“Sorry,” Laney says, taking his hand. She brings his fingers to her lips so she can kiss them gently. “How’d you turn out so—warm, generous, and attentive? So selfless.”
Each new term of praise causes his smile to brighten. Either that or each of the tiny kisses she’s landed on his fingertips traveled a direct line to his soul. “Sometimes,” he says quietly, “the best way to make up for what we weren’t given is to give it to someone else.”
“Well,” Laney says. “I don’t do one-way relationships, so expect plenty of it in return.”
“Count on it,” he whispers, kissing her forehead. “So you’ve told me what you saw, and I believe every word, but what do you think it means?”
“I think there’s no logical explanation for how she got up to my room so fast,” she says.
“There’s not a fire stairway or anything?”
“There’s only one and I was on it,” Laney says.
“Another entrance maybe?”
“There’s the key card entrance, which I went through, and then the fire stairway, which I was on. Now it has an exit door that only opens to the outside, but even if someone propped it open, I was on those stairs the whole time. I would have seen her. And after I walked away from her outside the dorm, she just vanished. She would have had to get between me and one of those doors and she didn’t… I mean, the rest of it could just be some crazy woman’s rambling. But that part—I just can’t get past that part, Michael.”
“The things she said, though. Did you believe her?”
“There were moments. There were moments when I believed because she clearly believed it.”
“Wow,” he says softly.
“I’m sorry, Michael.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“This crazy story. This doesn’t make for the best start. For us.”
He shifts slightly until he can take her face in his hands.
“Are you out of your mind?” he asks in a whisper.
“That’s what I was afraid you would say.”
“No no no. That’s not it.”
“Well, then what? I’m so confused.”
“If there was even a moment when you believed the things Lilliane said to you today, that means you chose me over the chance to live forever, the chance to be as beautiful as you are now for all time. Tell me, Laney. How could I ask for a better start than that?”
When their lips meet, she takes his face in her hands, enjoys once again the thrill of being able to touch him in such an intimate way. Even though just she’s felt the heft of his cock and the heat of his seed. She lays her fingers gently against the hard ridges of his cheekbones and jawline while their kiss seals them together. It still feels as tender and powerful as it did the night before.
12
LILLIANE
Alone on a bench across from St. Louis Cathedral, Lilliane watches the rain collect atop the candle’s round bed of wax, marveling at how the deepening pool inside the glass container makes the candle look like a pathetic, ordinary thing. The thunderstorm has cleared Jackson Square of its street musicians and artists. She has set the candle just outside the shelter offered by her umbrella.
It wasn’t easy to leave the comfort and warmth of her hotel suite in this storm, but she didn’t want to risk Bastian appearing to her at her hotel for the first time. The Montelone has been her safe space for years. But if ever there was a night for Bastian to break decorum and cross a boundary unannounced, it was tonight, on the eve of her thwarting his efforts directly for the first time since they met decades before.
The sudden ghostly silence that fills Jackson Square doesn’t surprise her in the slightest. Lilliane has seen Bastian stop time before but the sight this time is impressive. Frozen raindrops surround her, each one suspended perfectly in place. The security lights along the rooflines of the Cabildo and the Presbytere, which seemed to waver only seconds before in the wind and rain, now pierce the air around her, as substantial as ivory tusks. Where their beams hit the frozen raindrops, they carve stained-glass patterns of light and dark through the air itself.
In contrast to the drama of this dramatic, frozen tableaux, Bastian’s approaching footsteps are quiet, almost polite. They’re the only two people for blocks who can see each other right now. Still, she refuses to look at him as he closes his purple umbrella and rests it against the edge of her bench. She does the same with her own umbrella as he hefts the candle from the bench in both hands.
A sound like a snake’s hiss draws her full attention at last.
What was once Bastian’s gift for Laney Foley is now dark sand passing through the gaps between his pale, smooth fingers, dark sand laced with just the slightest hints of gold radiance, which flicker and die as it floats through the air, turning to dust, vanishing altogether before it can reach the flagstones at Bastian’s feet.
“Never seen that before,” Lilliane says.
“Neither have I,” Bastian responds.
“Well, there’s plenty more where that came from. I’ve kept you well stocked.”
“What will it matter if you try to stop me every time?”
“Oh, Bastian. There’s no stopping you.”
“You did today.”
“Who knows? Maybe today was a one-time thing. Or maybe I’ll try again. Depending on my mood.”
“Until—?”
“Until what?”
“Is this a game you’re going to play with me now?” he asks.
“Are you suggesting I’m trying to blackmail some answers out of you?” Lilliane asks.
“Your words, not mine.”
“I see.”
“I could just abandon you,” he says.
“Could you, really?” she asks. “Could you just abandon me, Bastian?”
He doesn’t answer.
“That’s what I thought,” she says. “You have no control over what you do. I saw it last night on the roof of the cathedral. You were pulled away from me by a force you barely understand.”
She realizes he is the closest to anger she’s ever seen him, and this satisfies her deeply. His eyes are ablaze with the gold radiance they must both work to conceal from ordinary humans in moments of anger and passion.
“Twelve-hundred people,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“Twelve-hundred. That’s how many I’ve visited since this journey began. That’s how many I have helped. There are only twenty-three of you, Lilliane.”
“Yes, but we live forever with the knowledge of what you’ve done.”
“With what you failed to do.”
“You liar!” she roars. She’s on her feet before she can stop herself, her voice echoing queerly through a square emptied of time and wind. “I was not some little college girl with doubt and mixed feelings. He was my boss’s son and he was white. We could have been lynched, Bastian. What would your candle have done for us then?”
“We’ll never know,” he answers.
“You smug bastard. Sitting in judgment of me when we know nothing of what you really are! You act like a guardian angel, but this is your punishment, isn’t it? You and your little shop. You’ve been sentenced to appear, again and again, at the beck and call of—you don’t even know what, do you? What I want to know is why? What secret are you hiding? What did you do when you were alive to earn this punishment?”
“You have had fifty-six years to be rid of your anger, Lilliane,” he growls. “And yet here it is again. Maybe this is all your punishment.”
“What is your name, Bastian?”
“Good evening, Lilliane.”
“What is your real name?”
“If there are consequences for what you’ve done, we shall experience them together, I am sure.”
“What is your name?”
In an instant, she is soaked. The rain slams to the flagstones around her. The lights along the roofline overhead take on their indistinct, wavering quality. Time is returned to its normal course and flow. Bastian is gone.
Small victories, Lilliane thinks. Small victories.
13
LANEY
From the moment she met him, Laney pictured Michael living in a brightly painted shotgun house somewhere near campus, with a small front yard full of strange modern sculptures and a Golden Retriever he’d named after a famous painter. In reality, his tiny studio apartment is in a large, red brick building in the Warehouse District, and there’s no trace of a pet. And there are no sculptures, unless you count the elaborate cast-iron frame of his king-sized bed, its posts shaped like obelisks with small, four-sided glass lanterns on top. As she scrapes her muddy shoes on the welcome mat, Michael pulls a box of matches from the nightstand drawer and starts lighting the stubby candles inside each lantern.
The power’s working just fine, but he’s not turning on any of the lights. Maybe it’s a nod to Lilliane’s crazy story. Or maybe he’s just trying to rush her into bed so he can do all the things to her body they didn’t have room for in the Kia’s cramped back seat. It didn’t take more than fifteen minutes for the temperature inside the stranded car to become stifling, but the rain was still coming down in sheets, so a jump was out of the question. The cab driver was friendly and Laney couldn’t help but wonder if the poor guy smelled the scent of sex wafting off his two passengers. Worse, had he been able to detect Laney’s struggle not to paw at Michael’s cock through his soaked jeans? Now that she has Michael all to herself again, the idea of more delayed gratification feels as delicious as his bed looks.
“A friend of mine’s a sculptor,” he says. “She made this for me. They’re modeled after the lamp posts that light the entrance to St. Peter’s Square in Rome.”
“Italy,” Laney says. But what she’s really thinking is, a woman made this bed for you? This whole bed? Who? I’ll have Cat investigate. And kill her. “You love Italy.”
“You remembered,” he says with a smile.
Don’t ask what kind of lady friend would make him a huge, elaborate bedframe out of cast iron. Artists are different. Maybe they make huge expensive things for one another without expecting sex in return.
“Janine,” Michael says suddenly.
“Excuse me?”
“She made the bed. Janine. That’s her name. And this summer she married her girlfriend in Provincetown.”
“So that would mean her girlfriend is now her wife,” Laney says.
“Very smart, Miss Foley.”
“You’re gonna have to stop calling me that, Professor Brouchard.”
“Not when it almost makes you come every time I do.”
“You know how to make me come for real now. Who cares about making me almost come?”
Before he can finish his lustful growl, and before he can close the distance between them, she says, “So is Italy your first real love?”
“You could say that,” he says. He curves his arms around her from behind, nuzzles his lips against her neck, allows her to study the bed before them, maybe so she can imagine all the pleasures he’ll provide once they’re both tangled in its chocolate-colored sheets. Safe from the rain. Safe from the fallout of a teacher-student relationship that might have damaged them both.
“Sophomore year of high school my parents took me on a summer trip to Rome, Florence, and Venice,” Michael says, his voice dreamily trailing off. “Let’s just say there was my life before I saw the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and there was my life after. That was the day art became the only way of trying to make sense of the world that held any logic to me. And the whole time, my parents thought I was just weeping because I was exhausted from jet lag.”
It feels like this is just Michael talking, not Michael the teacher. He never offered her classmates access to his teenage self, a privileged high school student with a heart so open he wept at his first up-close glimpse of Michelangelo’s most famous work even though he was raised by two people with hundred dollar bills and ice water flowing through their veins. For now, this Michael is just for her.
“Want to know what else makes me smart?” Laney asks.
“There’s plenty that makes you smart.”
“Well, thank you for saying so, but right now I’m smart enough to know you haven’t turned on any of the lights, which means there’s something in this apartment you don’t want me to see.”
“Or,” he says, kissing her neck softly. “I’m just trying to get in your pants again. I mean, last time I had to cut off power to a whole neighborhood before you let me taste that sweet beautiful little pussy you’ve got between your legs.”
She’s not sure if it’s the sudden burst of dirty talk or the fact that he delivered it in the same gentle tone of voice with which he told the story of his high school trip to Rome that causes her breath to leave her. His hands slide down her waist. When he cups her thighs, she slips quickly from his embrace, makes a beeline for the side of the apartment he’s deliberately left in shadow.
There’s a few seconds of fumbling before she finds the switch on a gooseneck lamp. With one flick of her wrist she’s illuminated a cramped but orderly art studio. The lamp’s bulb is so bright she has to blink for a few seconds to get her bearings.
Two easels flank a drafting table serviced by a high stool. On one of the easels sits the beginnings of an oil painting that looks like a landscape. It could be an abstract; she’s not sure. Most of the space is dedicated to larger versions of pencil sketches like the one he gave her the night before. If this were one of those scary movies her friends in high school always wanted her to sneak into, all the drawings on display would be of her. And there would be too many of them and they would all have been drawn from photographs of her he snapped in secret. And the character who played her in the movie would be sort of getting the message that her new lover was a psycho while the girls in the back row of the theatre screamed that very message at the top of their lungs.
But this isn’t a horror movie, so she’s not the subject of the drawings on display here in Michael’s apartment. They are, however, just as detailed and beautiful as the one he presented her with the night before—French Quarter street scenes, images of the riverfront, various angles on the Chamberland University campus. In fact, there’s only one or two human figures in any of them, mostly shadowy, distant pedestrians, and that makes the portrait Michael drew of her seem all the more special.
“So is this your secret?” she asks. “You’re an actual artist and not just someone who studies them?”
“My secret is that I’m just as happy teaching art as I am making it. Which is a very rare thing indeed. And to be honest, it’s not really a secret. A blessing, perhaps.”
“So you really were just trying to rush me into bed?” she asks.
He’s embracing her from behind again, his every touch making her remember the mad, yet focused flicker of his tongue across her clit. At the sight of the dry paintbrushes sitting bristles-up inside an old coffee can, a plan occurs to her.
“Maybe I just thought you’d be a little kinder on my work if you saw it after I made love to you,” Michael whispers.
“Love, huh?”
“I said I was going to make love. I didn’t say you’d fall in love with me.” He gives her a light nip on her earlobe. “Yet.”
She clasps his erection through his rain soaked jeans.
“That is so inappropriate, Mister Brouchard,” she says, tone full of mock indignation.
“Why? I’m not your teacher anymore, Miss Foley.”
“But you were,” she rasps, palming his length as he flickers his tongue against the nape of her neck. “You were my teacher, see? And you made me want you more and more every day I came to class. You kept rolling up the sleeves of your shirts so I could see these forearms.” She clutches both for effect, as if she were about to pull them free of her waist. She does nothing of the kind. “Some people would call that an abuse of power
, Professor Brouchard. Toying with your students like that.”
“If you were in my head, Miss Foley, seeing the things I saw every time you walked into my classroom, listening to my heart race when you sat down in your desk, you’d know who really had the power.” He gives the front of her jeans a hard tug, just hard enough to send a brief shockwave of pleasure through her aching folds.
“Still,” she gasps, “some people would say it was wrong. The way you felt about me. The way I feel about you.”
“Oh, yeah,” he growls into her ear. She hasn’t yet heard his voice drop to quite this timbre of raw lust. The sound of it has her soaked. “Should I force those people to sit in the corner and watch while I turn your writhing body into a work of art, while I fuck you until you can barely speak? Then those people can decide whether or not I did a good enough job of teaching Miss Laney Foley about art.”
This isn’t just dirty talk. This is delicious, riotously filthy talk, and it’s threatening to drive her to the bed right then and there.
The plan. The plan. Don’t forget your plan!
If it works, she’ll have Cat to thank. Who else?
Cat was the one who pulled that silly article from the pages of Cosmo a few weeks ago, the one with the picture of the happy couple in bed, smiling as they studied crude pencil sketches of a man and a woman’s body. Your Lover’s Special Spots, it was titled. As Cat read her the article, Laney mocked the idea of drawing circles on some silly sketch just so you could let your lover know where you wanted them to lick you and pinch you and kiss you and probe you. But secretly, behind the sarcasm, she’d longed to have a man do it. And now she had him. But they weren’t going to draw on some stupid sketch. She has a much better canvas in mind.
Michael’s hard, hungry kiss makes her feet feel like they’re leaving the floor. She breaks suddenly, takes a step back and lifts a single admonishing finger into the sudden space between them.
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