Bone River (34 page)

I was drowning, again. Choking and struggling, flailing and swallowing seawater and falling down and down and down into a void, a blackness I could not escape, and there was his voice speaking to me, echoing across it:
We don’t really live, do we?

And there I was...there
she
was, watching me, slow and steady, assessing dark eyes, a face beautiful and familiar, though I couldn’t say why. Suddenly her eyes hardened, and I was withering, my fingers turning to claws, nails still growing, and my skin adhering to my bones, my skin drying to umber but not stopping, not ending. Just drying up and drying up, withering and cracking and shrinking until I was a seedpod, blown about by a hot wind over prairie I had never seen, and then it died and I was swayed lightly to rest upon the sun-burned grass, and suddenly she was there, standing beside, and I cracked open, my fear cast up out of me like a spirit, a wisp of smoke through a hole in a longhouse roof, gone, dissipating into the clear sky beyond, and her voice ringing in my ears:
Go to him. I brought him for you. He was meant for you.

I opened my eyes, staring into darkness striated with moonlight blown by the wind, a chill kaleidoscope of shadow and light. The dream had its fingers in me still, clutching and soundless, a longing so swollen I could not be still. I felt the press of it, its insistence. I heard the words she’d spoken, my own desires given voice. And the pull...the pull was irresistible.

And the fear that had made me a coward was gone. What was in its place was a terrible desire—to live, not to dry up, to be whatever and whomever I was meant to be.

I went to the door, turning the key, unlocking myself, opening it and stepping into the hall. I heard the river as if it were right behind me, not muffled by walls and windows. All around me. I hesitated, putting a trembling hand to the wall beside my bedroom door, feeling as if I’d just emerged, cold and choking, from the Shoalwater.
Don’t do this
, I thought, oh, but it was vague
and faraway and I felt half-caught in the dream, and there were Daniel’s words too.
We don’t really live, do we?

I went to his door, resting my hand upon it for one bare moment before I turned the knob and pushed it open, blinking in the dim light that greeted my eyes when I did so. A lamp turned down low, and he was still awake in the middle of the night, sitting at my father’s desk, writing.

He twisted in the chair to look at me, surprise and quick concern. “Lea? What is it? Is something wrong?”

I closed the door softly. “Nothing’s wrong.”

He went very still. I saw the moment he understood, and it was then that I untied my dressing gown and let it fall. I unbuttoned my nightgown, and he watched my fingers with a rapt greediness that made me go slowly. I wanted to swallow that look; I wanted to feel it all through me. He did nothing and said nothing, only watched as I undid one button after another, as I pushed the gown from my shoulders and let it pool at my feet and I stood there naked before him but for the leather thong and beads around my neck, the cave bear tooth nestled between my heavy breasts.

He swallowed and rose. He stepped up to me slowly, as if to savor every moment, and then he boxed me in, his hands on either side, pressing me back against the door with his hips, and he bent to press his mouth to my neck, my ear, my jaw, the hollow of my throat, and then down to between my breasts, his lips following the path my fingers had given him, pressing the tooth hard into my skin, hard enough that I felt its point, and then he took it between his teeth and it was as if he took me. I arched against him uncontrollably, and he looked up at me, so deliberate, and I shuddered with recognition and inevitability, and he let the tooth fall from his lips to thud gently against my skin, warm and wet from his mouth. He straightened, his hands at the small of my back now, pulling me close. I opened my mouth to him when he kissed me, and tore at his shirt, jerking it so roughly
from his shoulders that I heard it rip, desperate as I was for the feel of his skin against mine. I undid the buttons on his long underwear and pushed it away, running my hands over his bare chest; he was muscled and lean and perfect, hard, sweet youth, a kind I’d never touched, and I slid to his trousers, inside. I felt him hot and heavy against my palm, so familiar. I knew him already.

He made a sound deep in his throat and pulled me from the door, pushing me—not gently—so I fell upon the bed, shedding the rest of his clothes. I reached for him and he came to me, and his kiss then was rough and desperately needy and I could not keep from twisting beneath him; I could not keep still and he did not ask me to. Instead he urged me to it, permission to be savage, to be who I was: “
Yes
, Lea,
yes
.” I was burning beneath him and I felt alive in a way I never had, and I could not get enough of him. And I knew that she was right, that he was meant for me, and the danger of him roared in my ears along with the river and I let myself drown.

I
WOKE TO
the late morning light coming through the window over my father’s desk, the curtains open to reveal the bright overcast, the trees blowing lightly in a breeze, the river coursing.

I felt Daniel’s warmth against my back where we were spooned together, where his arm was flung over me, his hand cupping my breast, his face buried in my hair. The memory of last night washed over me, the way I’d come to him, the fierceness of the way we’d taken each other, and I let myself think only of that, of nothing else. I had done things with him I had never before thought to do. I had been...not myself, and at the same time more myself than I had ever been, and he had been my match in passion and desire, so we had been unable to stop even in exhaustion, and the hours had been filled with
not yet, not yet. I want more.

I felt both sated and starving, as if I’d suddenly discovered something I hadn’t known I craved. And along with that came a reckless joy that took every consequence and flung it away to wisp into the clouds like smoke, to disappear.

Daniel stirred, murmuring whispers into my hair, and I turned to face him. He pulled me with him as he rolled onto
his back so I lay half on top of him. I traced down his throat, his chest, letting my hair fall forward to cascade over us like a waterfall. He stroked it idly, tangling his fingers in it. I smiled and kissed him.

His other arm, tucked around my waist, tightened, his hand splayed flat against my hip. “I thought you were a dream last night, when you came through my door.”

“I was surprised to find you awake.”

“You meant to take me like some succubus?”

“Hmmm, I don’t know. What is that?”

“A demon in a woman’s form, come to seduce a man in his sleep.”

“Like in the Indian legends. Spirits who play tricks on men in their dreams.”

“Tricks,” he repeated, smiling. “I like that. Spirit, play more tricks upon me.”

“Angel or demon?” I teased. I dug my nails into his chest and leaned close to whisper, “Which spirit do you want me to be?”

He grabbed me, twisting me around so I was on my back again, holding me down, teasing me in kind. “You’re a bewitchment. Is that what you want to hear? I’ve never wanted a woman so much.”

“Yes, it’s what I want to hear,” I said, laughing. “You sound tormented. Perhaps I should lift the spell.”

He pressed closer. His mouth was a bare whisper from mine. He took my arms, stretching them above my head, weaving his fingers through the twine of my bracelet. “Don’t lift it. Make it stronger. Bind me.”

The tease was gone. He was fervent, his eyes burning. I shivered and answered in kind. “I would. I would bind you if I could.”

My words lingered like an incantation. His hands tightened, his fingers pressing into my skin, fetters lashing his wrists and mine. He said softly, “I’ll hold you to that, you know. You promise you won’t release me, whatever happens?”

I loosed my hand and pressed my finger to his mouth. “Ssshhh, no promises. Not today. Today let it just be...this.”

He moved away from my finger. “Leonie—”

“Just you and me in the world,” I murmured. I arched a little against him, my hips to his. “No one else. Nothing else.”

I felt his sigh against my breasts, and I twined my fingers in his hair, pulling a little, bringing him to meet my kiss, gentle at first, and then, when he deepened it, fierce and possessive, rousing that fever in me again, and willingly I went into that wilderness with him, where there was no other existence, where the promises we made to each other were the only ones that mattered.

It wasn’t until much later, when I heard Edna lowing outside, that the world encroached again. I lay there and watched him as he dressed, hastily pulling on trousers, a shirt. “I’ll milk her and be back,” he told me. “Don’t leave this bed.”

I stretched and smiled. “I’m too lazy to leave it.”

He leaned down to kiss me quickly. “I won’t be long.”

He was out the door, racing down the stairs as if he suspected that more than a few minutes could be disastrous. I smiled to hear it, and stretched again, feeling swollen and ripe, aching and glazed with sweat and sex and with no other will than to have him.

I angled my arm beneath my head and my glance fell upon the papers on the desk that Daniel had shoved aside, my father’s relics pushed to the edges, and it seemed strange to see the two things together, the two halves of myself.

I sat up, pulling the sheet up around my naked breasts, looking at what remained of my father in this room, the relics and the journals. Daniel had taken it over so completely, and yet my father’s spirit was so strong it seemed to permeate the very walls. I felt it grow even as I thought it. And that, of course, opened the door to recriminations, to promises made that I’d broken, to the future my father wanted for me that I’d just thrown away.
There could be nothing but pain from this point on; there was no way to continue without hurt and anger, and yet...could I make myself go back? Could I even be what I’d been before?

And that was how Daniel found me when he returned bearing a pitcher of milk and some bread. He came inside, and I looked at him, and he set down what he carried and said, “I took too long, didn’t I?”

Suddenly I was crying; he came to the bed and pulled me into his arms, and I felt his kiss on my hair as I buried my face in his chest. He smelled of cold air and cow and milk; he smelled of me.

He whispered, “We’ll talk of all this later. I promise we will. But not today. Just you and me in the world—that’s what you said, isn’t it? Nothing else. No one else.”

I said, “But that’s a lie.”

“The world runs on lies,” he said. “What’s another day?”

I shook my head against him and he eased away, pulling off his shirt, taking my hand and pressing it to his bare chest, and I shivered at the desire that leaped through me and felt him shudder in response and marveled that such a simple touch should have such an effect. “You see?” he asked softly, muscle flexing beneath my hand as he raised my chin so I must look at him. “I don’t understand it either, but I can’t deny it. We belong together, Lea. You know it too. Why make ourselves suffer?”

“Because it’s wrong.”

“What’s wrong is everything else,” he said. “We did things...we made promises before we knew each other.”

“But we did them, we made them. They’re real.”

He smoothed my hair behind my ear. “The first time I saw you I felt as if I were waking from a long sleep. Don’t tell me you didn’t feel the same.”

“If I did, it doesn’t matter—”

“This is what’s real, Lea. The rest is the dream. What’s between us—you can’t want to throw it away.”

“I don’t want to. Believe me, I don’t. But Junius will come back and—”

“He’s not back yet. We have days to ourselves.”

“We can’t ignore this, Daniel.”

“Yes we can. For now, we can. We have these days, Lea. Let’s at least take them. There will be time enough for the rest later.”

And my reason melted away. I wanted what he did, to not think, to not decide. I wanted to pretend that there were no promises to keep, that he and I were both free. I wanted to keep feeling as I did when I was with him, that stinging awareness, that knowledge that the world was alive and I was alive within it. He was right; I’d been sleeping before I’d found the mummy and she had brought him here to show me I was dreaming, to show me that the real Leonie was the one who danced. And now...now I wanted to be awake.

We stayed in bed for days, leaving only to milk the cow or get something to eat. Chores went undone, everything in my life falling away. I did not think it was possible to be sated with him. I’d forgotten my distrust and my fear; I wanted to know everything about him, and he obliged with a laugh.

“I helped my mother with the laundry from the time I can remember. My job was to stir the pots of lye and soap, and pull clothes from the water because they were too heavy for her so she could wring them and hang them to dry. At twelve I had to get a job. I sold newspapers because I could still attend school. At thirteen I first kissed a girl—she was an orphan who lived on our street, and my mother used to feed her sometimes, like a stray cat. She became a whore, and so...well, you can imagine what happened between us. I worked the docks at fourteen. Fifteen, a printer’s devil at the
Call
. Then back to the docks again, doing whatever I could. Shall I go on?”