Scar Flowers (38 page)

“Should I let you go now?” His hand closed on her waist, a soft inlet of flesh below her ribs. Her hip flared out in a sudden curve underneath his palm.

“No.” A whisper.

The surface of her body had opened, so that what had been a sheet of ice was now fog over warm water. She had transformed him this way before; this must be
how it had felt for her when she had him writhing on the floor of her hotel room.

He put his mouth to her neck, reached for her breast to brush the nipple with his finger, a slow circle.

“You haven’t told me the rest about Angel. Maybe you want to show me instead.” Simon did not wait for her answer, was not sure that he even could. He tasted her neck, her shoulder, the salt and warmth, and she started to move away from him.

He did not try to stop her, just leaned back to let her go. She fell still, as if transfixed by a thought, and when she did not move away he started over, more slowly,
searching for what he had missed the first time, piecing this Leah together with the one from this afternoon.

He was almost there, to the answers.

She was delicately made, all fine shadings and small details. Sensitive to every nuance of touch and quick to try to hide from him. At times it was like unfolding gold leaf, all thin layers and delicate folds, brittle fragility, turning suddenly into an elastic, angular tangle of limbs, a confusion of inner resistance made physical. His body knew where it wanted to go, but she moved to question or block him at every turn. In between each clumsy advance in what was becoming a wrestling match, he paused to give her room, kept expecting that she would push him away, but it always turned into a kiss instead, that same fusion of mouths, tongues, and intentions from that day in the tiled room—and the only thing they agreed on. He stopped trying to do anything else.

Simon no longer braced himself for her to insist on taking over and
laying him bare, and her sudden movements, to guide his hand or gather his hair in her fists, lost the edge of command and became invitations, until finally she stretched herself out open and languorous, her lips relaxed into a curve of pleasure.

He was there at last, moving down the length of her with his hands and mouth, when he discovered it. First there were leaves, curls, foliage, then the center of her that he had long imagined. He took each of the fleshy outer petals in his mouth in turn, between his teeth, then traced circles between them with his tongue until the hooded stamen rose out of the folds that enclosed it. This was most secret place there was. Responding to him, answering
in the language being created right here: skin, sensation, movement. He could tell her, without words, everything he had been unable to say to her until now, at the same time he took her with him. She went willingly, as if she knew the way too, and pulled him close when she reached it, the moment of devastation.

He lowered his head to rest, to feel her stomach move under his cheek as she labored to catch her breath. The possible return of words, action, and consequence hung nearby, swaying: what he was supposed to say now, what she was supposed to do. But these things did not come back yet, could not reach this far. He wanted to gather her up and protect her, but at the same time he wanted to die with her, to take the journey again, more deeply and violently this time.

So unreal, that he had arrived at this place.

As he reached for her she slid away to sit on the edge of the bed, her back to him.

“It would be best for you if you left now.” Leah was a pale blur outlined by a faint glow from the windows and streaked with candlelight, her voice soft and unreadable.

“Are you sure?
” He pressed his palm to the base of her spine. She reached back to lace her fingers in his but otherwise did not move.

“How much of a chance do you give us? How long do you think it would last?” She turned her head. “All I can promise is just this, right now. That’s all.”

He pulled her back by her hand, which tightened in his.

“I mean it,” she said, her face lost in the shadow. She traced the mark on his ribs, the one she had touched in the hotel room months ago. “Beautiful scar,” she murmured, then her hair brushed his face as she kissed him. Her strength and insistence were back, sudden and sharp. Crouched over him, her knees pressed to his sides, she snaked one hand down to his belt buckle to open it.

Simon shucked free of his clothes and searched in the drawer beside the bed for
what he needed and ripped it open. He could not remember later how they slipped into the game. It started when he drew her down onto him, unable to wait anymore. Leah took a sudden gasp of breath, her voice small as she asked for him to stop. Too late; he could see it in her face as she closed around him, a mirror of what he felt—surprise and disbelief, like someone stabbed. He froze, feeling his grasp on everything sliding away, shifting like water in a plastic bag. Did she want this or not? He thought of the teenage girl hiding by the ice machine in that hotel long ago and of his earlier greed with Faith. Taking what he wanted with no thought for anyone else.

He closed his eyes briefly on a red haze, like a torch burning a cave. Unsure if he could stop, if that was what she asked for. At the instant he thought she would break away from him, trembling with hurt and fear, she stretched herself out along the length of his body, rolled down onto the bed and pulled him with her until he was on top.

“Wait, don’t move. Not yet,” she said, her lips against his shoulder. “Please.” Her fingers twined in his hair to take a strong handful of it, pulling. She kissed his face, his jaw, a nip and a pull at his mouth, as sweat broke out on his back. “I want to feel this. To feel you.”

She let her head fall back into the circle of candlelight. He touched the side of her face, watched the progress of his hand moving, over the scattered faint freckles visible now that her makeup had washed off. His body burned with impatience, nerves dancing like flames, and he felt again the precariousness of his position—
breaking and entering, intruder
. She was all around him, his every ridge and vein surrounded by her heat, but she kept her hands braced against his chest as if she were prepared to push him away.

Cramped and sweating and screaming inside to keep going, he remained still for what felt like an hour, until Leah’s eyes brimmed and tears spilled onto her cheek.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay, I can cry—”

“What is it?”

Her mouth turned down and she bit her lip. “I can cry,” she repeated.

Simon pulled back, certain that she must be in pain or fear, but she clung to him, repeating that she was all right, asking him for more. A pause for a long, aching moment while she coiled her limbs around him and ran her fingernails down his back, her smiles and sighs, and then they moved together, a slow passage of flesh, lined with sensation. Just once, and then he stopped. To show her that he could.
To trust you
, she had said.

She spoke again, to say she wanted him. Blood crashed and pounded in his ears,
and all sense of direction shuddered apart. Her teeth scraped the side of his face, and he caught an accidental mouthful of her hair when he finally moved again, everything slippery with sweat as they both gasped out a laugh.

The game fell away then, leaving just the two of them going forward together, as if running down the slope of a hill. She held him as the world convulsed, shattered in pleasure: her hands on his face, refusing to let him close his eyes, her mouth saying,
Look at me
. To meet her eyes was like falling down a well into green depths, hints and currents of who she might be and who he was. Later, when he remembered that moment of mingling like salt and sweat, it held the culmination of too many things to name, like a wave breaking on a distant shore.

Tuesday, December 5, 7:20 p.m.

Simon stood in the back of the screening room at The Big Picture in
Seattle. In the next room, a black-clad crowd of twenty- and thirty-somethings chatted with martini glasses in hand or lounged on the zebra-skin sofas. Though the club was in the basement of a swank steakhouse on First Avenue, the potted plants and carved Thai mirror frames gave it the aura of a cosmopolitan retreat.

His film would start in ten minutes. As he pushed his way into the main room, a cocktail waitress lifted her tray toward him, but he held up the beer
that he’d been carrying all night and shook his head, the fringe on his deerskin jacket swinging. The sleeve was still stiff enough to tug at his elbow when he bent his arm.

Faith, her short, ash-colored hair strewn with tiny barrettes, sat at the dark wood bar surrounded by
reviewers and industry people. One of them, a heavy-set brunette with a scraped-back bun, had introduced herself to him earlier as a producer.

“
We didn’t know we were being filmed at first. I was only in it for a couple of scenes originally, but Simon asked me to do more.” Faith tapped her straw on her glass and cast a glance at Simon. “I was the first one to sign a release for the hidden-camera and security-system footage. Not everyone did, but we worked around it.”

Monica, the actress whose face adorned the poster for the film, reached for Simon’s hand as he made his way past. A head shorter than the other women in the room, she wore her long red hair loose down her back.

“I’m nervous already.” She poked at a stuffed mushroom on her plate.

“You’re doing great,” he said. “They’ll love you.”

A man her age in a tweed jacket and a blond goatee appeared out of the crowd to put his arm around her.

“Simon, you know my boyfriend
, Tim, don’t you?”

“Through
Babylon
. Small world.” Tim dropped his hand from Monica’s waist to hold her hand. “Brian says to tell you he’s sorry he couldn’t make it, but he’s filming another project. When I told him about your premiere, he said you’d achieved every director’s dream—making a film without a cinematographer or producer.”

Simon laughed. As he continued toward the buffet, Faith waved him over. When he nodded but did not stop, she made a face and thrust a piece of paper at him. He glanced at it before tossing it in a planter. She had written “Can we talk?” on the back of a flyer for an exhibit of works by “upcoming young artist Angel Mendez, in his first gallery showing.” The flyer was illustrated with a drawing of boy with a tree trunk instead of legs, his back sprouting a pair of wings.

Simon glanced at the clock. Five minutes remained until the premiere began.

“You’re always avoiding me.” Faith jingled the ice in her glass. “I don’t bite, you know. Not hard enough to leave a mark, at least. That’s Leah’s territory, as I shouldn’t have to tell you.”

“But you’re telling me anyway.”

“You don’t have to be such a dick. I just wanted to thank you for giving me my break. I’m going to go to
L.A. and get an agent. Be an actress. I wanted you to know.”

“I’m glad you were inspired by the film. You were
great in it.”
Here it comes . . .

“O
kay, so could you at least tell Leah? This may be the last time either of you see me. I’m sure she’d want to know what I’m doing with my life.”

The usual pleas. If it wasn’t
Would you tell Leah?
it was
How is she? Did she mention me?

“Faith.” He reached for her shoulder, and she shrugged away.

“I didn’t ask for a lecture, Dad.” She set her drink down in a planter. “Have you ever stopped to count the number of people who are unhappy with her? At least Angel’s buried himself in his career, but Paul calls me all the time. He’s devastated. He—”

“Cobb! We’re here to see your vanity project.” Tom, in paint-spattered Carhart coveralls and flip
-flops, stood at the foot of the stairs that led to the street, his hand tucked in the back pocket of a solidly built Native Alaskan man who wore his flannel shirt rolled up to reveal a mermaid tattooed on his forearm. In honor of the season, perhaps, he had replaced the usual strip of denim that held his dreadlocks back with a red shoelace. He thumped Simon on the back and said, “This is Greg, my friend from San Fran.”

“Greg.” Simon reached out to shake hands with the new arrival. “I want you both to meet Faith Hellen, an actress in my film.”

Greg turned to Faith, but she ignored the hand he held out. She tilted her head and looked at Simon as if they were the only two people in the room. The corners of her mouth turned down, but her eyes held a light that was part of the Faith he’d first met in Leah’s house, the ambassador from some ancient tradition of elusive and knowing subservience. Conversation swelled around them, but each word rang in his ears as she said softly, “I could have loved you too, you know.”

For a moment she stood poised, then she turned on the balls of her feet and glided away, her neck impossibly long beneath her new crown of hair.

Tom cleared his throat. “That changed the temperature! What’ve you got, a femme-fatale magnet in your skull?”

“Where there’s a director, there are actresses.
We may be witnessing the birth of a career.” It didn’t come out sounding sincere, but Faith didn’t need any more encouragement from him.

“Cobbler here has revived his acting career. He’s gonna be our next Jay Silverheels,” said Tom. He turned to Simon. “I see you’re wearing Eva’s present.”

“Don’t go celebrating my political awakening yet, but . . . yeah. What we really need is a Tlingit matinee idol. Crossover appeal.”

“Too bad your
Hollywood film never came out.”

“Yeah, well. Maybe someday.”

“Is this another documentary?”

“
Meta-documentary. It’s about a director who gets seduced by the world he’s filming.”

“Sounds like pure nonfiction in your case.” Tom signaled a waiter.

“Not quite. Leah didn’t want to act, so I hired Monica. The lead female role is shared. Very
Obscure Object of Desire
, only Monica and Leah look much more alike.”

As Greg excused himself to find “the head,” Tom looked out over the people clustered at the bar.

“I want to meet this Leah. Is that her? The one who looks like she could use a hot meal?” Tom nodded toward Monica.

“No. That’s the actress who played her in the added scenes.”

“Oh. So how’d you two meet, again?” Tom studied the crowd.

“Leah was the fight choreographer on
Babylon
. But she’s going to open her own art gallery this month. Works from foreign artists.”

“I thought she was one of your actresses. She helped with the film, though?”

Simon nodded and dug his thumbnail against the rim of his glass. “She sent me some footage from the video surveillance cameras in her house, yeah. I used most of it.”

“You invited her, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But aren’t you two an item? C’mon, Cob
b. You’re cagey as a prom queen.”

“
Well, we’re—” He broke off as another petite redhead approached. When she saw Simon, she pressed her lips together to suppress a smile, but the corners of her mouth turned up. She wore a fitted leather jacket and a dark skirt, her hair pulled back.

“Tom, Leah. Leah, Tom.”

Tom nodded at Leah as they shook hands, just as Greg returned.

“The film’s about to start.” Simon took Leah’s elbow and went to the reserved seats in the back row of the screening room as the lights dimmed and the theater grew quiet.

As Tom and Greg sat on one side of him, Simon leaned over and whispered in Leah’s ear. “You’re late.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “I’ve got a young Spanish erotica artist for the gallery-opening party. We were finalizing plans—she wants an SM theme, the darling girl.”

“Oh?”

“Mm. I told her I knew just the right bartender. Interested?”

She reached into her glass and pulled out an olive. Waxy, oval, with a single crystal drop bellying from the underside.

The curtains parted, and the screen flickered with title cre
dits:
Red Widow—An Independent Film by Simon Mercer
. The audience applauded.

“No. Not interested at all.” Simon took the olive and put it to Leah’s mouth. The glimmer of the projected film swam on the surface of her eyes. Soft lips parted with the slight scrape of teeth,
and with a sucking pull, his hand was left empty.