady breath.

“Very nice. So what were you dreaming about me?”

“It was strange, really. I couldn’t see your face clearly, but I knew it was you. We were talking about books, some of the classics, and you were laughing at something I’d said. It was such a wonderful sound, your laughter. And I woke up wanting to hear that sound again. Only thing is, even though I knew it was your voice, it was different somehow. I know this must sound weird.”

Tyne heard the uncertainty in his voice. She wondered about her own dream, the man who was David and somehow wasn’t.

“So, what did you dream about me?” he asked.

Suddenly embarrassed, she didn’t want to tell him the intimate details, even after last night, or especially after last night. And there was something about her dreams that still brought a chill to her. Even though she hadn’t dreamed about the knife in a while, yet whenever she was with her dream lover, the dream David, there was a sense of danger, a sense that she wasn’t safe. Sometimes there was an overwhelming need to get away. Although that hadn’t been the case with tonight’s dream.

“It was nothing really…”

“That bad, huh?” he teased.

“No, nothing like that. I’d just rather not talk about it. But, it’s nice that you called though.”

A silence then, “Sometimes I just want to talk to someone. Reaching out isn’t always easy. And when you do, you hope you don’t get burned. That’s why I want you to know, it wasn’t just about the sex…I mean last night.”

She smiled. “That’s good to know. Like I said, I don’t do that usually, hardly ever. And never after just one date. Last night was different, though…special.” Even as she said this, she wondered whether she had revealed too much.

“For me, too.” Another silence. “I would never admit this to my mother, I mean she’s into all this predestination and kismet stuff, but sometimes you wonder if fate has something to do with the people we meet…”

“So, you think we were meant to find each other?” She tried to put a lilt in her voice, didn’t quite succeed. Because she didn’t think the idea was as farfetched as she wanted to make it sound. And the alternative was inexplicably disturbing.

“I know, I know…it sounds like a line. Just forget it. Tell me about you, Tyne.”

“Tell you about what?”

“I don’t know…your likes, dislikes…I want to know everything.”

“It’s late, David.”

“I know. But I have these feelings, and I can’t explain why the connection with you was so immediate, but it was. I just need to know why.”

“Sounds like you don’t want to have these feelings…”

“No, I like what’s happening. Which is why I want to know more about you.”

She sighed. “David, I could tell you the colors I like, the music I listen to, the foods I crave, but I don’t think it could really tell you about me. The thing you need to know is that I’m just a woman who wants what other women want…someone I can be comfortable with, can talk to, laugh with. I’ve had good relationships, as well as bad, and I know I don’t want to be hurt again. Have you ever hurt anyone, David?”

She heard him hesitate. “There was someone I hurt, hurt really bad…” And he told her about his last girlfriend, Karen, how he had walked away—or rather, let her walk away, how his heart hadn’t been open. “I wasn’t ready—then.” There was a pause that she knew she was supposed to fill, an inference she was meant to make but she held off, not wanting to assume too soon.

As though talking about Karen had opened a valve to his memories, he told her about other girlfriends, his first crush. A girl named Delana.

“I hate to admit this, but I’ve never been in love before,” he said with a hint of sadness.

“Before when?”

He didn’t answer, and she didn’t want him to. It was too soon. And she wasn’t yet sure of her own feelings. They only had one night between them.

She told him about her own failed romances and only when she had concluded her list did she realize that she had never really loved any of them. No one had ever come close enough to make her want to open her heart. She had spent more time guarding it instead.

He related other things to her. A best friend drowned, a father who had walked away.

“I’ve done many things that I’m ashamed of,” he said quietly. Another silence, and then, “I burned down my mother’s house a long time ago. It’s something I haven’t ever been able to fully tell her…and right now, I don’t know why I’m telling you. I guess I finally needed to tell somebody.” He told her how the fire got started, about how he had run instead of trying to put it out.

She heard the guilt in his voice, wanted to appease it somehow. “Maybe, one day you’ll be able to tell her everything. After all, it was an accident, and you were just a child, if a little mischievous. There’s only so long you should have to hold on to guilt, David. Sometimes, you just have to let things go and go on living.”

“Thanks for that, Tyne. I’m glad I told you.”

After that, they talked for hours. And when she finally hung up, dawn was breaking and it was time to get up.

R
hea sat quietly at the kitchen table studying the old photo. Her grandmother stood at the old chrome stove she’d had for nearly thirty years frying bacon in a skillet. She was humming like she always did while cooking.

The picture was creased at the corners, the sepia tones faded, making the colors indistinguishable. Rhea had to peer closely to discern the details of the faces captured in grain for over a century. The two women stood side by side, their heads adorned with hats sporting large, curving feathers. The taller of the two was her great-great-grandmother, Sarah. The other, according to her grandmother, was Rachel Chase. Both women were attractive, their smiles radiating even through the damage that age had done to the photo.

Her grandmother had unearthed the picture the other day from one of the many stashes she had sequestered away in the old attic.

“I shouldn’t even give this to you,” she admonished. “It’s not normal for a young girl to be so obsessed with the past. You should be going out, celebrating the end of finals, not laying around here reading letters from the dead.” But then her grandmother pointed to each of the women captured within the picture.

“This here is my grandmother, Sarah. A beautiful woman.” Rhea heard the pride in her grandmother’s voice as the older woman stared at her own grandmother.

“She was a stylish woman in her day. And did she ever love her hats! Custom made. Never went to church without a one-of-a-kind on top of her head. I always walked a little taller whenever I was with her. She and my grandfather sat on several boards, including a Negro savings and loan. You better believe that was a double feat for a colored woman back then. Now I’m not certain here, but I seem to recall my mother showing me this same picture one time and calling the other woman Aunt Rachel. Not that she was really my mother’s aunt, just someone my mother had an affection for. Has to be the same Rachel my grandmother corresponded with.”

Rhea looked at the second woman in the picture, trying to impress the image on her brain.

“Guess now you can put a face to the ghost,” her grandmother echoed her thoughts before going back to the business of making breakfast.

As is often the case, reality conflicted with fantasy. For some reason, she had imagined Rachel Chase as a demure, delicate flower. But the woman in the photo was taller than she’d imagined, and even with her small waist (no doubt courtesy of a corset), she was no shrinking violet. She would have been considered “statuesque” in her day, “stacked” by today’s lingo. The smile on her face was hardly demure.

“It was a shame what happened,” her grandmother said almost as an afterthought as she put the several sausage patties in an iron skillet.

“What do you mean? What happened?” Rhea stopped midtrack on her trek out of the kitchen. She detected the pity in her grandmother’s voice, and at that moment realized she had overlooked a very important source of information right under her nose. But she had assumed that because her grandmother never offered much about the woman who wrote the letters, she didn’t know anything.

“It’s strange how things start coming back to you. But I remember now how my mother once told me about her Aunt Rachel being killed. My first thought back then was that neither grandmama nor granddaddy had a sister. Then Mama showed me the picture and told me about her mother’s best friend who she had loved like an auntie. Anyway, the way my mother told it, Rachel disappeared one day. At first, everyone assumed she had upped and left New York, especially since she’d lost her husband. But sometime later that winter, they found her body frozen in the East River.”

Her grandmother flipped over the sausage, her recollection seemingly at an end.

“Well?” Rhea prodded, stepping closer to her grandmother. Near enough that the popping grease caught her on the wrist. She stepped back.

“Well what?” her grandmother said irritably. One of the sausage patties was smoking.

“Well, what happened to her? Did she fall in?”

“Uh, uh. Not likely, unless a corpse can drop itself into the water. Let’s just say someone left her with an extra smile—on her neck.”

This time Rhea stepped back in shock. Not that her grandmother ever had any subtlety. Her philosophy on death was simple: Death was death no matter how it came to you. A slit throat would be no more or less shocking than a heart attack in bed. “No one leaves this world healthy” she’d often heard her grandmother say. Still, Rhea couldn’t or didn’t want to fathom the beautiful woman in the picture stilled so brutally, her life robbed at the edge of a knife.

“Did they ever catch who did it?” The question came out a slight whine.

But her grandmother just shrugged. “If they did, no one told me. Could be they did. Maybe not. Who’s to know? It was such a long time ago. Still, it was a pity. Such a pretty woman.”

The one other thing Rhea knew about photographs: they kept the dead alive. Smiles couldn’t be forgotten so readily. She knew she would see Rachel’s smile in her dreams for a long time to come.

“Don’t take that tone with me! I’m your mother, not your girlfriend!”

“Then act like a mother and stop snooping through my bedroom!”

“I am acting like a mother! That’s what mothers do, snoop! Especially when their kids don’t do like they promised!” Carmen Carvelli stood with her arms akimbo, defiance making her smooth skin look aged. But she stood behind an aegis of righteous anger that protected her from her own doubts.

“If you hadn’t noticed, Ma, I’m no longer a kid!”

David paced up and down her living room like a trapped animal. Like he wanted to pounce at her. Maybe claw out her throat. But then again, she had to admit to herself that she’d gone too far this time, actually breaking into his house. If you can call using an emergency key “breaking in.”

“I’m sorry, but you promised me you’d come by Friday,” her tone capitulated, even if her stance didn’t. “It was important, and I wasn’t about to beg you.”

“No, you just decided to rummage through my house, my room. For what? What were you looking for?”

Her first instinct was to lie, immediately followed by the realization that she had lied way too much already, a choice she now regretted. No, there would be no more lies. But her resolve was fading in the face of David’s anger. His aura was blood red. Her hands trembled. She wanted—no, needed—a cigarette bad, real bad. She started for the kitchen, then remembered in her first half step that she had smoked her last one that morning with her coffee. She glanced longingly at the butts lying in the ashtray on her living room table before turning her eyes back to her son.

“David, do you ever have memories or strange dreams where you seem to be someone else?”

He stopped midpace and looked at her. She caught the startled look before he was able to quickly tuck it away, his angry mask back in place.

“What kind of craziness is that?” His voice was strained, the pitch off. It didn’t sound like him.

“No crazier than everything I’ve told you in the last week. Besides, reincarnation is…”

“…a whole bunch of shit that con men—or women—try to pawn off on hapless fools so they’ll believe in hope past this life,” he said angrily before falling hard into one of her wing-back chairs. It shook with the impact of his weight.

She sat down in an adjacent chair and said in her tone of reason, “Much like people believe in a heaven once they leave this plane. Are they hapless fools for believing there’s a higher power, a better place than this?”

David said nothing, just sat there brooding like a petulant boy, looking down at the area rug. He looked almost like the ten-year-old who had always butted heads with her. Only now, he was a man, a very angry man. She didn’t understand the anger. It was disproportionate to her small infraction. It couldn’t be just the snooping. He’d definitely been surprised that she knew his dreams, or part of them anyway.

When he was growing up, she’d been careful not to force her theology on him. She had only made him go to church up until his thirteenth birthday when he decided definitely that he would no longer go to church. She knew that if he didn’t want to believe in things beyond this world, she wasn’t going to change his mind at that point. But she did believe in a higher power, just as she believed there were malevolent powers at work also. Powers that were at work now. She didn’t know much about reincarnation. She’d only encountered a few souls that had returned to this earth, and they had hardly been aware of their past life, or in some cases, lives. But David’s case was different. He was having memories, and they were starting to manifest in dreams. What worried her was that they weren’t going to stay confined to the safety of those dreams.

Because sitting in her chair right now, she saw a soul going through a metamorphosis. What was scarier, David was becoming someone she didn’t know, someone volatile, someone in emotional pain.

She wanted to touch him, to comfort him, to read him, to pick up something so she could stave off the calamity she was sure would happen.

Instead she asked, “David, don’t you believe in anything?”

Just as quickly, the red began to waver, the anger to seep from the planes of his face. As he thought about the question, he seemed almost lost as he shook his head. “I believe in you, Ma. That you have a gift. I believe that there’s good in the world. But I know there’s a whole lot of evil to go up against that good. And there’s always love.”

A slight green softened the red, began pushing it away.

A small smile played at her lips. “Are you in love, David?”

Finally, he looked up at her, and said hesitatingly, “I don’t know. I don’t know what this is. It’s so much that I think it’s going to drive me crazy.”

Carmen Carvelli realized at that moment that there was another piece of the conundrum that had just settled into place.

“Tell me about her, David.”

New York—August 1879

Until he saw the hansom pull up outside the boarding room he’d let for the afternoon, Joseph wasn’t sure she would come. Both of them had much to lose by this rendezvous. Yet neither of them seemed able to overcome what had taken possession of them both. If love could split open a heart, his had already been rived in two. He looked around the room, regretted its despair. The only thing to temper the ugliness was a yellow rose he had placed in a glass vase on top of an old bureau.

As he watched Rachel from the upper window, a doubt blazed, telling him that she would not take the stairs leading to the building. That she would not knock on the door to this room. That she would reenter the cab and leave this place and his life forever.

His heart leapt as she ascended to the building’s entrance and was let in by the proprietor. Finally, the knock on his own door came and he hastened to answer in case she should change her mind and decide to turn away.

All reservations fled as he saw her standing there, lovely and vulnerable. Her eyes were hesitant, but there was desire there also. He pulled her into the room, pulled her to him, found her lips. They opened softly, eagerly.

He stopped, catching his breath. “Are you sure?” he asked, hoping not to hear anything other than yes.

“I would not be here if I had any doubts.” But then she smiled guiltily. “To be honest, I might have some. I just don’t hear them as well as I used to.” She was breathless, and he didn’t know whether it was due to nervousness or desire. Or maybe fear. There could be unwanted consequences.

“I have a rubber shield for…” he started, then noticing the lowering of her eyes, realized she didn’t want to hear the rude aspects of what they were about to do.

“Thank you,” she said, and this barely above a whisper. He held her again.

“I love you, Rachel,” he breathed into her hair, his fingers tangling in the coils. Only when the words had left his lips did he realize that he had never said this to anyone. Not to his mother, never to his father. At least he had loved his mother, in a fashion, although she had not returned the affection. Not really. He had only been a link in the chain binding her to her prison.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything like this before. It’s wonderful.”

She was silent for a moment, as though she had to think of a response. For that interminable second, his heart froze, as he wondered if he were truly alone, even with her standing here in front of him. That he had grown up without affection, he had long come to terms with. That this might be so for the rest of his life, he could not fathom. To love and to have it returned was something that he had only hoped for. He had waited for the woman whose soul would reach out to his, through touch or word. And she was standing here with him now.

Please love me
, he pleaded silently.

Her eyes gave him his answer and he allowed himself to breathe again.

She began unbuttoning her dress jacket. He barely registered an impression of lilac trimmed with a darker hue, his senses too heady to care about sartorial details. A white shift fell to the floor. He helped her out of the full skirt, her bustle and bindings until she stood wonderfully naked before him. There was no bashfulness, no feminine coyness, just a trust that was openly given.

As he touched her, he wondered how skin could be dark yet so soft. Until this moment, he had only thought that a virtue of white flesh. But as he buried his face in her bared breasts, he knew this was not so. Her moan was the sound of angels.

He shed the rest of their clothes and carried her to the bed, a pallet really. But it would do.

He laid her down gently. Emboldened by the desire in her eyes, he began exploring all of her contours with hands, mouth, tongue, his touch causing her to sigh, moan or, at times, softly laugh. The savor and smell of her drove him on, making him desperate to consume all of her. Slowly he moved his lips down the taut, soft stomach, farther down still until he found her creamy moisture. He tasted her and she gasped. He realized then that despite years of marriage, she was still innocent to much of lovemaking. He welcomed the opportunity to teach her.