Lustfully Ever After (5 page)

The last candle went out. I tried to light it again, but the flame wouldn’t take. I tried each of the others, but they had soaked through. I tried until the book of matches was nothing but stubs. A tear froze just below my eye, and the ice stung my cheek. The cold prickled, then deepened, the sting of rose thorns turning to the pierce of a scorpion’s barb. Snowflakes gathered on my eyelashes so that the whole world shimmered with ice.

A falling star broke through the clouds and streaked to earth, and the light slowly went out of the world. I remembered my
abuela
telling me about
los meteoros
. If I saw one, she said, it meant one of only two things: a soul was being welcomed into heaven, or two souls had fallen in love and were becoming one. “They’re close, no,
m’ija?
” she had always asked.

I thought I was dead by the time I saw him. I thought the
green of Roman’s eyes was the last thing I would think of before I met my
abuela
again. Strange, how much I must have wanted him, even from those few moments in the rose candle’s light, that I would think of him then.

Roman put his hands on the sides of my face, and the warmth of his palms felt so good it tore a scream from me. The sleeves of his jacket smelled like ash tree bark in summer. The hollow of his neck shared the same color and scent as agave nectar. I was all ice now, and the warmth of him was breaking me. He put his jacket around me, and the lining held so much of his heat that I thought it would splinter me into snowflakes.

He shook me to get me to look at him. “Stay with me, okay?”

His breath was hot against my mouth, and my lips stung with thawing. He put my arm around his shoulder and picked me up off the steps. My body was too numb to fight him or hold onto him. I was still dying, and though I felt the warmth of Roman’s chest against my cheek, I could still see the falling star.

He shook me gently. “Don’t fall asleep,” he said. “Look at me.”

I didn’t listen.

The last thing I felt out in the cold was the snowflakes melting from my eyelashes and slipping down my cheeks. After that it was the soft pain of my skin warming again, of his hands stripping away my clothes. I fought him then. I tried slapping him, but he only grabbed my hand and looked at it, front and back, like he thought I might be bleeding.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said.

I fought harder when I realized I was in his bed. The wood scent of his skin and the smell of that old leather were on the sheets.

“Your clothes are wet,” he said. “They’re gonna get you sick.” He pulled my blouse off hard enough that I sat up from the force, falling when my arms were free of the sleeves. He held
the small of my back to slow my fall. The tips of my breasts brushed against the quilt. He put a hand on my forehead and whispered something I couldn’t make out. His fingers shone with oil, and his hand smelled like wild blue sage.

He held my hand. I tried to pull it away.

He pinched the middle of my palm between his thumb and forefinger. “Do you want to lose half your hand or do you want me to help you?” he asked.

I stopped fighting. He cut a blade from a potted
áloe
and spread the wet inside over my fingers. The pain dulled at his touch. I must have talked in my sleep as he took me away from
la plaza
, because he knew to show me one of the rose candles. He pinched the blackened wick with his thumb and third finger. He drew his fingers up quickly, and the candle lit. I looked for a match hidden in his palm. There was nothing. He’d ignited it with his bare hand, but he looked neither surprised nor impressed with himself.

“How did you?” I asked.

Now he bowed his head to let his hair fall in his eyes. “It happened the first time when I was five,” he said. “I lit a candle but I didn’t mean to.” He winced in a way that told me someone had beaten him for it, thinking he’d been playing with matches. “It was always things that were supposed to be lit,” he said. “Candles. Lanterns. But my
bisabuela
taught me to control it.”

The light, orange-gold as a harvest moon, brought out the olive in his face as he set the rose candle on the table next to the bed.

“
Tiene un corazón solitario
,
pero usted no es el único
,” he said—
you have a lonely heart, but you’re not the only one
. It must have been something he had learned from his
bisabuela
, who had been kind to him, who had never beaten him for making fire between his fingers.

What a strange man, who lit candles without matches, who called the woman he had cared for most
bruja
.

He turned just enough for me to see a streak of dirt in the wound on his temple. Flecks of dried blood still clung to his lip. He had not taken the same care with his own body as he had taken with mine. I wondered how long the men in
la plaza
had kicked him and hit him before he and I drove them off with the twelve truths.

I brushed away a few flecks of blood, my thumb grazing his lower lip. “You’re hurt.”

“I’m all right,” he said.

I pulled his shirt off anyway. He let me. Bruises darkened his body, some already violet as blackberries. They shaded the contours of his chest and back. My
abuela
would have said that was good, that him bruising quickly meant he would heal quickly.

My hands were ice on his bruises. Each time I moved them, he winced at the cold, but then relaxed to feel it spread.

“
Las malvarrosas,
” he said, because he must have known I was wondering why he had been out in
la plaza
so late. “They grow wild in the hills on the other side of town, but I gotta get them at night, or they don’t keep.”

I’d seen them, the fluffy flowers that turned the hillsides red and gold and blush pink in springtime. I didn’t ask why he wanted them. Maybe their scent helped him sleep, or they were his
bisabuela
’s favorite.

His back was darker than his chest, the brown of a clay jar. His skin was so warm I thought a little of the sun must still be in it, that I could see it letting off light if I looked close enough. I kissed the darkest bruise on his back, just below his left shoulder blade. I’d meant it as kindness, more out of gratitude for him pulling me from the cold than out of desire for
the heat of his body, but I felt the flinch of his muscle under my mouth. He knew.

I did the same with his chest, kissing a patch of blue over his heart as though it would veil the longing. But I realized my hands were on his jeans, and wondered if the tensing in his thigh muscles was from that same desire or only because he could feel the chill of my palms through the fabric.

The inside of me spun hot as a new star, but my skin was still so cold I felt like I was cracking whenever I moved. I shuddered with the ache of coming back to life. It began below my collarbone and ended with a rush of warmth and wetness between my legs. With every new scent I picked up on him—the ash bark, the green herbs, the jacket he must have inherited from his father or uncle—I wanted him in that new way.

The feeling came back to my fingers like light across water. I kissed him hard enough that the breath at the back of his throat deepened to a low, quick groan. His mouth tasted like copper rock salt.

He pulled the quilt around my shoulders. “No,” he said. “
No ahora. No porque usted tiene frío
.”
Not now. Not because you’re cold.

“
No es porque tengo frío,
” I said. “
Es porque soy vivo
.”
Not because I’m cold. Because I’m alive.

It must have been enough of an answer, because he kissed me, one forearm under the small of my back. He pulled my panties off with the same urgency of tearing my wet clothes away. He unhooked my bra as if it were made of ice and it would kill me if it stayed on my skin.

The
áloe
had brought most of the sensation back to my fingers, but they were just numb enough that I struggled to unbutton his jeans. He was patient, even as he grew hard against my hands. I got his pants down around his knees and kicked them the rest
of the way off his legs. My hands found the warmth of his bare thighs and then strayed to his erection.

He didn’t thrust against my palm, but he moved a little toward me, letting me know he didn’t mind the cold. I couldn’t understand it, how any man would let a woman with so much cold in her fingers touch him where it could hurt him most. But maybe there was enough heat in his body that he liked it, his nerves responding to the sudden change. He got harder against my hand. When I offered my mouth to his, he took it.

The gash on his lip reopened from kissing. Without thinking, I tongued the trickle of blood. He startled. I stopped and gasped, afraid I’d stung him, but he breathed in with a soft noise that told me he liked it.

The heat of his body spread over me. I was a shimmer of cold sand, and he was the salt of a warm ocean, turning my million rough grains back into flesh. I cried out at the pleasure of it. He did not startle again, not until I opened my legs and guided him into me. He set his teeth like the feeling surprised him, like he’d never felt it before. I didn’t ask; it would’ve been cruel. I could see the desire in the tensing of his muscles, but there was something chaste in the agave green of his eyes. It made me think I should handle him gently. I couldn’t. I was still too cold. My fingers could not touch him delicately. They were too hungry for his warmth.

“It’s inside me,” I said.

“What is?” he asked.

“
El frío,
” I said.
The cold
.

He pushed deeper into me, reaching that last part that was iced over and armored in snowflakes. The same finger that had lit the candle touched me until I felt like a close star. He was all warmth and salt. I bit his shoulder, and even there he tasted like rock salt. I opened to take him in. The black of his eyes flinched
as the inside of me pulsed around him. The green darkened, and the last ice inside me shattered. He still looked kind, but not chaste. I still had the glisten of snowflakes on my skin, but there was no winter inside me.

When he came, it spread through me like hot amber, melting the part of me that still fought what his hands were doing to me. “Roman,” I said, calling for him like we were in darkness. I finished, and he held onto me tighter, like he was catching me. Coming down from the feeling of his touch made me dizzy, like falling into grass after spinning under the night sky, and I slept.

His arm was around my waist when I woke up. It wasn’t yet dawn, and snowflakes still spun outside the window. The glow of my
abuela
’s candle let me see the spice jars and potted plants along the wall of his bedroom. Agave and moonflower. Cayenne and blue lavender. The same plants that skilled women used to heal children with nightmares or fevers and men and women with
susto
. Roman went to the hillsides in the dark for
las malvarrosas
because he wanted them for his
remedios
.

“You are a
brujo,
” I said.

He slowly ran his fingers through my hair. “Sort of,” he said. “Apprentice
brujo
. For now I pay the bills with carpentry work.”

“Who do you apprentice to?” I asked. I didn’t know a
curandero
in town, man or woman.

“Nobody,” he said. “It was my
bisabuela,
but she died last year, so I’m figuring it out as I go.”

“That’s why you knew the twelve truths.”

“Since I was six,” he said. “I fought it for a while. Then I gave up. The
gringos
were calling me warlock, and the rest were saying
brujo
. I figured I’d better take it.”

I stroked my fingers along the side of his face. The constellations of freckles on his temple and the bridge of his nose seemed
as unlikely as the life flickering in my blood. “Last night,” I said. “How’d you know?”

“Something didn’t seem right,” he said. “So I came back.”

“You live here alone?” I asked.

“My
bisabuela
lived here.”

“You’re young,” I said. “To be a
curandero
.”

“She said I was ready, before she died. Sometimes I don’t know though.”

I kissed the bruising on his temple and on the side of his mouth.

“What were you doing out there?” he asked. It wasn’t a question I was meant to answer with my lips. He put his hand to my forehead, not so much reading my thoughts as feeling the shape of what I was willing to let him know. I’d heard of
curanderos
doing the same, but never one so young.

“Oh,” he said.

I didn’t meet his eyes.

“You could stay here,” he said.

“You don’t know me,” I said.

“You got those guys off me. That’s as much as I need to know.
Los corazónes solitarios
gotta stick together.” He got up from the bed and, one by one, lit my
abuela
’s candles by sliding each wick between his fingers. The whole room glowed rose-gold.

He lit the last of my
abuela
’s candles. I caught his hand and pulled him toward me, the heat of a falling star between us. He covered my body with his, so close I could watch the muscles in his back as I stroked that bluish bruise on his shoulder blade. I shivered when he took the most sensitive part of me between his thumb and his forefinger, nervous that it might turn to fire at his touch. He stroked it like a candle’s wick, and the pleasure spread so quickly it felt like embers on his fingertips.

I could have gone back to
la plaza
and waited for the cold to take me to my
abuela
. I could have gone to my mother’s and waited on her front porch. But I didn’t want any of it. I wanted nothing more than this man with the fire on his fingertips.

 

 

 

 

I
n the headquarters of Castle Jewelers, the young CEO sat, as usual, locked away from everyone in his high tower office. He glared at the email from the board of directors open on his computer and the corresponding appointment notice on his calendar and snarled out loud to himself as he turned his chair away and stood up. The CEO was a notorious figure among the employees who sat in the offices on the lower floors—his internal ugliness had become legendary, making his chosen reclusion in his office welcome among all who worked for him. The impeccability of his blue suit and expensive gold jewelry did nothing to hide the beastly disposition his workers had always seen in him.