“Any particular kind?”
I shrug. “House red. Whatever.” Rachel hasn’t had opinions about much in a very long time. She barely had any to begin with, which was also a problem.
He brings it back and I hand him a credit card. “I’ll run a tab.” No one ever offers to buy Rachel a drink. She’s not that kind of girl.
Peter studies the card. “Rachel Smith, huh?”
“Cliché and yet—that’s my name.” My maiden name. He took his name with him.
“Rachel is pretty.”
“It means a sheep. A ewe.”
“She was Jacob’s favorite wife.” Peter is still holding my credit card, still standing there, waiting for more.
“Do you ever think about that—what that means for a man to have a favorite wife? That implies that someone else is the least favorite. The one he’d kick to the curb if he could.”
Peter leans forearms on the bar, my card braced between upright fingers like a text he’s studying. “He never loved his other wife, Leah. He was tricked into marrying her.”
“And put her on the front lines, in hopes Esau would kill her.”
“But that’s not you. You’re the beloved. Rachel.”
“No, I’m definitely the roadkill one.” I hold his gaze a moment longer, not sure if he’s gotten my message. Unable to stand it, I snatch the credit card back, slip it into my billfold and pull out a ten. “Actually, I’ve changed my mind. I’m not in the mood for this.”
“The drink is on the house anyway. I owe you one.”
I pause in the middle of sliding off the stool. Peter is watching me with a solemn expression. “Don’t go,” he says. “Rachel.”
“Okay.” I take another deep breath and slide back onto the stool. This is the hardest thing I’ve done in forever. Much more difficult than I dreaded, talking to him as myself. I pick up the wine and he takes it from me before I can sip.
“Not this,” he says, tossing it out. He keeps an eye on me while he makes me another drink. But I won’t let myself run. Not this time. Not yet.
I’m not surprised when he sets a beautifully separated Black Velvet in front of me. I sip it, savoring the blend of flavors and textures. Dark and bright together. “I hope it’s not Dom again.”
“Only the best for you.”
“I’m sorry you wasted so much on me the other night.”
“Nothing is ever wasted, particularly where you’re concerned.” Peter waves goodbye to the businessman, who leaves without looking at me twice.
I take a few more sips, gathering my liquid courage. “How did you know it was me?”
Peter thinks about it, washing the businessman’s glass. “I think it’s the way you move. You have this grace to even the smallest gesture, this sensuality. Like you could be Salome, seductive and mysterious.”
“I’m not any of those things.”
He cocks his head, frowning slightly. “But you are.”
“No. Maybe those other women were, but they’re not me. I tried them on like fancy dresses I can’t afford to keep.”
He considers this. “I didn’t expect you to come back as yourself.”
“But you expected me to come back?”
“I hoped.”
“I’m sorry I broke my promise,” I say quietly, studying how the stout and champagne begin to filter one into the other, first with tendrils, dark infiltrating the light. Or maybe it could be the other way around and I can’t see it as well. “That I said I wouldn’t leave when I was waiting for you to leave me alone long enough so I could.”
“I wasn’t surprised.”
“I’m sorry for that, too.”
“Don’t be. You were honest with me. At least as far as your rules are concerned. Though I still don’t understand.”
“Don’t you? Even seeing me now?”
His brows draw together and he looks me over, as if puzzling out a riddle. “No.”
His pretense throws me, though I am the Queen of Deception, and I take a gulp of my cocktail, too fast, sending myself into a coughing fit that surely makes me red-faced. He ducks under the pass-through to edge a hip onto the stool beside me, taking my hands.
“Just breathe,” he says. “Nice and easy. It’s only me. You know I won’t hurt you.”
To my shock, I discover that I might believe that.
Another customer leaves and Peter nods goodbye, then gets up to follow him, locking the door and flipping off the “Open” sign.
“Come on.” Peter takes my hand, tugging me off the stool and zipping off the televisions with a remote. “Bring your drink. Let’s go upstairs.”
“You can’t just close early,” I protest.
“It’s good to be boss.” He gives me that same easy grin he did the other night.
“You were supposed to be a priest,” I say, foolishly, because of course that’s wrong, that’s only what his mother wanted him to be and we are never what our families imagine for us. Or maybe that’s just me.
“I’m very good at hearing confession. Bartenders and priests have that in common.” He keeps my hand as he flips off the lights and unlocks the door to upstairs, as if I might run.
I still might.
He seats me on the couch, taking both of my hands in his again when I set my drink on the low coffee table. It has books piled on it, but I can’t take in their titles and covers. I feel naked, exposed in some profound way. Peter lifts my hands and kisses my knuckles, a sprinkling of casual affection. “Lovely Rachel,” he murmurs. “I’m so glad you came back.”
“Don’t lie to me,” I grit out. “Please don’t.”
He gives me a long look. “It’s not a lie. I’ve never lied to you.”
I can’t say the same and he knows it. All those lies I’ve spoken, the deceptions large and small, they weigh on me. For a time they freed me, those other women, the many disguises. After a while though, they bound me tighter. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
“Won’t you tell me your story, trust me with it?”
“It’s boring and stupid.” Like me. I laugh and it comes out ragged. I’m no good at this.
“Indulge me.” He’s still holding my hands, stroking the backs with his thumbs.
“I’m not married, but I was.” I manage to say it like other women do. Tra la, tra lay. Oh, my ex, they breezily dismiss with a wave of their hand, as if they hadn’t gone into it expecting forever, hadn’t believed that being good meant having it.
“I’m sorry,” Peter says and sounds like he means it. “I’ve got friends who’ve gone through that and it’s devastating, no matter the reason. You must have gotten married young.”
“Younger than I knew I was,” I agree. “I married the man my family and my temple picked out for me, who I believed was meant to be mine. I believed in all those words, that we’d keep promises and grow old together. I was stupid.”
“That’s not stupid. If you don’t think that going in, why get married?”
Why indeed? “I was stupid because I was Leah and didn’t know it. I believed I was bashert and what kind of idiot believes in that?”
“What does it mean?”
“Like soul mates.” I fumble, embarrassed to articulate it. “Forty days before a male child is conceived, a voice from heaven announces whose daughter he is going to marry.”
“A match made in heaven, destined for happily ever after,” Peter says, looking thoughtful. “A powerful idea.”
“Yes. Until your husband leaves you for someone else, because you aren’t soulmates after all.” I impress myself, that I get it out so cleanly, barely a wobble in my voice. “He’d been having an affair with her all along and said he’d decided to marry me instead of her, but he realized he’d made the wrong choice. Because I…” I falter completely there.
Peter waits, while I swallow against the confession. Finally he says, “You know it’s not real, right? Whatever he told you was the reason was a lie. Because the reas
on was him, not you.”
“I don’t know that. Neither can you.”
“Yes, I do, and so do you. He lied to you from the beginning, didn’t he?”
“He did.” All those promises. None of them real. “But I was the problem. Our marriage bed was cold. I was frigid.”
Peter laughs. A huge laugh, which startles me. I yank my hands away and stand. “Don’t you laugh at me!” I clench my fists at my sides. It’s not Peter I want to punch.
“I’m not.” He holds up his palms, choking back the laughter, but he’s still grinning. “It’s just that it’s so absurd. You’re the least frigid woman I’ve ever met and, besides, who says that anymore? Did he accuse you of hysteria and penis envy, too?”
I snatch up my cocktail and take a long drink. Not the latter, but he’d definitely wielded the former. I sit again. “I’m such a fucking cliché.”
“Were you a virgin when you got married?” Peter asks, brushing my knee, a fleeting touch.
I nod. “Good little Orthodox Jewish girl. I just trusted everything would be wonderful.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“No. The wedding night…” I can’t get it out, not this way. “Rachel was a good girl and she didn’t know what it would be like. No one told her. She had these ideas…” Much as I hate that girl’s ignorance, I want to weep for her. “Ideas that it would be all floaty, with hearts and flowers and…rose petals.” My voice finally breaks.
“But it wasn’t.”
“No. It was pain. And the blood frightened her.” I locked myself in the bathroom for hours, cleaning it off of her, long after it was gone. “I’ve learned since that not everyone bleeds like that, but I didn’t know it then. I thought I was dying.” I flush, chagrined at the memory. In a way, the girl I was had died that night.
“That’s why you do it,” Peter says. “Become someone else.”
I close my eyes, letting out a long breath. I’m still holding the cocktail. “It’s the only way I can do it. Can enjoy it. If I’m not…her. Rachel.”
Rachel who’d lost her husband, disappointed her family, disgraced her temple. Frigid, stupid, panicked Rachel. “It was a bad omen, you see?”
“Because a man is obligated to divorce his wife if he doesn’t give her pleasure”
He did see. More, he listened. Something in me let go at having told the tale.
“Yes. So, he did. Divorce her. And after a long time, she got tired of being ignorant. I locked Rachel in a closet and found other women to be.”
“Have you ever had sex as yourself?” Peter takes my glass away, sets it aside, and cups my face in his hands. His beautiful hands, like an angel’s.
“Yes,” I say. “With my—”
Peter kisses me. “Not him.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.” He kisses me again, fingers feathering through my short hair, and the gold infiltrates the dark. “You have been. All along. Every one of them is you.”
“You saw me,” I say, our breath mingling with the words. “All along.”
“I see you now. Lovely Rachel. I want to be with you, get to know you, inside and out. In the light and in the dark. Can we try that?”
I want to try. “I might not be any good at it. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
“I know who you are. You’re smart and brave. Beloved.” He takes me by the hand and leads me to his bedroom. There he’ll touch me and I’ll close my eyes and simply feel. Afterward, we’ll sleep curled together like cats, and it will be only us. I won’t vanish with the dawn.
Tonight, my name is Rachel. I suppose it always has been.
About Jeffe Kennedy
Jeffe Kennedy is an award-winning author whose works include novels, non-fiction, poetry, and short fiction. She has been a Ucross Foundation Fellow, received the Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship for Poetry, and was awarded a Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award.
Her most recent works include a number of fiction series: the fantasy romance novels of A Covenant of Thorns; the contemporary BDSM novellas of the Facets of Passion; an erotic contemporary serial novel, Master of the Opera; and the erotic romance trilogy, Falling Under, which includes Going Under, Under His Touch and Under Contract.
Her award-winning fantasy romance trilogy The Twelve Kingdoms hit the shelves starting in May 2014. Book 1, The Mark of the Tala, received a starred Library Journal review and was nominated for the RT Book of the Year while the sequel, The Tears of the Rose received a Top Pick Gold and was nominated for the RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2014. The third book, The Talon of the Hawk, won the RT Reviewers’ Choice Best Fantasy Romance of 2015. Two more books followed in this world, beginning the spin-off series The Uncharted Realms, with The Pages of the Mind in May 2016 and The Edge of the Blade in December 2016.
She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with two Maine coon cats, plentiful free-range lizards and a very handsome Doctor of Oriental Medicine.
Jeffe can be found online at her website: JeffeKennedy.com, every Sunday at the popular SFF Seven blog, on Facebook, on Goodreads and pretty much constantly on Twitter @jeffekennedy.
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facebook.com/Author.Jeffe.Kennedy
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Titles by Jeffe Kennedy
~*~*~
CONTEMPORARY BDSM ROMANCES
FACETS OF PASSION
Sapphire
Platinum
Ruby
Five Golden Rings
FALLING UNDER
Going Under
Under His Touch
Under Contract
EROTIC PARANORMAL
MASTER OF THE OPERA E-SERIAL
Master of the Opera, Act 1: Passionate Overture
Master of the Opera, Act 2: Ghost Aria
Master of the Opera, Act 3: Phantom Serenade
Master of the Opera, Act 4: Dark Interlude
Master of the Opera, Act 5: A Haunting Duet
Master of the Opera, Act 6: Crescendo
Master of the Opera
BLOOD CURRENCY
Feeding the Vampire
Hunting the Siren
BDSM FAIRYTALE ROMANCE
Petals and Thorns
FANTASY ROMANCE
SORCEROUS MOONS
Lonen’s War
Oria’s Gambit
The Tides of Bára
A COVENANT OF THORNS
Rogue’s Pawn
Rogue’s Possession
Rogue’s Paradise
THE TWELVE KINGDOMS
Negotiation
The Mark of the Tala
The Tears of the Rose
The Talon of the Hawk
Heart’s Blood
For Crown and Kingdom
THE UNCHARTED REALMS
The Pages of the Mind
The Edge of the Blade (Coming December 27, 2016)
OTHER WORKS
Birdwoman
Hopeful Monsters
Teeth, Long and Sharp Anthology
Thank you for reading!
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