Burning for You (Blackwater) (25 page)

“Does it have to do with Michael?”
Ash asks me.  “Is that why you’re upset?”

I sit up on my elbow and look at
him.  The moonlight behind him frames his profile in a soft glow.  It’s not a
perfect profile like the ones you see in those old fashioned silhouettes but
flawed.  Ash’s is all nose and lips and angles.  “I thought about Michael when
you and Theo were…on me.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“Did you plan that?” I want to
know.  “Did you know that was going to happen?”

“How would I have known?” Ash
says.  “It just happened, didn’t it?  I told you dinners at Normandy are
unusual to most people.”

“Unusual is an understatement,” I
interject.  “You didn’t tell me it would be a full on orgy.”

“It’s whatever you make of it,” Ash
explains.  “Or whatever it makes of you.”

“What do you mean by that?” I ask
him.  I don’t even wait for an answer.  I just want to talk.  “I felt like I
was in a trance.  Like I didn’t have control over myself and what I would
normally do.  It was like something taking over me.”

“Your inhibitions.”

“Yes, exactly,” I say.  “What did
that to me?”

“The wine,” Ash replies. 

“I’m being serious.”

“So am I,” he says.  “You were
served Lavanne Vineyard wine.  Not the kind that we sell.  The kind we keep and
drink for ourselves.  It’s enchanted.  The Lavannes have every elemental working
at Normandy.  Between the four elementals, we have the ability to do some
pretty twisted shit to our wine.”

“So I was drugged?” I ask him
flatly.

Ash shakes his head.  “Not drugged,
but certainly stripped of your ability to not realize what you want.”

“And I wanted a threesome?”

“No,” Ash replies quickly.  He
finally turns to look at me.  “You wanted Theo.”

My breath catches sharply in my
throat.  I feel my heart pounding anxiously.  “I didn’t want-“

“Didn’t want him?” Ash interrupts. 
“Bullshit, Leah, the moment you saw him I could feel it leaking from your
pores.  I could practically smell you wanting him, like a freaking cat in heat
or something.”

“Very poetic,” I snap.  “What I was
going to say to you was that I didn’t want to hurt you.”

Ash leans forward, resting his arms
on his knees and cradling his head in his hands.  “I knew you were too good to
be true,” he says quietly.  “I knew that it was impossible to expect that you
would be mine.”

“Ash,” I say, throwing the covers
back and crawling so that I am directly in front of him on my hands and knees. 
“You are my catalyst.  I am yours.”

“And Theo’s,” he says.  “Not just
mine.  You’ll never just be mine.  I’ll never have you to myself.”

“Stop it!” I say pushing his head
back and out of his hands so he’s forced to see me.  “This is ridiculous.  I
don’t choose who my catalyst is.  You didn’t choose either.  You and I were
drawn to each other.  We found each other.  That will always be ours.”

“At least Theo has Olivia,” Ash
says, pulling back from me and pressing himself back against his headboard. 
“You have Theo and me.  I only have you.”

I sit back, feeling offended at his
words.  “That’s not enough for you, I take it?”

“No Leah,” Ash says.  His voice,
normally so deep and rich is now cracking at every word that escapes his
mouth.  “You don’t understand what I’m feeling.  It’s everything for me. 
You’re all I want and need, but I’m not all you want and need.  I can’t expect
you to understand now that you’ve met my brother, so I won’t bother explaining
to you.”

“That’s not fair,” I say softly,
looking down at my hands.  Ash doesn’t say anything.  “So what are we supposed
to do?”

He shrugs.  “I know what I should
do, but not what I want to do.”

“What do you want to do?” I ask
him.

“Throw you down on the bed and make
love to you and then take you far away from here where no one will ever find
us.”

I stare hard at him.  “Why don’t
you?”

“I can’t,” he says, looking away
from me, with the intent to hide his face from mine.  Instead, the moonlight
catches his face and shows me he’s crying.  “You would suffer away from Theo.”

“But I would have you!”

He shakes his head.  “It doesn’t
matter.  Now that you’ve met Theo, you’re connected to him.  You’ll feel a pull
to him for the rest of your life – or the rest of his.  Do you want to end up
like Olivia?”

“What do you mean?” I ask him.  I
have an idea of what he’s referring to but I need to hear it out loud.  What I
saw from tonight told me everything, the way she was on the couch watching me
with Theo.

“I mean her catalyst – her only
catalyst, as far as she knows – is her twin brother.  She can’t marry him, she
can’t make love to him, she can’t touch him.  She obviously has a deep
attraction to him, but there isn’t a thing she can do.”

“Not to sound gross,” I say, “But
why not?  I mean, if they feel the way they do about each other, why don’t they
just say ‘fuck you taboos’ and spend the rest of their lives together?  Run
away or something?”

“Two reasons,” Ash says.  “One is
Maman.  She is a huge enforcer of keeping things within the family…civil, so to
speak.  If Olivia and Theo were caught outside of the home together even so
much as holding hands in public, do you think no one would notice?  The way
they look like two sides of a mirror?”

“No,” I admit.  “I would probably
think they were some weird alien pod twins or something.”  I take a deep breath
and sigh.  “So what’s the second reason?”

Ash looks at me.  “You are the
second reason.  Now that you’re in the picture, Theo won’t go anywhere.”

I understand what he means.  Even
now, I feel like I want to be close to Theo, and I know he is somewhere in the
house, breathing, sleeping, maybe not sleeping and thinking about me like I am
about him. 

Outside of Ash’s window, I see a
streak of lightning cast itself across the sky.  The inevitable boom of thunder
follows a few seconds later.  “I do love you Ash,” I say softly.  “I never lied
to you.”

“I know,” he says.  He gets up from
the bed as I try to come closer to him and stands at the window.  “Come outside
with me.”

I look at him, afraid he’s lost his
mind.  “Now?”

“Now.”

I stand up and follow him to the
window and look outside.  Raindrops begin to show up on the window, a few drops
slowly, and then more fall in line quickly.  Within a minute, the rain is
blasting against the window in sheets.  “Give me something to wear,” I tell
him.

                “No,” he tells me.  “Come outside now.”  He
holds out his hand to me and leads me to his bedroom door.  We walk down the
long hallway, past room after room, making me wonder if people are in them or
if the hallway is empty.  The window at the end of the hall lights the way for
us, illuminating our path with a flash.  We turn and go down the staircase at
the end, spiraling down two flights to the ground floor.  The air is colder
down here, and I shiver, but Ash doesn’t notice and I’m too afraid to say
anything.  He must know I’m freezing, I think, and he’s making me suffer.  Something
about creeping through Normandy without any clothes on makes me feel as though
I’m being punished for something I can’t control.  As though Ash can hear my
thoughts, he opens up a glass French door that leads to a covered stone patio. 
The patio would normally overlook the vineyards and be a beautiful backdrop,
but at this hour with this storm, it’s simply darkness covered by sheets of rain.

                “Let’s go for that run,” Ash shouts to me
over the storm, and takes off into the vineyard, out of the covered porch and
directly into the rain.  I watch him for a few feet, astounded, and then see
him disappear into the darkness. 

                “Ash!” I scream out into the rain, but I can
barely hear myself.  I hold my arms over my naked body, feeling slapped by rain
and bitten by cold.  “Where are you?”  I’m overcome with the fear that he’s
trying to kill himself, and I take off into the vineyards after him and into
the storm.  I choke and gasp as the rain pelts against my face full blast.  I
am instantly drenched and hurting in a million places on my skin from the
impact of the downpour.  My body had time to grow numb on the porch, but it’s
reached a whole new level of cold.  “Ash!” I scream again, running forward.  I
keep running, turning my head in all directions and trying to listen or see,
neither sense working very well at the moment.  Then I stumble on a vine, so
low to the ground, placed there as if to make me fall.  Wet ground smacks
against my breasts, which are the first part of me to feel the impact.  I lay
my head down, defeated, and begin to sob. 

                Rough hands push me over on to my back and I
see Ash’s black eyes glowing in the darkness, only inches from my face. 
“You’re mine!” he shouts against the wind.  “I’ll make you mine tonight!”

                I scream as he parts my legs roughly and
tears me apart by plunging into me as hard and as deeply as he will go.  He
presses against me and pulls away furiously, making me tear and sting.  His
hands squeeze my breasts, and he comes within seconds and collapses on top of
me, sobbing.  Mud streaked on my skin is plastered to his shirt, and I hold him
against me to avoid feeling the cold.

*

I’m in Ash’s bed when I wake up,
with mud everywhere around me – streaked on the sheets and plastered to my hair
and embedded in my nails.  I look around the room and notice the open armoire,
the discarded tuxedo on the floor and the note taped to the footboard of the
bed.  I don’t even need to read the note to know that he’s gone.

I don’t have to ask how Theo knew
to come find me.  After I woke up and realized Ash was gone, I got up and
showered.  I didn’t shed any more tears – I had cried all I could last night.

When I come out of the shower, Theo
is waiting for me on the sofa in the sitting area.  I sit down next to him
without a word, wrapped only in a towel.  I don’t have anything to wear except
for the dress I came in the night before.  It was stupid of me not to bring a
change of clothing, considering I knew I was going to end up spending the
night.  My lack of foresight makes me question whether I actually do have any of
the water elemental in me, but when I see Theo I toss that thought aside.

“How is this going to work?” I
blurt out suddenly.  He sits looking casual in a crisp white oxford shirt and
jeans.  I notice he is barefoot and his hands are the same as Ash’s. 

He doesn’t respond at first, but he
looks at me wearing my towel with my wet hair combed back from my face.  “How
can I know the answer to that?” he finally says.  “You appear out of nowhere
the night I get back from France.  I was hardly expecting you.”

“I wasn’t expecting you either,” I
agree.  “But now here we are and Ash is gone.”  I choke back a sob and feel
like I might fall apart.  “When is he coming back?”

“He didn’t tell me anything,” Theo
replies.  “But he won’t stay away forever.  Maman might know.”

“Lisette knows everything,” I say,
not without sarcasm. 

Theo laughs and shakes his head. 
“Maman knows what she thinks she knows, which is to say, she will tell you she
knows and she may or may not be right.”

“Is she usually?”

“Yes,” Theo admits.  He turns to me
and smiles softly, not touching me, for which I’m relieved and grateful.  “I
feel responsible for being the cause of your pain right now, Leah, and
Olivia’s.  I don’t know what to do because I feel like I’ve hurt everyone when
all I’m doing is existing.”

He’s right, I think.  Theo did
nothing other than make his presence known to me.  I notice he looks
exhausted.  “Did you get any sleep last night?”

“No,” he tells me.  “Mostly I
stayed up trying to comfort Olivia.”

“Oh.”

“That’s another thing,” he
continues. “You probably hate me right now because I drove Ash away.  Ash hates
me right now because I’ve shown him he’s not the only one in your life that
will help you define your elementals.  Olivia hates me because my attention is
divided and all she’s done for the six months while I was in France was ache
for me.”

“And she probably hates me too,
based on all that,” I suggest.

“Of course she does,” Theo says,
causing me to smile and groan at the same time.  “She actually despises you!  She
told me she wishes you were dead!  She plans to poison you and hit you
repeatedly with a blunt object.  All of that good stuff.”

“Jeez,” I say.  “Maybe I should go
home now.”

“I’m only teasing,” Theo admits. 
His pale eyes glance over at me and his pink mouth turns up at the corners. 
“Well, maybe not about her feelings.  But she’s not going to do any of that,
because she knows she’ll lose me if she does.”

“Well that’s a relief,” I reply,
smirking.  “So what can I do to help?  Obviously Ash can’t be helped right now,
since he’s gone and we don’t know where he is.  You and Olivia are here.  While
none of us can change how things are, at the very least, we should try and
repair anything that’s broken.”

“Oh, I agree,” Theo says.  “So why
not start off as friends?”

“Friends?” I repeat.

“Absolutely, friends.”  He smiles
even wider, making himself beautiful and showing off his perfectly even white
teeth and a dimple.  “Friends help each other.  Friends also don’t make stir
crazy twin sisters jealous or throw entire bottles of wine at their brothers. 
At least not from what I hear.  Every family is different.”

“Olivia threw a bottle of wine at
you?” I ask him, finding it very easy to picture.  “I’m glad she didn’t hit
you.”

“She throws like a girl,” he
replies, making me laugh.

“So here’s what you can do for me
as a friend,” I suggest.  “Get me some damn clothes.  I can’t go home in a
towel and either you or your brother ripped my dress.”