Again (3 page)

I
n the offices of Gaines, Carvelli and Debbs, a small architectural firm located on the fourteenth floor of a North Michigan high-rise, a stray thought caused David Carvelli’s hand to pause midair as he reached for the plans on his desk. An impression of skin, cinnamon-touched silk, ran through his mind for an instant. He shook the image away. Tried hard to concentrate on the schematics before him.

Still, he had to fight to keep his mind from wandering back to the dreams, much as it had been doing these last couple of months. They were threatening to subsume everything in his life, including his work, and he couldn’t afford to let that happen. Especially not now with the Kershner deal at stake. He and his partners needed this account to keep the firm afloat.

After a few minutes of checking the digital designs, he placed them back on the desk with a sigh. Another flash, this time just a breath of a remembered scent, took him out of the moment. The dreams again. It always came back to them.

Dreams he had trouble remembering upon waking. Images that left his mouth dry, his pulse racing. But in the midst of the fear, he kept reaching out to someone, trying to touch her. Sometimes he did touch her. But the dreams only left him with vague impressions. Nothing ever substantial.

At times, he had awakened to find his hand stroking his penis, the member fully engorged. He’d been aware of a lingering memory of perfume hanging in the dark. Several nights in a row, he’d had to masturbate just to relieve the tension, to slow the blood pounding in his head.

Nothing had plagued him this much, not since when he was a child, just after…

He tried to cut off the thought he had carelessly summoned. But the memory came flooding back, as though he were eleven years old again standing alongside Terry, his best friend, as both waited in hushed excitement for David to set fire to the spider. David hadn’t wanted to but Terry had egged him on, dared him…

“C’mon, chicken! Go on, do it!” Terry’s red hair seemed to mark his fascination with anything incendiary.

David stiffened at the taunt. He wasn’t chicken! What was the big deal anyway? Just set the damn thing on fire, watch it burn. That’s all he had to do.

He struck the red ball of the match to the sandpaper strip along the side of the carton. A flame shot up accompanied by the familiar acrid smell. Flickering red and gold light reflected and refracted in two pairs of eager eyes as the boys stood enthralled by the tiny bit of devastation they held. They were ready to watch it take hold of the black widow that had set up residence in the storage room off the kitchen. Liquid black with a spot of orange on its underside, the creature was beautiful in a horrific way. At least to a pair of mischievous boys. David would have liked just to observe the spider in its kingdom, observe it in its predatory glory.

But Terry wanted to see skin, muscle, legs, eyes engulfed in a red blaze, to see the last instinct of his prey chase itself in an attempt to run away from the sizzling pain, to see the body draw up and eventually shrivel in a smoldering mass.

David watched the flame ride down the match. He waited to feel the heat of the advancing flame on his finger.

“C’mon,” Terry urged, probably worried that Mrs. Carvelli would come into the anteroom any moment and catch them in flagrante, so to speak. He shook David’s arm. The sudden motion made David drop the small torch onto a pile of rags just beneath the ledge where the spider hovered. The pieces of cloth had cleaning solution embedded in their fibers and the small flame licked hungrily at the pile, began consuming it.

Terry, always the self-preservationist, ran from the room without a thought of the trouble he had instigated. David stayed for a heroic few seconds and tried to stamp out the fire, but couldn’t. The flames raced along the lower wooden paneling of the room, then latched on to some old cartons in the corner. The crackling grew louder, and smoke began filling the small room, making it hard to breathe. David gave up and ran, fear knocking all thought from his head. For years, he would wonder what would have happened if he’d kept his wits—if he’d remembered the pail in the cabinet beneath the sink, filled it with water and thrown it on the growing flames. He might have extinguished the fire and saved his mother’s house. Instead he had followed Terry out the back door, hoping with a child’s irrational hope that the problem would right itself on its own, that the fire tearing at the walls of the small room would go no farther…

But it had.

As far as his mother was concerned, a candle fell over and burned down the Victorian house in which her mother had been born and later left to her. The house that once stood proudly on the edge of Old Town was long gone. All because of a stupid accident. Worse still, the guilt of a child who couldn’t trust his mother to forgive him had stilled his tongue even into his adult years. He accepted the fact that he would never tell his mother, and that, at least on this one thing, he was a coward.

The phone rang, breaking through his reminiscing, momentarily pushing back the guilt. He picked up.

“David Carvelli here.”

“Hey Dave,” Rick’s excited voice came over the line. “Great news. I just talked to Kershner, and he’s willing to sit down with us tomorrow at four. So make sure the specs are ready. Dave…Dave? You there?”

Dave heard the voice from a distance, as though it was being filtered through a tunnel.

“I’m here. I was just checking something,” he said. “Four o’clock is fine. The specs will be done by then. Will Clarence be there?”

“No. It’s just us for right now. Just make sure you have the designs ready for Kershner to look at.” Rick’s voice still sounded far away.

“We’ll be ready. We got this.” He managed to sound confident, but his stomach fluttered, and not with anticipation.

After he hung up the phone, he contemplated the evening ahead.

He needed to get a good night’s sleep to be on his game.

If only those damned dreams would just stop.

Thing was, part of him really didn’t want them to go away. He didn’t want her to go away.

Tyne started the evening with a scented bath. Vanilla Bean by Yardley. She placed lit candles along the edge of the tub. Their flickering lights set a tranquil mood. Gerald Albright’s “I Need You” flowed from the CD player, the seductive strains of his smooth sax filling the small bathroom.

Soaking in the hot water, Tyne turned her mind to family matters, putting aside for the moment the need and fear of sleep. April’s wedding was coming up in less than a month, and she had to go to yet another fitting, which was always a pain. Being the maid of honor—as well as the oldest—hardly inured her to the tittering and mania of the younger bridesmaids, most of whom hadn’t even hit the quarter mark yet. All the primping, posturing and posing got on her nerves. She noticed their eyes reflected in the mirrors when they looked at themselves and knew with a time-earned intuition that they saw princess lace instead of the shimmering lime satin of the bridesmaid dresses they actually wore. In their minds, they walked down an imaginary aisle to meet a dark, handsome stranger named Rashad, Keith, or maybe Jamal waiting in dreadlocked splendor at the end.

Perhaps she’d had that look a long time ago, but not now. Maybe never again. It vanished along with her once indefatigable hope that she would be settled down by thirty, already into a routine of divvied house responsibilities, with him making romantic meals—her own cooking was ptomaine lousy—and her doing the laundry and cleaning of their large, airy loft. Maybe there would be one or two kids, maybe one of each, a girl and a boy.

That had been her wholehearted plan by twenty-five, twenty-six. By twenty-nine, those plans had become halfhearted, and she decided to concentrate on pushing her career forward. But even that failed to go the way she planned. She had graduated from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism with grandiose plans of working on a large Chicago paper, hopefully the
Tribune
. But several community papers later, she’d only managed to move down a notch. The market was tight right now, and though she might have gotten better opportunities in a smaller market in a smaller town, she didn’t want to leave Chicago, where her family lived—her mother, her sisters April and Tanya, and brother, Tyrone. She just thanked providence for the paycheck—however long that lasted. Next month might see her in the unemployment line.

Another thing to be glad for was April. The family had come close to losing her last spring. Trying to get out of an abusive relationship, April had barely survived the bullet her boyfriend Kendrick fired into her chest after taking her hostage in her downtown office. After shooting her, the fool turned his gun on himself, thankfully.

April had once been single-minded in her pursuit of lowlifes. When anyone asked, she used to say that she liked a little thug in her men, real or not. She’d been contemptuous and casual—and maybe a little guilt-ridden—about her middle-class upbringing, often acting out. It had taken a .38-magnum bullet blowing her chest open to finally blow some sense into her head. When she recovered—after five hours of surgery and nearly a month in the hospital—Donell was waiting for her as he had been waiting for nearly eight years. Donell and April had gone to high school together. Bespeckled and soft-spoken, Tyne knew he was hardly April’s initial idea of the man she wanted to wake up to every morning. Too sturdy, too dull, April used to say. Thank God, she’d changed her mind, realizing in time that love might hurt you on occasion, but it wasn’t supposed to kill you.

Tyne stood up in the tub, water dripping, suds clinging, and caught her image in the full-length mirror hanging on the door. She studied herself to see what a stranger would see. All the self-love books she had ever read stated that love begins with acceptance of all of one’s self, including the physical faults. So she guessed she should accept the slight saddlebags of her hips and the scar that ran along her arm—a souvenir of a bad motorcycle fall; her mother had made sure her father locked up his Harley after that. She looked at her breasts, the way they curved upward, and appreciated that gravity hadn’t gotten to them yet. As for her behind, it was nicely rounded like some men seemed to appreciate. Her waist, although not small, was in proportion to her hips and chest. All in all, she had a more than passable body.

But she was a sister who didn’t take booty calls, so her nights were solitary. There had been a few boyfriends in the past, but those relationships had been merely fillers; she had known at the onset she wouldn’t marry any of them. Put off by the strain of her last thing with Raymond, she’d been celibate for a couple of years and was used to waking up alone. That seemed to be her fate; so be it. She cared, but she wasn’t going to languish waiting for someone to come and fill her life, her bed. There were other ways to satisfy herself.

Still, the loneliness seemed to be manifesting itself in these strange dreams. Maybe Gail was right; she needed to get laid. Maybe the dreams would go away if she worked off some of her tension.

Tyne stepped out of the bath and toweled herself off, trying not to think of the many times she had orgasmed these last nights. It wasn’t normal, having dreams so vivid, so sensual, they made you come and come hard. Dreams so vivid, they frightened you. How could she desire something, or someone, that frightened her, that made her tremble with yearning and fear? More frightening was the knife that had begun appearing in the dreams lately.

She put on her nightgown and walked to the bedroom. She opened the curtains to let in the illumination from the streetlights below and a bright quarter moon above. Total darkness was no longer a comfort. She popped open the tranquility sound machine she’d purchased on the way home and flipped in the tape labeled “Rain Forest.” The soothing rhythm of a light rainfall filled the room. As her head settled into the pillow and her eyes closed, she envisioned herself standing alone under the dripping fronds of lush, tropical trees, felt the warm rain spray on her body, enter her pores, open her up. She was falling, falling…

The dinner table was gone. It was just him now. She felt herself opening up to him, her resistance giving way. First one, then two, three fingers eased inside her, then moved up her wet canal while a fourth lightly stroked her clitoris, sending spasms through her body. Her vibrating walls sucked the fingers deeper into her eager crotch, and she began bucking against them, working her body to their rhythm. Lips touched her nipple, then a tongue began tracing the sensitive orb, circling it slowly, keeping time with the fingers moving in, out, in, out. A scent of male musk hovered in the air, mixed with the scent of her excitement…

He smelled her scent, bent down to taste her wetness, felt her hips rise, pushing her moist, sex-scented lips against his eager tongue, felt her moving in time with his rhythm.

His tongue moved inside her, teasing her walls, tasting her cream, his lips pumping against her vulva. He heard her moan and it filled him. But just beneath the current of her longing, he felt her resistance, her dishonor. She didn’t want to love him, yet she yielded to him with her softness, her wetness. When she moaned again, it signaled submission, not desire. But he refused to hear her tears…

David stirred awake at the sound, found his left hand stroking his balls. He felt embarrassed and disgusted. His writhing had caused the sheets to half fall off the bed.

He sat up dazed. Tried to remember. He had more than a slight impression of a woman beneath him, accepting him with desire—and shame.

A scent lingered in the air, a mixture of perfume and sex. He remembered the fleeting image of shimmering green. He had heard a soft, throaty sound, but couldn’t remember if it had been hers or his own.

Somewhere in the distance, he had heard someone say, “We’re going to be together forever,” the voice strangled with desire and anger—and realized that it was his own voice he heard.