The corsos paused at the corner, the metal of their bodies creaking as they sniffed the air. In no hurry, they turned their heads toward the dark where I hid. The gas-flame blue of their eyes grew brighter as their iron joints creaked, readying their bodies to lunge.
They would make no sound as they tore my throat open. They had not been built to bark or snarl like living dogs. Only my screams and the grating of metal on metal would cut through the silence on the empty street.
A few more points of light joined the glow of their eyes. At first I thought more had come. But the new lights were too low to the ground, and instead of gas blue, they were tinged with violet, like iolite. Even the corsos stopped to watch them glide over the cobblestones. The biggest among them lowered his head to sniff one. Electricity arced through the iron and brass of his frame, lighting it up pale purple, and he clattered to the ground. The others drew back, skittering away from the remaining little lights. But one by one, they too glowed with the same violet sparks and then fell, eyes vanishing as their brass lids snapped shut.
I couldn’t move. I had lost my night vision to the hounds’ eyes and the little wisteria-colored lights. The corsos blocked my path out of the alley. They had been stunned, but they could shock back into life at any moment.
The last little point of glowing violet rolled toward me. It was nothing but a clear glass marble, with a tiny lavender spark captured inside. But I didn’t have enough breath to run from it, and it came to rest against the side of my boot. Its heat and electricity shimmered through my body. My head fell back against the brick, and my bangs cleared from my eyes, letting me see the blur of the stars and the thumbnail slice of moon.
I saw him running toward me. Though I could only see his silhouette, I knew his shape better than mine, because I had touched his body more than I had touched my own. My hands had learned him in every second they’d spent on his back and thighs. But he couldn’t have been there. He had emerged from my fever dream. If I wanted it enough, he would push me up against the wall and take my weight on his hips.
The warmth in my temples made me dizzy. He held me and put his lips to my ear, whispering my name as the stars and moon went dark.
I dreamed of him in the sweet, damp haze of touch and bayberry candle glow.
Hours later, I surfaced from sleep to the feeling of chambray cotton sheets, worn soft by years of washing. The scent of violets and roses mixed with the soft spice of ashes and cloves. Cambric and ash: it identified him as well as a fingerprint.
“Ezra?” I said before I was awake enough to open my eyes.
I could feel his weight on the bed as he sat near me and stroked my hair. “It’s all right,” he said, and stood up again. “You’re all right.”
I shut my eyes tighter and then let them relax open. It was still night, but through the space between the shades I found a thin line of pink that traced the hills and mesas along the horizon. In an hour or so, it would be morning.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
He shrugged, his back to me. “We still run similar routes.”
“I haven’t seen you.”
“I haven’t wanted you to.” He turned up the lamp, the same pressed-lead glass we’d made love by a year earlier. He looked almost as young as the last time I saw him; a faint shadow of stubble along his jawline made him look barely older. Locks of his hair fell in his eyes, and the lamp lit up the red strands that hid within the brown like stray threads. His trousers had the same pinstripes I remembered, and over his collared shirt he wore a waistcoat he had inherited from his father. It used to be big on him, and now it fit; even though he had a little more muscle to him now, he must have had it taken in.
My coat hung on a hook near the bureau, with my crinoline next to it. I had on only the velvet of my dress over the cream-white of my slip. I hadn’t been this naked in front of a man since the last time I saw him.
He’d loosened the lacing on my corset. I could breathe. I sat up, and my hair fell around my shoulders. He’d freed it from its pinned curls.
I combed it with my fingers. “Were you planning to take advantage of me?”
“If I were, I wouldn’t have left your dress on.” He filled with water two chipped vases that had belonged to his late grandmother. “You wouldn’t have been able to sleep in your coat.”
I recognized things from where he had last lived, where I had lived with him for a few months. The railroad pocket watch his grandfather had given him was on the bureau. The lamp gave off an apricot glow I knew by heart. I remembered the rosewood table where he set the vases. But this was somewhere else. It was far enough out in the country to see the mesas, instead of right in the city.
He slipped the Parma violets and damask roses from the lining of my coat into the water. “You’ve got to stop wearing your corset so tight. You’ll crack a rib.”
I wore it that way without thinking. My mother used to tell me, “Better in pain than unkempt.”
“It’s a habit,” I told Ezra.
“It’s a bad one.” He checked the flowers for crushed petals. “Who’s your grower?”
I sat on the edge of the bed, letting the toes of my stockings catch dust from the floor. “I am.”
“Where?” he asked.
“My sister rents me a half acre on her land.”
“Luisa?” He almost laughed. “She never wanted you involved in the first place.”
Luisa, like my mother, had never wanted a Reyes woman like me involved with a gringo like Ezra.
“Her new husband is a businessman at heart,” I said. It wasn’t exactly the truth. I had stayed with them for a few weeks after I left Ezra. Within a month of seeing me leave my bed only to help Luisa with the housework, my brother-in-law suggested that starting a garden might help my mood. He turned a blind eye when he realized the flowers I grew helped produce spirits rather than lift them.
Ezra’s mouth was the exact color I remembered it. Once when he was sleeping, I had matched it to the outer petals of a blush moss. I wanted to kiss him so badly it stung between my legs.
We had worked together once, taking flowers to the distillery Samuel Arlings had concealed in his barn, and then smuggling the product away. Ezra had worked in the city as a chimney sweep since he was eight years old, so no one thought anything of his going in and out of houses, where he brought the quarter-liter bottles. Our regular buyers furnished him with keys and allowed him in when they weren’t home; he hid the contraband bottles inside the masonry of their unused chimneys, where they would find them, but the authorities wouldn’t.
Our friends had asked why we never opened our own operation, but there was an art to making violet and rose liqueur. It took more time and skill than the bathtub-faucet alcohol that had come into vogue since the Ban, so dreadful it needed three parts cream or orange juice to salvage it. Parma and rose liqueur, if made well, could be sipped pure, but the flowers were so delicate they had to be distilled with water instead of steam.
Ezra still wouldn’t look at me. He kept his back to me. I slid off the bed and put my hand on his shoulder. How hurt he looked made me unsteady, and I braced my other hand on the rosewood table. I’d always thought he’d fall in love with the next girl who carried roses inside her coat.
“I thought you left me to go back to your parents,” he said, checking the flowers again.
I slid my hand down over his shoulder blade and said nothing.
“If you were going to keep working, why did you leave?” he asked.
“Because I knew you’d get yourself killed,” I said.
“I know how to stay alive.”
“Not with me around.” I took his face in my hands to make him look at me, and I felt the soft bristle that had grown in since he last shaved. “I drew too much attention to you. I thought that whenever we got caught, at least I’d have my family’s reputation behind me. The name Reyes means something. I had that. You didn’t.”
“Your family’s name.” He pulled away from me. �
�Hell of a lot of good that did you last night.”
I grabbed his hand before it left the table. His fingernails still had soot under them, but he had cleaned them recently, so the whites were silvery gray. “Thank you,” I said. “For saving my life.”
He smiled the smile I’d first fallen in love with, uneven because he’d lost some of the feeling in one side of his face to a childhood illness. “You had a lot of good petals up under your dress,” he said. “Would’ve been a shame to see them ruined.”
My hand traveled up his arm to his neck, and my mouth found his. I caught the taste of spiced wood on his tongue; he hadn’t broken the habit of holding a dried clove between his back teeth when he was working. He gripped my waist like he always had, trying to feel my body under my corset and slip.
His mouth broke from mine, but he still stayed so close we kept our eyes shut. “Is that really why you left?”
“Yes,” I said, giving up the truth before I could think to lie.
“You didn’t go back to your parents?” he asked.
“I couldn’t.” Not after being with him. Not after making love at midnight and watching the sun rise over the mesas when we were still drunk from it.
His thumbs grazed my cheeks, his forehead resting against mine. His hands bore patches of calloused skin, but his touch was so gentle that the roughness on his palms felt as soft as lilac leaves. He held aside a loose curl and kissed my forehead; I tried not to think of how he used to say my hair reminded him of black magic roses. I was so sure this was a good-bye that I gripped handfuls of his waistcoat fabric; I would not let him go.
He moved his head so his eyelashes brushed my temple. He was taking in the scent of my hair. “Marry me,” he said.
I opened my eyes.
“You may have been worried about me,” he said.
“I still am,” I interrupted, pulling away enough to look at him.
“And now I’m worried about you.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Think of it as strategic business. If we’re married, no one will ask questions when we’re together.”
I tried to tickle him through his waistcoat and shirt. “Who said I’d work with you again?”
“You already are. You just didn’t know it.” He kissed me again, once. “Are you going to answer my question?”
“You first,” I said. “I want to know how you saved me last night.”
He smiled again, like full dawn after rain. He knelt near his bureau and pulled up a board from the floor, unveiling a faint violet glow.
“Lightning marbles.” He offered his hand to help me to the floor. “Sam gets so many strikes out on his farm, we thought we’d do something with them.”
“You still work for Sam?” I knelt next to him. “Why haven’t I seen you?”
“I didn’t want you to,” he said. “He’s teaching me to distill.”
I cleared a slash of hair from in front of his eye. “Good.” Sam’s wife had wanted him to retire for years.
Ezra looked down at the floor. “He figures I know how to handle flowers by now. Even the delicate ones.” He pushed the board out of the way.
Beneath the floor, an old jewelry box held a dozen or so marbles, blown-glass and all different sizes. Within each, tiny veins of electricity sparked and pulsed.
“How do you catch it in there?” I asked.
“You’ll have to marry me to find that out,” he said.
I tried not to smile. “How do they work?”
With a pair of porcelain tongs, he lifted one of the bigger ones to the light. It shimmered like raw amethyst.
“When it makes contact with a conductor, the lightning tries so hard to get out that it melts the glass away, just leaving the electricity.”
“So you can shock police guards and former lovers?” I asked.
He cringed. “I didn’t mean that to happen. I thought you’d run. Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to touch something if you don’t know what it is?”
“My mother told me never to touch anything,” I said. “Especially you.”
He lowered his head so his hair would shadow his blush.
“What if you accidentally shock yourself?” I asked.
He laughed. “It hurts.”
“Then why did I…”
“Because you’re smaller than I am. And I’m used to it.”
I wondered how he pulled the electricity from my body enough to take me home, if my skin let off little shocks when it met his, if the charge passed through the petals in the lining of my coat as he held me. I wondered if it was still inside me, if sparks still spread heat through my body.
“They’re dangerous,” I said. “You shouldn’t be carrying them.”
He set the marble back in the wooden jewelry box. “They’re the only way to stall the corsos.”
“You’ll hurt yourself.”
“I won’t.” He lifted out another with the clay tongs, cupping his other hand to receive it.
“Ezra, no!” I said.
It landed in the hollow of his palm. A halo of violet glowed around his arm, and he fell back against the floor.
“Ezra.” I cleared his hair from his face and felt little shocks on my fingertips. “Ezra.”
He laughed, his eyes still closed. “I told you. It hurts, but that’s all.”
I shoved his shoulder. “Don’t do that.” I took his hand and kissed the faint burn in the center of his palm.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll fade. It always does.”
I climbed onto him and kissed him. I could almost feel the remnant lightning on his tongue.
He opened his eyes. He was trying not to breathe hard, and his lips were trembling for it. His pupils dilated and constricted with the slow rhythm of a lighthouse.
We grabbed at each other’s clothes. I unbuttoned his waistcoat and shirt. He unfastened my dress and slip. Too impatient to strip him naked, I undid his trousers and slipped my hand inside. He was already hard. Later, when we were lying in bed together, I’d tease him for it, but now I couldn’t wait, even for the few seconds of a passing flirtation.
He wanted to look at all of me; he was so hungry to see me naked I could feel it in the way he took hold of my lingerie, like it bound me and kept me from him. He pulled away my bloomers and freed me from my corset. He kissed the undersides of my breasts like he was thirsty and they would turn to water against his mouth. While he followed the lower curves, his fingers explored the rings of brownish-pink at the tips of my breasts, like he was learning to draw them.
I straddled him, my knees on either side of his hips, and guided his erection inside me. He bit his lower lip to stop its trembling. His hands moved so easily from my breasts to between my thighs that I did not realize they were there until his strokes drew out more of my wetness. The tiniest sparks, so small I couldn’t know if they were real or imagined, leapt between his fingers and the pearl that held my deepest lust.
I put all my weight onto him, and it both heightened his pleasure and maddened him, because he barely had the freedom to thrust into me. But he knew the way inside me, as no other man did, and I opened to him so he could reach that last trace of electricity that his amethyst lightning had left the night before. When he found it, his own seed of newer lightning, still in his body, shuddered through his hardness and met the spark I held within my darkest place, just as dawn soaked the room in rose-gold light.
He said my name. I answered with his, my palms mapping the contours of his chest. He said mine a second time. “Yes,” I said as I kissed him, an answer I would give again to any question he asked. “Yes,” I said, as involuntarily as the noises I made when he touched me between my legs. “Yes.” A response to the question he’d asked but that I’d left suspended between us, unanswered, in lantern light. “Yes.” A cry for more of everything: his mouth on my neck, his hands on my breasts, his erection growing harder as he moved inside me.
Yes, things were better for me when I behaved myself. But I preferred the desperate heat we hel
d between our bodies, and the sweet, slight pain of our shared lightning.
GREEN CHEESE
Lisabet Sarai
Oh, I do beg your pardon! Are you hurt? Please, allow me to assist you…”
Caroline Fortescue-Smythe scowled up from the ground where she sat in a crumpled heap of skirts and petticoats. The tropical glare behind him made it difficult for her to see his features. Nevertheless, despite his impeccable English, the man who had slammed into her was clearly Siamese. He extended his hand to help her to her feet. His other hand clutched some bulky contraption of leather and brass, embedded with lenses that glittered in the sun.
“You should pay attention to where you are going,” she grumbled, brushing the dust from her heavy clothing. Perspiration trickled down her spine and her stays dug into her ribs, adding to her foul mood. “I’m not injured, but I might easily have been. You were barreling along like a locomotive.”
“I am so sorry,” the young man repeated. “I was trying to capture images of the race.” He pointed to the strange mechanism he carried. A cheer rose up from the crowd as some stallion or other crossed the finish line. “I was so focused on the horses, I didn’t see you.”
Caroline snapped open her parasol. In its welcome shade she felt fractionally cooler. “What is it?” Aside from the lenses, it did not look like any camera she’d ever seen.
“My latest invention,” her companion replied, pride evident in his voice. “A moving picture recorder and player.”
“Like the Lumières’ projector?” The French ambassador had been boasting about this marvel of Gallic technology at some official function only last week.
“You are familiar with their work?” He favored her with such a warm smile that it melted a good deal of her annoyance. “My videographic device is similar in function, but much faster and more versatile. The same machine can both capture and display moving images. You see, here, I can show you the last race…” The stranger drew her closer and indicated an oval-shaped glass panel built into the side of the recorder. He pressed a button. Sleek equine shapes galloped across the glass surface, the motion so smooth and natural that Caroline was astonished.
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