He grabs my shoulders, holds me away from him. He does not look at my body, only at my eyes. “Pink cakes, Mac. Tell me about pink cakes.”
“I don’t give a rat’s petunia about pink cakes!” I shout. I want him to look at my body. I am confused. I am afraid. “I don’t even know what a rat’s petunia is!”
“Your mother didn’t like you and your sister to cuss. ‘Petunia’ is the word you say instead of saying ‘ass,’ Mac.”
“I do not know that word, ‘sister,’ either!” I lie. I hate the word.
“Oh, yes, you do. She was your world. She was killed. And she needs you to fight for her. She needs you to come back. Come back and fight, Mac. Bloody hell, fight! If you’d just fight like you fuck, you’d’ve walked out of this room the day I carried you in!”
“I do not want to walk out of this room! I like this room!” I will show him fight. I launch myself at him, a volley of fists and teeth and nails.
I am ineffectual. He is as obdurate as a mountain.
He prevents me from damaging him or myself. We stumble and fall to the floor. Abruptly I am no longer angry.
I sprawl on top of him. I hurt inside my chest. I kick off my shoes.
I drop my head in the hollow where his shoulder meets his neck. We are still. His arms are around me, strong, certain, safe. “I miss her,” I say. “I do not know how to live without her. There is a hole inside me that nothing fills.” There is something else inside me, too, besides that hole. Something so awful that I will not look at it. I am weary. I do not want to feel anymore. No pain, no loss, no failure. Only the colors of black and red. Death, silence, lust, power. Those things give me peace.
“I understand.”
I draw back and look at him. His eyes are deep with shadows. I know those shadows. He does understand. “Then why do you push me?”
“Because if you don’t find something to fill that hole, Mac, someone else will. And if someone else fills it, they own you. Forever. You’ll never get yourself back.”
“You are a confusing man.”
“What’s this?” He smiles faintly. “I am a man now? I am no longer a beast?”
It is all I have called him until now. My lover, my beast.
But I have found another new word: “man.” I look at him. His face seems to shimmer and change, and for a moment he is shockingly familiar, as if I have known him somewhere before here and now. I touch him, trace his arrogant, handsome features slowly. He turns his face into my palm, kisses it. I see shapes behind him. Books and shelves and cases of trinkets.
I gasp.
His hands close tight on my waist, hurting me. “What? What did you see?”
“You. Books. Lots of them. You … I … know you. You are …” I trail off. A sign creaking on a pole in the wind. Amber sconces. A fireplace. Rain. Eternal rain. A bell rings. I like the sound. I shake my head. There was no such place or time. I shake my head harder.
He surprises me. He does not push me with words I do not like to hear. He does not shout at me or call me Mac or insist I talk more.
In fact, when I open my mouth to speak again, he kisses me, hard.
He shuts me up with his tongue, deep.
He kisses me until I cannot speak or even breathe, until I do not even care if I ever breathe again. Until I have forgotten that for a moment he was not a beast but a man. Until the images that so disturbed me are singed to ash by the heat of our lust and gone.
He carries me to the bed and tosses me on it. I feel anger in his body, although I do not know why.
I stretch my naked body on the sleek silk, luxuriating in sensation, in the sure knowledge of what is to come. Of what he is about to do. Of what he makes me feel.
He stares down at me. “See how you look at me. Fuck. I understand why they do it.”
“Who does what?”
“The Fae. Turn women Pri-ya.”
I do not like those words. They terrify me. I am lust. He is my world. I tell him so.
He laughs, and his eyes glitter like night sky pierced by a million stars. “What am I, Mac?” He pours his sleek, powerful body over mine, laces our fingers together, and stretches my hands above my head.
“You are my world.”
“And what do you want from me? Say my name.”
“I want you inside me, Jericho. Now.”
Our sex is savage, as if we are punishing each other. I feel something changing. In me. In him. In this room. I do not like it. I try to stop it with my body, drive it back. I do not look at this room in which we exist. I do not let my mind wander beyond the walls. I am here and he is, too, most of the time, and that is enough.
Later, when I am drifting like a balloon, in that happy, free place that is the twilight sky before dreams, I hear him take a deep breath as if he is about to speak.
He releases it.
Curses.
Takes another breath but says nothing again.
He grunts and punches his pillow. He is divided, this strange man, as if he both wants to speak and wants not to.
Finally, he says tightly, “What did you wear to your senior prom, Mac?”
“Pink dress,” I mumble. “Tiffany bought the same one. Totally ruined my prom. But my shoes were Betsey Johnson. Hers were Stuart Weitzman. My shoes were better.” I laugh. It is the sound of someone I do not recognize, young and without care. It is the laugh of a woman who knows no pain, never did. I wish I knew her.
He touches my face.
There is something different in his touch. It feels like he’s saying good-bye, and I know a moment of panic. But my dream sky darkens and sleep’s moon fills the horizon.
“Don’t leave me.” I thrash in the sheets.
“I’m not, Mac.”
I know I am dreaming then, because dreams are home to the absurd and what he says next is beyond absurd.
“You’re leaving me, Rainbow Girl.”
We’re “Tubthumping” again. He makes me dance around the room, shouting: I get knocked down but I get up again. You’re never gonna keep me down.
He dances with me. We shout the lyrics at each other. Something about seeing this man, this big, sexual, powerful—and, some part of me knows, highly dangerous and unpredictable—man, dancing nude, shouting that he’s never going to be kept down, completely undoes me.
I feel as if I am seeing something forbidden. I know without knowing how I know that the circumstances under which he would behave in such a fashion are incalculably few.