Club Storyville (26 page)

“That’s hard to say,” she responded, reaching for the sheet and pulling it over me. “I don’t know how you feel. But it’s always different.” Watching her in the darkness, I could feel her slipping away, more mentally than physically. “We should try to get some sleep,” she said, and, dropping her head to kiss me, she bypassed my lips for my cheek, and I realized I wasn’t satisfied with her telling me when we were finished.

My hand sliding into Ariel’s hair to keep her from getting away from me, I seized her lips, finding when it most mattered, I too could be demanding. There was a small part of me that wanted to give orders and make Ariel follow them. Another part, though, a much bigger part, just wanted to make her feel the way she’d made me feel, to steal her breath and her ability to think, to leave something behind that would live inside her forever, no matter what came to pass when the night ended and the sun came up again.

Ariel’s tongue winding around mine, despite her declaration we should sleep, my hands found the fabric of her nightgown, easing it upward, and I tugged my lips reluctantly from hers when it stuck at her hips. Ariel’s thighs pale and strong as I cast a glare toward them, they distracted me from the task at hand, and, releasing the fabric for a moment, my hand curved around her exposed leg, delighting in the way her muscles responded to my touch.

As demanding as I’d discovered I could be, it turned out Ariel could be equally acquiescent. As I looked up to meet her eyes and tugged more insistently at her nightgown, she rose from the mattress to pull it over her head and fell back into place beside me.

Gaze sweeping down her body, I felt things I could never have imagined feeling just from looking at someone, and, fingers drawn to her skin, as if there was a magnetic pull between them, I felt immense satisfaction as it responded along the path of my touch, realizing there had been some truth when Ariel said she wanted me. Or at least truth that she wanted someone.

Emboldened each time she let me touch her, her arm, her chest, her stomach, I at last dragged my fingertips down Ariel’s side, sliding my finger into the waistband of her panties and glancing up at her face as I urged them off.

Though I could see the indecision in the instant before she chose to meet this last request, Ariel at last complied, rolling to her back to ease them over her hips and kick them toward the end of the bed.

I had never seen a naked woman before, not in real life, and, in that moment, I was thankful. As Ariel lay back in the moonlight, I could fathom no greater introduction to a woman’s beauty, and I wanted her to stay just like that, exposed and receptive to me.

Sliding closer as she tried to turn, my hand pressed against the center of her chest to keep her still as I molded against her side, gasping a desperate breath at the unexpected feel of our skin pressing together.

Touching her as she had touched me, my fingers softly finding her breasts, her nipples, my mouth exploring all the places my fingers had been, I realized I had the power to make Ariel sigh, to make her moan quietly beneath her breath, to make her reach for me, which felt like the greatest power I could ever possess.

Ariel trembled as I still trembled, she sighed when my lips pressed to her stomach, and jerked when my fingers found their way between her legs, exploring the velvet flesh there to find the spots that would make her moan and gasp.

“May I?” It felt unnaturally polite, but also like something one should ask, and when Ariel nodded her permission, I let my touch slide inside of her, watching her hair spill against the pillow as her head fell back. It was like being wrapped in a cocoon, warm and transformative.

By the way Ariel rocked into my touch, I was sure I was doing something right, but, her heady scent drifting up to me, I realized I wanted more. I had seen, heard, touched and inhaled every part of her, but I hadn’t tasted everything. It was my fantasy, but incomplete, and I wanted all I had ever dreamed.

Pressing a kiss to her hip, I heard Ariel’s sharp intake of breath as I pulled my hand away, wondering if I could figure out what I was doing as I went along.

“Elizabeth,” Ariel’s hand on my shoulder stopped me when she realized my intention, and I looked to her through eyes glassy with a primal craving that superseded fear or doubt. “You don’t have to,” she said softly.

“I want to,” I told her, and I wondered if I would have to tell her how much, how often I had thought about it, how many times I had tasted her in my mind.

It seemed to be Ariel’s greatest concern, what I wanted. Her fingers turning softer on my shoulder, they guided me over her, and her leg fell open to let me in. Breathing in the scent, she was like wine and citrus and nothing I had smelled before, and sticking my tongue out to taste, before fear or unwelcome voices could find their way in, I found she tasted something like wine too, tangy, and less sweet than I expected.

Then, beneath the layers of perfectly-hemmed Sunday dresses and mild manners and carefully chosen words, most women were.

The more I tasted Ariel, the more I wanted to taste her, and the more she gasped and whimpered above me, the more I wanted to please her.

“You taste like Heaven.” It might have been a silly thing to say as I pulled away to catch my breath, but it was true. Smile flitting across my face as Ariel opened her eyes, I watched her lips part, her skin paler than usual without the powder and rouge she put on to cover it, more perfect than ever. “But I have no idea what I’m doing,” I admitted, and it felt so good to laugh at myself, at my floundering inexperience that wanted so much to give her pleasure, but didn’t know how.

When Ariel laughed too, her body shaking beneath me, I was glad we could still be normal with each other, what normal had become between us, at least. Though it changed a lot, what we were doing didn’t have to change everything.

Ariel’s hand moving to my cheek, her eyes softened on me, and I loved her so much in that moment, I was sure my heart would burst from the sheer expansiveness of what I felt.

“You’re doing fine,” she said, and it was all the encouragement I needed to keep trying, to lower my head and revel in her taste, to flick my tongue over her soft, willing flesh.

When I felt Ariel’s body grow tense beneath me, though, her hand grew tighter on my shoulder, her acquiescence coming to an abrupt and forceful end as she pulled me upward and I felt her lips against mine.

Her hand guiding me, it pressed my hand between her legs, encouraging my fingers back inside of her, and I felt strangely powerful when Ariel moaned as they entered her.

“Like that,” Ariel pulled away on a gasp, her head falling back. “Just like that.”

It wasn’t just like that, though. The deeper I was willing to go into her, I discovered, the more Ariel opened to me, the tighter she held me, the richer her breaths became where they poured from her lips.

She could conduct me, and I was certainly in need of conducting, but, in the end, I was the one who got to play the notes. That’s why it was always different, I realized. It didn’t matter how proficient or deficient one was at the start, it mattered only how much two people wanted to make a piece right, how in tune they were with each other. When it came to the world’s most exquisite beauty, it was always collaboration.

Chapter Twenty-Four

O
ut of a night of such horrors, I never could have imagined such a happy waking, but it was the happiness that came first, before any other feelings had the chance, crashing over me in a wave of sensation and memory of the last hours before I fell asleep. As I shifted, I could feel the ache in secret places throughout my body, and it only made the sensation more acute, reminding me not every way in which I had been profoundly changed in the night was bad, and making me turn to look for Ariel with the secret hope we might continue my lessons by daylight.

Finding the room empty, I could tell it was late by the way the sun reached in through the window, but I only stretched against the sheets, not worrying until Ariel’s absence went on and on without any sign of her imminent return.

At last sitting up, I inspected the space, comforted by her things where she had left them, and was about to get out of the bed and go in search when the door opened and Ariel came in, fully-dressed for the day as if she'd been awake for hours.

“Good, you're up,” she glanced to me, shutting the door quickly when she realized I had only the sheet for cover and hadn’t put forth a particularly dedicated effort in using it. “We need to get moving.”

“Why?” I asked, watching her hasten to her suitcase stored against the wall with an inkling of concern. “Where are we going?”

“Home,” Ariel responded, scarcely looking at me as she pulled the suitcase from the floor, and the satisfied feeling with which I’d woken was aggressively shaken.

“Already?” I asked. It didn’t occur to me there was some humor in the question when I had been the one so hesitant to come in the first place, and so anxious to leave the first night, until Ariel glanced back with a look that was slightly bemused, before it turned all business again.

“We did what your grandmother asked us to do,” she reminded me. “We found Desmond Caster, or a Desmond Caster at least. If we hurry, we’ll have enough time to stop by there if you want to give him the box, and…” At her pause, I could see her giving her words careful consideration. “To check on him before we go to the station.”

Pulling her clothes from the dresser drawer she had made her own, Ariel tucked them into her suitcase in perfect order, and I felt as if my memories of the night weren’t real, as if, in my heightened emotional state, I had imagined something that took the sting out of reality. Searching the room for proof, my state of undress was the only indication the night wasn’t just part of my dreams, as it had been so many times before, and, suddenly uncomfortable, I tucked the sheet more sufficiently around me.

“Okay,” I weakly uttered, not knowing how we had reverted so quickly from me being naked under the sheet to just barely conversing, and, stopping in her bustle to gather her belongings, Ariel stared into her suitcase for so long I thought she might have frozen that way, before she looked to me again, swallowing thickly as she held my gaze.

“I thought you would want to get back to Nan.” Her voice was softer, less brusque, and, at the reminder there actually was a reason to rush, I tried to push aside the feeling that Ariel was attempting to escape what had happened between us.

“Yes. Of course,” I said. Though I meant it, the part of me that knew things would have to change again, that whatever freedom we had found in the underground world of Club Storyville and in the privacy of our room at Buddy’s couldn’t return with us to Richmond, wanted to stay right where I was forever.

“She’ll want to see you,” Ariel declared, and it was enough to get me out of bed, despite my nudity and Ariel’s strange behavior.

Or, perhaps, Ariel’s behavior wasn’t strange. Perhaps, this was what a day was like with her after a night in which she had been so open and willing and giving. I didn’t know what else I was expecting. Or why I thought, after everything we had done, she would at least kiss me good morning.

W
ith the hours Ariel let me sleep in and our train scheduled for afternoon, there wasn’t time for a long goodbye at Buddy’s.

“It was nice having you ladies here,” he said to us, and it sounded sincere, despite all the inconvenience and worry our presence had to have caused him. “I hate to see you go.”

“Well, there is certainly no place I would rather have stayed,” Ariel returned, and I nodded my agreement, realizing, after the night we had been through, coming back to Buddy’s brought solace I doubted we would have found anywhere else.

“Thank you so much for your hospitality.”

“That is my business,” Buddy grinned at me, but we all knew it was more than that. The boarding house wasn’t just business for Buddy. It was a way of being, the tiny light he shone into the world to make it just a little less scary for weary travelers.

“Ronald and Marcus,” Ariel said suddenly, and I shivered at the realization I had forgotten about them, the two men who had been staying next door to us at Buddy’s, who had shared breakfast with us, last seen in Desmond’s club before the police closed in. “Have you seen them this morning?” Ariel was careful in her questioning. “I was hoping to tell them goodbye.”

“No,” Buddy seemed to just notice their absence himself. “Sure haven’t. Must still be in bed, or maybe they left early when I was away from the desk. No tellin’.”

Buddy didn’t know it, but he was right. There was no telling what happened to Ronald and Marcus, or anyone I saw dragged from the courtyard, it occurred to me, and I put my hand on my stomach to try to calm the sudden upsurge within it.

“When you see them,” Ariel said, which I took comfort to mean she expected them to at least make it back at some point. “Would you tell them I said ‘Good luck’ and to be safe?”

“Yeah, of course.” Not recognizing the importance in Ariel’s request, Buddy grinned again. “I’m sure they’d wish the same for you.”

“Yes,” Ariel breathed. “I imagine they would.”

The words had no power against weapons, I knew. They couldn’t protect Ronald and Marcus, or Ariel, from the terrible things that might happen in those few places in which they were free to be themselves. The places in which
we
were free to be
ourselves
. I wondered if there were any that could, ancient, supernatural blessings stronger than steel.

Then, I remembered the chaos and screams and the man beaten right beside us. If there were any words with such power, that man, and a lot of other people, must have prayed them. And from what I could see, their prayers were about as effective as an imaginary wall against a cannon’s blast.

B
efore Ariel’s mention of Ronald and Marcus, I hadn’t thought about what to fear as I knocked on Desmond’s front door. Standing there, though, waiting for someone to answer, I wondered where he had ended up, if he was in jail or worse off, either way too incapacitated to get back home in the night.