Lustfully Ever After (4 page)

When I shattered around the hot bloom of his release.

And after that, nothing was the same.

First it was one night a week and then two. And then it was more. There were dates and dinners, and I while I never stopped looking for warts or for danger in his choice of what to eat, I let myself enjoy his company. I particularly enjoyed his bed.

Sitting in the middle of it one night, naked and slick, sated from our lovemaking, I waited for him. He came to me with a tray full of cheese and wine and bread. Breaking the loaf, he pressed a piece against my swollen lips. I took it in, but as I did, I remembered how I always used to feed myself. I wondered how the cobwebs in my apartment were doing.

“Come on, love,” he said, a wicked smile upon his face. “Eat up, now. You know you’ll need your strength.”

As I chewed and swallowed, I thought of all the times that he had told me I was beautiful, a low hint of caution tingling in my spine. The feeling only grew as we ate. His hands were at my
face so many times, touching and stroking and placing morsels on my tongue. I accepted it all. The food. The affection that was so warm it hurt my heart.

The praise.

We made love with the lights out, tumbling roughly. Swift strokes in and out, and his fingers in my mouth, my teeth restrained as I came and came and came.

Afterward, he curled himself around my body with a hand against my abdomen. Through the hum of his sleeping breath, I imagined he wanted it to grow.

My earlier uncertainty resurged. With my hand over his, I pulled his arm away from me, slipping out from underneath him to stand beside his bed. I saw my own reflection in the mirror and tried to see if I was fuller in my figure, or if it was just inside my mind.

I
felt
fuller. Like I was more than I had been.

I remembered that he could just be fattening me up. The way he fed my belly and my heart, I would be ripe for the slaughter. And he had so much power now. In just his words, he had all he needed to make me bleed.

He was still sleeping as I pulled my clothes back on. I didn’t say good-bye, and I didn’t leave a note.

But when I stepped outside, I found that all the crumbs I’d left were gone. Somehow, in the intervening months, they had gone to seed, and the sidewalks bloomed with the flowers of my previous hesitancy, a brilliant rainbow of poppies. I could have followed them. I knew where they would lead me.

Instead, I picked a small bouquet of blooms and went inside. Most of them I left in a little plastic cup, filled with water to keep them alive. But one I took to bed with me.

For half the night, I trailed its scarlet head across my lover’s skin, relearning the shape of him and opening my mind to
hoping for more from him.

The next day, I followed the path of poppies to my old apartment, and I packed a box. One by one, I moved my things into his space. I never told him. Still, he knew.

For a week, the poppies sat there on our kitchen table, beautiful and colorful and new. When they started to wilt, I kept them fresh, heading out into the field that now covered the walk and gathering another bundle of blooms. They reminded me that I could always find my way back to my own lonely bed.

And that, in retrospect, the path that I had taken to the one I slept in now was beautiful.

A few days later, I came home from work to find our apartment hot and sweltering, the drywall dripping. As the heat overtook me, I leaned against the wall beside the door.

When I pulled my hand away, it was covered in sticky-sweet.

Stepping forward, I called his name, and he called back. I found him in the kitchen, hovering over the oven. Through the window, I could see the orange lines of flames.

In the corner, the poppies were wilting.

With a smile, he turned toward me. “You’re just in time.”

All my old uncertainties told me I should flee. His face was still clean, no hints of warts or green, but surely this was enough of a sign.

I wanted to trust him, though. God, but I wanted to.

“Just in time for what?”

“For this.”

And then he threw the oven wide.

I jumped back, my skin raw, like it was blistering. He was bent over, his arms reaching, and in the flames behind his body, I saw my opportunity.

My thoughts screamed,
Save yourself!

But I couldn’t harm him without harming myself.

A second later, it was all rendered moot as he turned back around. His smile was just as devilish as I had always feared. And it was even more beautiful than that.

But he didn’t push me in. He didn’t burn me.

Instead, he swung the oven closed, and when I looked again, his arms were full of bread. What I’d mistaken for a leer was just a grin.

“Come on,” he said, reaching over to kiss me. “It’s cooler in the bedroom.” As we walked, he told me how the oven had been malfunctioning, but how he’d persevered.

“Wait,” I begged. “You did all this.…You almost roasted yourself because you wanted to feed me?”

“What can I say?” With his eyes soft, his hand on my cheek, he explained, “I love you.”

So many times, I’d thought of love as a forest one walked in alone. It was dangerous and frighteningly dark.

How could I have known that it was also warm and bright? That it could smell of bread and poppies.

“Take off your clothes and lie down.”

I followed his instructions with brimming eyes, my own assurances of love hanging silent on my lips. He didn’t let them spill out. Instead he pressed a bit of crust into my mouth.

I ate it happily.

Spread out on the bed the way he’d asked of me, I lay there and waited for him to join me. Instead, he stood there at the edge, tearing off pieces of bread. “What are you—”

“Shh.”

One by one, he laid the pieces on my body. A lump on my shoulder and another on my breast, all of them leading to the very center of me. So tenderly, he tore a final chunk and placed it on my mound. Sitting back, he licked his lips.

Taking care to keep still, I look down at the trail he’d left
across my skin, and then I asked, again, “What are you doing?”

His mouth and eyes were shining as he stared down at me, slowly bending down to kiss me. With one fingertip, he traced the bread crumb line from my throat to my heart and to my sex. He followed it with his lips.

At the juncture of my legs, he paused to look up at me.

“I’m making sure I can find my way home.”

 

 

 

 

 

O
n the night of my eighteenth birthday, my mother’s boyfriend handed me a box of candles and locked me out of the house. He said if I sold them all I could come back the next morning.

They had belonged to his mother, who’d taught me to make dolls from yarn and cornhusks and let me call her my
abuela
even though we were not related. The deep red wax let off the perfume of rose oil as I walked to
la plaza
. It was empty this time of night, the men home or drunk at the
tavernas,
the women asleep or waiting. The church was dark, the water in the fountain still, and the cobblestones shone from the last rain.

A few men stood at the opposite side of the
plaza
. I wasn’t afraid. The men in this town were too lazy to do anything but call out, “Wanna take me to church,
santa guapa?
” But one of them kicked at something on the ground. Another bent down and hit it with the side of his fist. When I got closer, I heard them saying the same thing over and over.
Chucho
. Mutt. I wondered
if they were beating a young coyote or a runt mule.

I knocked my heel against the stone of the fountain. “Leave it alone.”

They shuffled enough that I could see between their legs. Not an injured coyote, but a young man lay curled on his side. He couldn’t have been much older than I was. His hair was as dark as mine, but his skin was lighter, like the inner peels of birch bark. Just the rings of his irises showed around the blacks of his eyes. They were green as an agave frond. That was what they had meant by calling him
chucho
. He was half-dark, like me, like the men who were beating him, but the rest of him was pale. I wondered which of his parents had been which.

He lifted his head a little when he saw me. Blood shone on his lip and temple. He still had a watch on. I doubted they had taken his wallet. For them, it was about the fun of it, not what he had on him. If it was, they would’ve picked a man with a better watch.

“
Princesa
likes
los chuchos?
” asked one of the standing men.

I struck a match, lit one of the candles, and held it out, a sheet of light between them and me. The two men holding the young man down did not let him go. I remembered the prayer my
abuela
had taught me,
De las doce verdades del mundo.
The twelve truths of the world. I said the first truth,
la Casa Santa—
the Lord’s house.

The two men holding the young man took their hands from him and stood up. They each took a slow step back, as though I clutched a handful of cursed rock salt over their mothers’ graves and was slowly opening my fingers.

I held the candle just in front of me so they could see my face. I said the second truth,
dos Tablas de Moisés—
two tablets of Moses—and the third,
tres Trinidades—
three trinities. The man on the ground began to move his lips, first silently, and
then his mouth slowly gave the words sound. He knew the prayer, and said it with me.
Cuatro Evangelios
—four gospels.

The men startled to hear him speak.
Cinco llagas—
five wounds. The men backed away like tadpoles scattering from a firefly’s light.
Seis candeleros—
six candles. The men left
la plaza
and vanished into the dark.

The man on the ground mouthed the rest of the prayer, eyes closed. I thought he might have been too hurt to move, but then he crossed himself.

“Can you get up?” I asked.

He did, wincing a little. He had on jeans, and a leather jacket that was cracked and worn enough that it must have been at least a generation old. He was too clean to be homeless. His jeans had the soft look of being worked in all day, but there were no stains except new ones from his blood and the wet ground.

“Are you a
bruja?
” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Are you?”

“My
bisabuela
was,” he said. “A
curandera
, I mean.”

He must have had a young
bisabuela
; my great-grandmothers had all died years before I was born. I didn’t know why he used the word
bruja
at all if his great-grandmother had been a
curandera
.
Bruja
—witch—was a word used by those who feared the women who healed with herbs from midnight gardens.

He tossed his head to clear his hair from his forehead. He had a browbone and a mouth like other brown men, but the
gringo
in him showed up in the shape of his nose and in those eyes. Even in the dark, with the shadow of his hair as it fell back over his forehead, his eyes were green as a tree’s first sprouts. He was that strange kind of handsome that only
chuchos
were, freckles on brown skin, green eyes, and hair dark as a river at night.

“My name’s Roman,” he said, and he stood there looking at me.

“Are you stupid?”

He shook his head.

“You gonna wait around here for them to come back?” I asked.

He shook his head again, slower this time, and put his hands in his pockets to leave. He looked over his shoulder and said, “Thank you,” no trace of an accent. It made me wonder if he was all
gringo,
and the men had made a mistake.

He tried locking eyes with me. I blew the candle out so he couldn’t see my face.

When I couldn’t see his shape anymore, I huddled into a corner of the church steps with the box of candles. There was no one to buy them at this time of night, not unless I walked down to the bars, and those weren’t the kind of men who cared for
las rosas de la virgen
.

I wished I had my heavier coat. My fingers were red with the cold, and the tips of my breasts grew hard enough to spread pain through my upper body. The smell of winter, of ice crystals and frozen earth, spun through the air. I relit the candle. It was already ruined for selling; no one would buy a black wick. Seeing the light turn gold and amber on the cobblestones warmed me more than that small flame.

A tear slipped from the inner corner of my eye. I gasped to fight it, but it slid easily down my cheek. I pulled my knees into me, shielding the candles. Wind brushed the back of my neck, and as I fell asleep I imagined it was my
abuela
stroking my hair. In those last few moments before I slept, I thought I saw her in the light on the still fountain water, laughing and kneading dough with the heels of her hands.

I woke up to snowflakes spinning in the dark, each catching the moon through the clouds. A light layer of snow stuck to the cobblestones in the
plaza
. I would have found it beautiful
if I hadn’t been so cold. I shivered off the dusting on my shoulders and lap. My body was stiff. I felt as brittle as new ice. The candle had gone out; the wick was damp and dotted with snowflakes. It would not light again, no matter how many matches I spent on it.

The feeling went out of the tips of my fingers. Lighting another candle, one with a dry, new wick, would at least give me that little light to hold my hands near. The glow in my corner of
la plaza
would turn the snow to gold.

The candle flickered to life, and I saw my
abuela
again, the shape of her in threads of light. But snowflakes stuck to the wick and put the candle out. I lit the next one, and my
abuela
appeared from the light, this time sewing a dress I had torn playing in the rose bushes. The snow dampened the wick again, and it dimmed. I lit the next, not caring that I wouldn’t be able to sell it, and I saw her cutting roses from the same bushes. I lit the one after that, and the one after that. Each time the snow, falling harder now, put out the flame and ruined the wick.