by Steph Post
“Triple layers of crepe de Chine. This color doesn’t even exist yet, but I’m wearing it. And this, a wave of mother of pearl. A wave! Can you imagine the hours of hand sewing? Of course, the entire dress is sewn by hand. Gustave didn’t touch a machine. He never does. Do you, Gustave?”
He could see that Ruby was standing very close to Daniel now. Hayden was too far away to discern their expressions and it would have been too difficult with the masks anyway. He nodded at Mrs. Bosch.
“It’s some dress. Truly. And thank you again for inviting me.”
Hayden could feel the circle of men sizing him up. Gustave twitched his mustache like a disapproving otter. Mrs. Bosch made a show of looking to either side of Hayden.
“Oh my, I hope you didn’t come alone. I told you not to. Couldn’t you manage to wrangle a date?”
The short man standing next to Gustave barked out a laugh and then chomped on his cigar. The crowd shifted again and Ruby disappeared behind a wave of tipsy men, some now wearing their wives’ brightly colored masks. Hayden turned distractedly to Mrs. Bosch.
“I did, she’s here somewhere. I think she got caught up in a conversation somewhere over there.”
Hayden gestured vaguely toward the dance floor. Mrs. Bosch craned her neck trying to see.
“I do hope it wasn’t the Mathews. They’re such bores and like to commandeer any poor thing that is polite enough to stand listening to them drone on and on about their house in Antibes. As if anyone would ever care! Did the man have a ridiculously large nose? Shaped exactly like the beak of a parrot?”
Hayden could see Ruby again. She had stepped back from the bar, but still seemed to be talking to Daniel. Hayden couldn’t tell what was going on. Were they fighting? Had she already put the plan in motion? Was Daniel only moments away from sending a fireball blasting through the ballroom? Mrs. Bosch was standing at his shoulder now, waiting expectantly. Hayden didn’t look at her.
“Maybe. I suppose, maybe.”
Mrs. Bosch put her hands on her hips.
“Darling, what has captured your attention so fully? Is there some scandal in our midst that you’re keeping from me?”
Hayden quickly turned to her.
“No.”
He scanned the crowd and then nodded toward a sloppy couple sitting at one of the tables in the corner. The drunk man had his hand halfway up the woman’s skirt.
“See for yourself. They don’t look like a married couple.”
Mrs. Bosch clapped her hands together in relish.
“Oh, no, not to each other, that’s for sure!”
Hayden glanced toward the bar again, but Ruby and Daniel had vanished. A swell of panic rose up inside of him. Mrs. Bosch, oblivious, continued her chatter.
“That pretty young thing is the newly married Mrs. Delany. Pricilla plays bridge with her sister, Minnie. Mrs. Delany’s been wed only four months now and I don’t even think that’s the same gentleman her husband caught her with last month.”
Hayden’s eyes were darting across the back of the ballroom, searching for a burst of red in the sea of black and white tuxedos. He couldn’t see Ruby anywhere.
“And that man, now that I look closer at him, he could be Mr. Abbott. Of the Charleston Abbotts, you know.”
Hayden gripped his empty glass tighter and his mouth went dry. He suddenly felt as if he couldn’t swallow. He was about to break through the circle of sycophantic little men still gathered around himself and Mrs. Bosch and go charging to the back of the room. Daniel could have taken her anywhere, could be doing anything to her. He didn’t know for sure that Daniel couldn’t hurt Ruby. Hayden didn’t know anything about him for certain. He wasn’t even human, for Christ’s sake. Hayden felt a hand squeeze his arm.
“Mr. Morrow, are you quite all right? You look dreadful. Do you need to sit down?”
Then Hayden caught sight of them. Ruby was leading Daniel by the hand, away from the bar and the crowd. She seemed in control of herself and the situation. Hayden wanted to call out to her and it took all of his willpower to stop himself. He watched them slip through a door at the back of the room. And then they were gone.
He turned to Mrs. Bosch who was looking at him with acute concern. She patted his arm.
“Too many drinks, perhaps? Do you need anything? Is there something I can do?”
Hayden stared at the door Ruby had walked through with Daniel.
“There’s nothing anyone can do. Not now.”
Ruby raised her head and gazed toward the glowing glass ceiling, arcing high above her. In all of her nights of staring up at the stars, she had never seen anything so sublime. If it was to be the last night sky she would ever see, it would be enough. She had Daniel’s hand in hers and she led him out into the atrium. This late in the evening, with the hotel closed off for the party, the cavernous space was empty and full of echoes and shadows. They were behind the Grand Staircase now and with the walls curving around them and the glass bowing over them, Ruby and Daniel were in their own separate world entire.
Daniel suddenly pulled her toward him, whirling her around to face him. She forced her breath to even out, forced herself to stand tall and become the harbinger of her future. She now felt as if she understood so much more about who she was and who she could become. Daniel let go of her hand and untied his mask, gently dropping it to the floor at his side. His face betrayed everything she thought she knew about him. In the dim light, with the shadows glancing off his cheekbones and the curve of his mouth, with his eyes shining, he appeared vulnerable. In truth, not illusion, and this terrified Ruby. She knew now that to make it happen, to open the path between them, she would have to meet him as he was. She would have to surrender. Ruby would have to trust him, as she had done before. If he was offering himself up to her, she could not hold herself back. They would have to become mirrors of one another.
Daniel stepped closer and reached behind her head with both hands to untie her mask. His head was bent forward near her ear and she shut her eyes against the closeness. He was drawing her in and she knew it. She could feel herself on the edge of something dangerous. Primal. Familiar. Something she wanted as desperately as he did. If she let herself. Daniel lifted the mask from her face and flung it across the floor. He stepped back to look at her and she allowed him, meeting his hooded black eyes with hers clear and wide open. His voice was uncertain, almost like a lover’s.
“This?”
Ruby could not back down.
“This.”
She stripped off her long gloves and moved toward him. Daniel raised his hands and put both on her bare collar bone, spreading his fingers out. He slowly slid them up her neck and along the length of her jaw until he was holding her face in his hands. His fingers curved against the back of her neck and he brought his thumbs up to her lips. There was such hunger in his eyes, but such hesitation in his movements. She didn’t have to fight him. She didn’t need to. Ruby rested her hands lightly on the front of his suit. She leaned against him and then raised her hands to his face. His skin was cool, pearlescent, and shimmered beneath her fingers. Ruby knew this wasn’t a trick of the light or the shadows. It was him, his true self. Daniel’s fingers were in her hair now and he was drawing her closer. Before she closed her own eyes, she saw Daniel’s flicker red and then she let herself go.
She wanted him. She wanted this. She wanted it all.
Daniel wrenched himself away. He careened forward and braced himself with his hands on his knees while he stared down at the marble floor, trying to bring it into focus. The world was spinning, racing in dizzying rings around him, and he had the strange sensation that he had been flung out into the cold depths of space and was only now drifting slowly back down, lured by the pull of gravity. He tried to catch his breath.
Touching Ruby again had felt the same as before, only infinitely more transcendent. It was as if she had completely given herself up to him, but not as the prey gives in to the predator. As a woman gives in to a man and a man to a woman
. As humans do. It was a corporeal yielding, he was sure of it. In those moments, when he had reached out, when he had broken past the barrier with her, he had felt everything. A roaring passion ripping him apart. Pain. Tangible, physical pain in an agonizing burn down his spine. He had shivered and sweated. He was exhausted and wanted to sleep and he had been terrified of dying. He had felt himself at the enthralling edge of mortality. He had known he would not last forever and had been seized by the paralyzing grip of his limits. Limits! He had been contained, walled in by boundaries that were warm and close and kept him from feeling as if he were always exploding into a million tiny particles. He was no longer mere dust. He had felt a pure, raw lust for the woman he was embracing and then a startling rent in his stomach, an ache that seared throughout his entire body. He thought it could be love.
At this surge, Daniel had forced himself to pull away from her. It was overwhelming. Such a crest of fallible emotion. A galaxy of tiny nuances that he had only guessed existed. So many events he had witnessed over the centuries suddenly were illuminated. So many choices and decisions he had previously considered pathetic and dishonorable. Incomprehensible. The intentions and motivations had come forth to him with a shocking, trembling clarity. As the room around him slowly became fixed and the normal coolness of his being settled back over him like a mantle, it occurred to Daniel that he had just experienced something that none of his kind ever had before. He had passed through the threshold of the crossroads, if only for a moment.
Daniel stood up, his face wet with tears he hadn’t even known he was able to produce. He touched his face and then examined the wetness on his fingers. He could feel the smile spreading unabashedly across his face. A genuine, unaffected smile. He slowly, shyly, raised his eyes to Ruby.
“Thank you.”
Though he had just felt everything, everything he could ever have possibly hoped for, he still couldn’t read her. Her eyes were bright, though, and her face radiant. Her hair had come loose and he moved toward her and pushed it back from her shoulder. It was so soft, so fine against his skin. He looked at her hair, caught in his fingers, and then at the curve of her neck, the terrible designs, yes, but also the warmth he knew was beneath them. Daniel stepped back, unsure of himself.
“How did you do that? How were you able to make that happen?”
Ruby caught her breath and smiled.
“I just let go. I trusted you and I trusted myself. I gave myself to you completely.”
Daniel looked away from her.
“It was as before, in the tent. Only then it was just a hint. A glimmering of something more. And this, this was the more. But now there was a glimmer of something else.”
He looked up at her sharply.
“Ruby, what did you feel? Just now?”
Ruby’s mouth turned down slightly. If it was anything on the level of what he had just experienced, it would be difficult for her to put into words. She looked all around the room, everywhere but at him, and then her answer came haltingly.
“Guiltless. Free. Powerful. As if I could do anything and I would never have to care about the consequences. There was no regret. As if no one else in the world, in the universe, mattered. It was all laid out before me. It was all mine.”
Daniel nodded.
“But you didn’t feel me. You felt what I am, but not who I am.”
Ruby tilted her head slightly.
“I don’t understand.”
Daniel took her hand and held it to his chest. The feeling he craved so badly was there, but it was fading. He needed her to make it happen. It was all Ruby.
“I felt what it is to be human. But I didn’t feel what it is to be you. You, Ruby. The essence, the experience of one person. One person, who is everything.”
Her eyes were wide.
“That is what you want?”
Daniel took her hand in both of his and raised it. He pressed it hard against his lips.
“That is what I want. And I want you to know me as well. Me. Can you do that?”
Ruby didn’t blink. She was his, he knew this now.
“I can do that.”
He drew her in again and this time, very gently, he touched his lips to hers.
It was a dark world, full of rushing wind and the sound of the stars grinding down into diamond dust. The first time Ruby could not see, but could only feel as the firmament beneath her rose up and the sky came crushing down and everything she had ever known was split into minute pieces and thrown asunder. Her body had burned and then been pierced with cold and then had left her altogether as she became filled with starlight. She was above everything, in a place where pain and sorrow and loss could not follow her. She could not be disappointed. She could not be betrayed. She could never have her heart broken, for she would never have to give her heart to anyone other than herself. No one could hurt her, no one could touch her. Yet the world was hers, blazing all around her; she need only reach out and take what she wanted. There would never be repercussions. There would never be second thoughts.
But this time, Ruby could feel Daniel in the wind, searching through the darkness for her. She let herself fall apart into those grains of stardust and be carried away, and though she knew the danger, the temptation, she finally went deep, so deep she could see. Only the eyes that Ruby opened were not her own.
It came at Daniel with a force he could not have imagined would ever be inside of one person. He opened his eyes and out of the ash and confusion, the moments began to assail him, one after another after another. He was alone in a forest with snow in his hair. He was surrounded by flames, screaming in anguish, a woman dying in his arms. He was standing behind a tent, trembling in a teenage embrace, he was aching as his body was scarred with a needle, he was drunk. He was laughing, he was abandoned, he was empty, filled with rage, self-loathing, he was reckless, he was helpless, he was ashamed. Brackish water from the bayou washed over him, sparks from popping colored bulbs rained down on him, faces in a crowd jeered at him, called out to him, lusted after him. A safe, warm embrace came around him. His stomach dropped as a Ferris Wheel lifted him high up into the sky. His heart fluttered at the scent of sweat and tobacco and charcoal on fingers. His breath was taken away.
Ruby was in a field strewn with the ravaged bodies of soldiers. Some were clutching spears, some swords, some rifles. Their cries were in a hundred languages. They reached for her, but Ruby felt nothing for them as she stepped through their blood and moved on. She was in a palace with light streaming across her face. She was under a white tree hung with fetishes and offerings. She was in a gilded room filled with beautiful men and women, their eyes glazed over with desire, looking only to her. She was feared, adored, envied. She was trusted. She was unquestioned. She was absolute. Ruby turned away and looked up to the heavens. The constellations were not abstractions, but her brethren. The creatures surrounded her, a rider on a horse with eight legs, a man with winged feet, a woman with a cloak made of eyes, and so many, many more all swirling around her, but she was not afraid. Some went back up into the sky, some went deep into the earth, some disappeared under the water. A few stayed to roam the twilit plains Ruby knew could be her home. Here she could stay for a thousand years, for more, and know that everything she touched, everything that came near her, anything she wanted at all, would be hers.
The expanse before her was fathomless, but she could see Daniel coming toward her, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He stopped and smiled and Ruby knew that he was hers, too. All of this was hers, and with him at her side it could never be taken away.
But that was not why she had come. Ruby felt the essence of the gods coursing through her and knew she wanted it more than anything she had ever desired before, but no. It was not her Iku’anga. It was a path, yes, but it was not her path. Ruby closed her eyes and began to recede. She knew she could.
This time it was Ruby who pulled away first and the force of the release knocked her backwards. Daniel reached for her and
they both stumbled to the ground, heaving and catching their breaths. He held her as she shuddered, gasping for air. Daniel’s heart was pounding as he gripped her and ran his hands up and down her back, trying to soothe them both. She stayed in his arms a moment more and then Daniel lifted her up, helping her to stand. Ruby let go of him to brush the hair out of her eyes and wipe the tears from her face. She threw back her shoulders, raised her head and met his eyes. It was not what Daniel was expecting.
She was looking straight at him, her eyes twinkling, her mouth twisted in a cruel, mocking smile, and suddenly Daniel knew. A dark curtain fell between them, severing him from her. The look she was giving him was one that had been on his own face a thousand times before. Daniel had been tricked.
Ruby crossed her arms and held her head high as she watched Daniel try to compose himself. She watched as elation gave way to confusion and then to comprehension. Daniel smoothed down the front of his tuxedo jacket and straightened his cuffs. He ran his hands over his hair, laying it back perfectly again, but there was nothing he could do about the gray sheen of his skin. Daniel clasped his hands in front of him. He appeared steady, but his voice was shaky.
“So, what’s this?”
Ruby smiled.
“You got what you wanted.”
Daniel nodded slowly.
“As did you.”
“I did. It’s too bad it will have to be the last time.”
