Stone Kissed (18 page)

Her hips rose up to ride the rigid bulge of his cock, and she reached down, ran her finger through a belt loop and jerked it forward. Grant released her body, but not her mouth, and slid the fabric of her bra cup down so that it bunched up under her breast. He tugged at her nipple, plucking it as if it were a violin string attached to the hot wet swelling between her thighs. He laved the side of her neck with his tongue, and each little wet flick caused her to whimper. He slid his long index finger over her swollen clit into the gaping wetness of her core, and she clenched around him immediately, groaning her desire, squeezing her demands into him.

He said he’s going to marry me.
She pointed at the bed. Grant jerked off his shirt and pulled her in for another rough kiss. She ran her fingers along the dark stubble on his chin. He said he was going to marry her, damn him. She pushed him back again.

“This is not what I expected,” he commented wryly, as the bed groaned under the impact of his body. He bounced lightly, and she crawled on top of him.

“Condom.” She reached for the bedside drawer. She tore open the wrapper with her teeth, pausing as she realized he was still in his black boxer-briefs.

“You want I should take them off?”

Damn him, he had laughter in his voice.

“I’ll do it.” She held the moist rubber in one hand while she jerked his underwear down, left side, right side, tugging it off his body as she backed up off the bed. His cock made a dark shadow on his belly. She rolled the condom down, straddled him and impaled herself upon him, even as he reached up to wrap his arms around her back.

“No.” She sat up and brought his hands to her waist. She rose and lowered on him and he slammed into her in response.

He reached around and grabbed her thighs, pulling her wider, lower, so that his cock rammed deep into her belly with each impact. His hands lifted her by the waist after each thrust, so that she was all but empty, and then pounded her down as he buffeted her. Theirs was an ecstatic dance of power and contact, and he kept his eyes locked on hers the entire time. Her thigh muscles burned from the repeated impact. Her waist burned from the heat of his palms. Her heart burned to watch his eyes, dark with passion for her.

Finally Delia fell forward, planting her palms on the pillow on either side of his head. Grant lifted his chin to claim her mouth, his tongue forging into her. She poured every drop of love and power into her response and they spiraled together, bound and melding. She clung to him with mouth and arms and heart and core, giving him everything she had.

It was enough. He came in her, the sinews of his neck cording as his eyes locked onto hers. He lifted Delia’s shins off the sheets in his convulsive thrusts. She was ready for him and clenched down tight. Her own orgasm rolled over her like waves in a thunderstorm, crashing and crashing. Her head whipped back and her chest caved forward.

She landed upon him, and he embraced her everywhere, everywhere she was.

She couldn’t move her cheek without feeling the soft scratch of his chest hair. As the aftershocks shuddered through her, she caressed the muscles of his chest and ran her fingertips along his jaw. She couldn’t move her hand without feeling the contrast between the stubble on his chin and the softness of his full, full lips. She couldn’t move her thigh without feeling the corded power that held her in a not-so-strange bed in a no-longer-unfamiliar room. Grant was under her, in her, around her. She couldn’t separate herself from him. Even if she were to lose herself in some jungle among the gaping maws of ancient Aztec warriors screaming their frustration at having been forgotten, or to hide away in the farthest barren reaches of the icy Baltic coast, she would never be able to separate herself from him. Not because he was so all-consuming, but because he was Grant—and she loved him.

His breath slowed. He was asleep. She loved him, and he was asleep.

She tried to sleep, too, and maybe she succeeded, in spite of the hollow feeling in her heart and the dark thoughts that crawled and leaped in her mind.

He would never understand her. She could hand her soul to him on a silver platter, and he, damn him, would never even see it sitting there. But he didn’t want her soul. He wanted her body for the moment, and…pleasant conversation.

Breed his children, and he would keep her body for a while longer—years, even. Grant didn’t make false promises. Delia could have a ring on her finger and a prenup on file at Baldridge and Sons faster than you could blast rock face. She could delay divorce for years on the grounds that the children would suffer, because when Grant finally fathered children, he would create for them an ideal little universe free of pain, sorrow or loneliness.

She could wake up with him every day and go to bed with him every night, loving him beyond all reason—and knowing he saw her as another acquisition. Valuable? No question. But an acquisition, nonetheless. He didn’t love her. How could he? He thought she was a liar. He thought she was nuts.

But Grant had said he believed her, so he was a liar, too, wasn’t he? She felt his breath hitch beneath her cheek.

“Delia?”

She’d been wrong about him. He was awake, and the light through Bea’s lacy white curtains had gone gray. “Did you mean it?” the words burst out.

“Mean what?” His voice was sleepy “Yes.”

Delia reached into the space between the pillow and the headboard for her bra. Her panties were on the floor below the headboard. Thankfully she could see them—she didn’t want to have to crawl. She’d been on her knees for him, his hand wrapped around her hips to deepen every thrust—when? She glanced at the sickly green numbers on Bea’s digital clock—only three hours ago. But now the moonlight was flat and colorless, the walls were institutional beige and the morning was coming and Grant, once again, had taken too long with his answer.

“Delia,” he repeated, “I did. I do. I believe you.”

“No.” She pulled on her underclothes and rose to snatch her jeans from the chair. “You’re humoring the weird girl. I saw enough of that when I was younger and too stupid to know not to confide in anyone. Oh, wait.” She laughed, but it was quiet, cold and much too close to a sob. “I’m still stupid.”

Then he was in front of her, above her, her chin resting gently in his palms. “How would it benefit me to lie to you?”

She rolled her eyes and glanced at the bed.

Grant dropped his arms to the side and stepped back. He towered over her, naked and cold with fury. “That? If I wanted a fuck I could have had your cousin. She’s been crawling all over me since I got to town.”

She couldn’t breathe. It was as if he’d slapped her, twice.

“She’s not my cousin,” she bit out, jerking her discarded shirt over her head. In her haste, she caught her elbow in her armhole and had to pull the whole damn thing off again to do it right.

Grant sat back on the bed. “I meant you are…important to me. I’m serious about marriage.”

“So am I, Grant. My father might not be much of man, but he loved my mother and she loved him.” She turned away before he could see her face melt. Delia reached for her bag and he reached for her, pulling her into his chest. She inhaled deeply, and pushed her bag against him. “I want to go.” The lie scraped her throat.

“One of these days, Delia…” His voice was quiet, but bitter. He rose from the bed in a swift movement and pulled another tee from the closet.

“What are you doing?”

“You’re in no condition to drive. I’m following you back.”

“You can’t,” she protested, swaying as she stood. She’d had so little sleep, and the adrenaline had rushed, drained and rushed again throughout the day. She looked wistfully at the bed. But who knew where she’d find Frank? And last Sunday, Heywood’s lamb had been facing the wrong direction when she walked up the cemetery slope.

“Stay here, then. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“I have to go.”

“Why?”

“Because they walk.” The words rose out of bone deep exhaustion and a bruised heart. “And I have to put them back.”

He stepped around in front of her, lifted her chin and held her face in his hands. “That’s why you leave?”

She nodded.

Grant closed his night-darkened eyes and leaned his forehead down to hers. She melted against him, wrapping her arms around his waist.

“You’re not leaving me,” he said into her hair. “You’re going to them.”

His voice was full of quiet pain, not raw and new, but the kind Delia knew so well, that ached so deep you could ignore it most years. Old pain that no longer called forth tears—at least from the one who felt it. She felt it with him, for him, and could not resist the pull of his arms. Her eyes welled up and she leaned slightly sideways. He knew the move. He took her down with him in a flood of desperate kisses.

When her cell phone rang, she almost didn’t hear it. She was dissipating in a fog of pleasure and relief.

“Delia,” he said, his lips against her collarbone. “You should answer that. It could be the hospital.” She sighed and glanced at the cheap alarm clock again. Four forty-five. Then she dug in her bag by the bed and flipped open the phone.

Dr. Bustamante’s hands flapped loosely as he looked first at Grant and then at Delia. His face flashed red and blue with Chief Griffin’s cruiser lights. “I’m sorry for the chaos, Delia. Someone stole St. Francis.”

Her treacherous body turned toward Grant—his heat, his strength. She curled her fingers into the dark blue cotton of his shirt and looked up at the grooves cutting into the planes of his cheeks and between his brows. She wanted to reach up and touch his face, but she was distracted by a raw, keening sound. It was coming from her, so she clamped her jaws shut to hold it in, which was a mistake. Now she could hear the doctor’s words, chiseling into her, cutting away the newest, rawest pieces of her heart.

“We think it was a stroke, Delia. We’ll know more after the autopsy, but it was sudden. He felt no pain.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Grant said, his tone grim.

Delia lifted her head but felt his hands press gently into the small of her back and the soft space between her shoulder blades. She clung to him until Bustamante’s footsteps had faded down the hallway.

“Delia, I’m taking you home.”

Which home did he mean? Her apartment was crowded with statues that said what they wanted and did what they wanted and went where they wanted. Even now, St. Francis might be seated on her sofa discussing the trinity with Romana or St. Patrick with Brogan. When they slept together, “home” meant Grant’s room at the inn—fussy, frilly and devoid of anything real but Grant himself. Maybe Grant meant to take her back to Steward House, the home of her heart—and, he claimed, his own. The home where her father had attempted to raise her in his clumsy, heavy-handed way, and had ultimately given up.

Father had told her he was sorry and she’d told him she forgave him. He was supposed to wake up and say, “Thank you.” She was supposed to say, “I love you, Dad,” and he was supposed to say, “I love you too, sweetheart.” They were supposed to live together again, quietly, at peace with one another, working side-by-side in and for Steward House.

Instead, Delia stood frozen solid, wrapped in the heat and scent of a man who said he was going to marry her. She’d seen his wealth. She’d heard his reasons for marriage. He could and would give her everything except his heart.

Whatever home Grant meant, Delia’s dream of life with him was like her dream of reconciling with her father—another hollow fantasy.

Despair, according to Grandmère, had nothing to do with wailing and gnashing teeth.
Pleurants
didn’t speak because true despair couldn’t be contained in mere words.

“I’m going now. Let me go.”

***

Delia stared over his shoulder at the concrete base where St. Francis had been, and her shoulders began to shake. Grant was prepared for tears, ready to take saltwater and snot into his shirt and absorb her gasping sobs. He was ready to comfort. He was good at it. He’d trained at his mother’s knee.

“I’m going now.” She went limp in his arms. “Let me go.”

The flash of silver in the trees made the skin on his body want to peel free, and his arms opened in involuntary surprise. A silver-gray bird rose off a branch and wafted back down, impossibly slow. As he struggled to understand what his eyes had seen, Delia walked to her car, slowly, gracefully, her chin high. She was free. Her father was dead, Steward House was off her hands, her business was closed and she had a cool million left in the bank. She didn’t need him.

His nerves resonated, as he looked up at the bird hopping in syrupy-slow motion. Ignoring the police tape, Grant ran his palm over St. Francis’s pediment. It was smooth—no mortar, no mount, no chips or gouges—not even a telltale line where the statue had scraped as it had been pulled away. He lifted his palm and blew across it. No dust. Grant turned back to look across the parking lot, but the weird little bird was gone.

“Delia, what’s happening here?” he called out to her shrinking back.

“I told you.”

“Yes, but…” he trailed off, helplessly, and she drove away.

***

He followed her home and it gave her a perverse sense of comfort. She felt him step out of his car when she got out of hers, but she didn’t look back. She couldn’t look back. Her last, tenuous thread of self, separate from him, depended on her not looking back. Even when she pulled her apartment door shut behind her, Delia closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see his face.

The statues were singing for her. Delia dropped her bag on the floor, curled up on the futon and listened. The “Kyrie” washed over her and wrapped around her in meaningless harmony. Brogan’s bass hugged her close. The shepherdesses’ soprano duet melded seamlessly with Sophie’s smoky alto and Romana’s strident tenor. But the voice that speared her heart and ripped it open was Bert’s—his high countertenor lifted above the sopranos, each note soaring to heaven and plummeting back down to chisel free yet more pieces of her pain.

Delia lifted up the images of her father scowling and smiling, of her mother at the piano with him standing over her shoulder, of Father and Grant sharing a complicit grin. She examined them, rubbed their sharp edges smooth and felt them settle into her chest, heavy and solid as stones washed by the river.

The final words resonated and stilled. Sophie ceased her eerie dance. Brogan’s leaves flattened back onto his face. Romana circled her torso back to her center and Bert, who stood next to Delia’s face in front of the futon, rested his paws back on his paisley vest.

“Where’d you learn that?” Delia mumbled.

Bert stroked her cheek with his left ear. “Your Grandma’s Mozart taught me. Beethoven told him it was drivel, but I fancied it.”

Delia snorted and reached for him. He leaned into her, cool and fluid-solid, and she wrapped her arms around her bunny just as she’d done as a child.

But he was still stone. Cold, without the ebb and flow of breath or the comforting rhythm of a heart. He wasn’t flesh. He wasn’t human. And above all, he was not Grant.

***

Delia leaned against the side of the family mausoleum, a sheaf of papers stuffed between the pages of her sketchbook—the evidence of her last few days cleaning up after her father’s death. In her hands she held a hospital bill stamped “paid,” a copy of a report that said “heart failure,” the details for the funeral in the afternoon and an acknowledgement she would eat the security deposit for breaking her lease early. The wind was brisk this afternoon. She could tear those papers in little bits and watch them flutter down the hill.

“They make up paperwork to keep you too busy to be sad,” Delia said, and then wished she hadn’t. Putting the word out there made the feeling solid in her chest. She let the tears fall and didn’t even attempt to wipe them away. She was free, and it was almost time to go.

“How anything on paper can matter is beyond me.” Grandmère sniffed.

Delia’s house was gone. Her father was gone. Hell, even Frank was gone again, the victim of a malicious group of pranksters, according to the rumor that had trickled into her consciousness while she was busy scratching letters and numbers on pieces of paper. This time he hadn’t even bothered to come back in the night and sit his perch for her sake. All earthly ties to Stewardsville were gone, leaving only a few unearthly ones. It was time to untie those too.

“So you’ll let Father in.”

“But of course,
chère
,” Grandmère replied, her fingers stroking Delia’s hair. “That was never my rule.”

Delia looked up at the lines carved in the arches above her head. She’d ordered the carver to inscribe her father’s dates in the arch below her mother’s.

Which arch would have been hers? It didn’t matter. She’d never rest in the mausoleum because Delia had a new plan. She was about to ride off into the sunset—and that would be the end of the Steward Witches. “What’s going to happen to you?” she asked Grandmère.

“Check.” Annabel’s hand flowed back from the chessboard she and Isobel stored inside the mausoleum gate.

Grandmère ignored her question. “Where is this Wee-o-meeng?”

“Far away, in the American West.”

“They don’t have many statues there, do they?”

“No.” She couldn’t risk it. She couldn’t travel the world like a disease, animating every stone creature in sight. “You have legs, Grandmère. Wouldn’t you like to take a walk? I can guide you.”

“Foolishness,” Grandmère scoffed. “Besides, I belong right here. So do you.” Delia felt the pleasurable rush of Grandmère’s words, the inescapable, inexplicable, unacceptable hope they made her feel. She tamped the sensation down and tugged her head to the side to disentangle her hair from Grandmère fingers. “He would marry you, Delia. You keep him, the house, make some squishy babies.”

“I know, Grandmère. That’s why I’m going to Wyoming.”

She let the sun soak into her legs, felt the stone warming beneath her on the hot day. Isobel lost to Annabel, twice.

“They’re coming,” the Fullilove cherub chirped and winged his way back to his stone.

Delia gathered the chessboard and her sketchbook and tucked them out of sight behind the mausoleum. She dusted off her old black jersey knit tank dress and stood at the open gate.

She was surprised by the turnout. Easily fifty people picked their way up the gravel paths of the Stewardsville cemetery and stood in the small clearing below the family plot to watch the pallbearers carry the coffin up the hill.

Grant was the youngest and strongest, and her stupid heart rose to see him. He held the back right corner of the mahogany coffin, making it look easy. To those who hadn’t studied every curve and cut of his face, Grant looked relaxed. But she knew his expressions. His flat mask covered frustration or anger, and his eyes focused on the line of the trees at the top of the hill.

He was angry at her, no doubt. She’d ignored his calls and texts.
I keep seeing a bird.
The one yesterday read, but it was too little, too late. Sure, he’d made her father what amounted to a promise on his deathbed, but when she was gone and he was back to his real life in the city, he would thank her for not holding him to it.

In the crowd on either side of the gravel walk she saw a handful of barely familiar faces—people from out of town, like Grant’s sister Randi and the handsome Viking next to her, who towered over everyone but Grant.

But her eye was drawn back, over and over, to Grant. It looked as if it rested on him and him alone to carry Father’s soul to heaven. And from the admiring looks of her neighbors and friends, everyone in Stewardsville expected him to do exactly that.

“He’s real people, not some bigwig city snob,” Delia heard Mrs. Hardcastle say.

“Not afraid to get his hands dirty,” Myrna confirmed.

As chief mourner, Delia held pride of place opposite Grandmère at the doorway. The crowd of mourners parted, and the silent parade of pallbearers carried the coffin up to the mausoleum. They walked into the darkness slowly, in deference to their burden, in consideration of the older men shouldering the load, and because it was high summer, languorous and sultry.

Delia’s face flushed with another heat, however, when she saw Cecily following the coffin in a parade of her own. She moved smoothly, easily, never missing a step, although her black stilettos were clearly inappropriate for the cemetery’s gravel walkways. She wore a black suit over a lacy black camisole and carried a black clutch. Her hat fascinated Delia most. It was a black pillbox hat with a fingertip veil that obscured the upper half of Cecily’s face. She looked every inch the bereaved widow, but her full red lips pursed into a thin line when the crowd muttered its disapproval. As Grant and the others exited the mausoleum, she placed herself directly on Delia’s right elbow. Periodically, Cecily would pull a tissue out of her black clutch and slide it up under the veil to pat at the eyes Delia couldn’t see.

The mourners gathered in a tight cluster in front of the mausoleum, and the funeral director closed the door and locked the exterior wrought iron gate. Delia—and Cecily—stepped back and turned to face the new young Methodist minister.

“The Lord is my shepherd…” The mourners read from the printed program in their hands. Grant’s voice reverberated through her chest in unison with two other familiar voices, high and sweet—Annabel and Isobel, reading the Psalm from their Bible of stone. Pastor Carson’s was a newer translation, so the words blended together, then diverged, then melted back together again. A few heads in the crowd turned, looking about themselves in confusion. Delia sucked in a breath. Did they hear the twins? Grant turned to her, his eyebrow raised.

Defiance speared through her and she lifted her chin. If, after one hundred years of being mortared to the top of a stone, her twins wanted to pray with their community, then they damn well should. Once she was gone, they would settle into stillness and silence again. She looked over her shoulder at the girls atop their tomb and nodded when Annabel, ever so slowly, turned up her head to meet Delia’s gaze with her own blank stare.

When Delia turned back to face the pastor, Cecily removed one black glove and stroked Delia’s wrist. The pain shocked her and her knees buckled.

Grant grasped Delia’s elbows to keep her from falling. She wished desperately to turn in his arms, away from the smug twist of Cecily’s mouth, away from the iron bars that closed like teeth behind the back of the fresh-faced minister—away, even, from Grandmère’s low weeping, which was her privilege and duty as the Steward family
pleurant.

But Delia stiffened, rolled her shoulders back and spread her arms out from her waist. He understood the signal and without hesitation Grant released her and stepped back.

As the first-chair trumpeter from Stewardsville High played the strains of “Amazing Grace,” the crowd poured out the gate and down the hill to the cars which would carry them like a line of ants to the Methodist Church basement for the ritual covered-dish supper.

“My condolences, cousin,” Cecily murmured. “I am so deeply sorry for your loss.”

Delia turned to face her. Grant stepped forward as if to come between the two women, but Delia elbowed him gently to the side and held her ground.