LUCIEN: A Standalone Romance

by Glenna Sinclair

  “Actually, I feel like I should,” Levi said. “I was hoping you’d feel up to making the arrangements for your brother’s funeral today.”

  I grimaced. Definitely not the way I wanted to spend my first day in the city, but I recognized that it needed to be done. I wouldn’t even be here if Matt hadn’t sent Levi to get me. I had to pay my respects—and figure out how to send my brother off in a way that made sense.

  “I really don’t want it to be anything big,” I said. “I wasn't lying when I said I was the only one left. There’s nothing more depressing than a small funeral.” I knew that one from experience. “I’d be the only one there.”

  “That’s not true,” Levi said. “I’d be there.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I do. He saved my life. And even though he was on the payroll, I really did consider him a friend. I’m not saying that for your consolation. It’s the truth.”

  I decided, in the end, that cremation was fine. That the funeral could just be us in the room with my brother before they burned his body. That seemed to satisfy whatever part of Levi wanted the ritual of the final rites.

  “Do you want to see your brother before they put him in?” Levi asked. “All of the formalities—the paperwork, the identification—that’s all taken care of. It would only be if you wanted to. Before he’s cremated.”

  ***

  I wondered if I should be crying—if he expected me to cry. I just didn’t feel like crying. And I didn’t understand the draw of gazing upon the face of someone who was dead. He wasn’t going to hear me if I came up with anything to say. There weren’t going to be any pearls of wisdom I was going to catch from those dead lips.

  Still, there was the fear that I might regret not seeing him, consigning him to the flames without that last look.

  “I’ll be quick,” I said, motioning to the technician standing by, who opened the coffin.

  “Take your time,” she said. “There’s no hurry.”

  “I guess he isn’t going anywhere,” I said, wincing at my own poorly timed joked. I didn’t know what to do or say, didn’t understand how I needed to act. This was the second person I’d lost in my life to an untimely, violent death. It didn’t get any easier.

  I cast my eyes downward, and sure enough, there was Matt. Levi hadn’t been lying to me. My brother was lying in the casket, ready to be transformed into ashes that I could store in a convenient urn.

  I willed those eyes open again, even if I knew I was an idiot for doing so. He was dead. Gone. This body was an empty vessel. It wasn’t my brother anymore.

  And yet I did have questions for him. Why had he pushed Levi out of the way? Why hadn’t he just let the man take the bullet that was intended for him? What was the special thing that my brother had seen in Levi to save him? And why had he asked Levi to save me?

  I thought I’d known my brother well, but maybe I only knew him as well as he had known me. I’d made sure that Matt didn’t know what had happened to me, that he knew as little as possible about the hell he’d left behind when he went to New York City.

  But somehow, with his dying breath, he knew that I still required saving, and had sent Levi to complete a task he hadn’t been able to do.

  Maybe Matt knew more than I thought he did.

  There was no more knowledge I could glean here. I stepped away and nodded at the technician, hoping I looked like I’d been making peace with the fact that my brother was dead.

  Levi put his arm around me as the technician closed the casket again and turned on the conveyer belt, feeding my brother into the oven. I waited there, expecting to feel grief, but there was just a gaping emptiness. My brother’s death had brought the man beside me into my life. It was a never-ending cycle of loss and gain. I’d known that long before I met Levi.

  I itched to go somewhere—anywhere—away from here, but I forced myself to be patient, to draw strength from the warmth of the man beside me, and the relentless professionalism of the technician in charge of this operation.

  “You can go, if you’d like,” she said, and I was so thankful that I could’ve kissed her on the mouth. “This is something of a process. We’ll have the remains ready for you in the urn you selected in a few hours.”

  “Let’s go,” I said eagerly, looking up at Levi. “Leave the professionals to their jobs.”

  “If that’s what you’d like to do.”

  Grief was a funny thing—a twisting, unexpected thing that I couldn’t begin to understand. I’d loved my brother, and depended on him. Why couldn’t I hold vigil there at the facility, staying with him until his transformation to ash was complete? I simply didn’t want to. I wanted a distraction. I needed one.

  We had a late lunch—or an early dinner—and Levi took me driving around the city, silent as I vibrated with excitement at the looming buildings, the landmarks I’d only ever dreamed about, the crush of people all wanting to be here, right here, in this city. My heart beat in time with the pulse of this place. This was going to be home.

  The next low point came when I held what remained of Matt in my two hands—a deceptively heavy urn that I regretted. It was too real, then, and I could sense a kind of eagerness in Levi, a desire to see me emote something normal. I wished I could squeeze a few tears out for him, but all I felt was surreal regret. All that was left of my brother had been crammed in this vase. It was almost silly.

  “Can we go home now?”

  “Home?” Levi looked down at me, startled. “You want to go home?”

  “Back to your townhouse.” I wondered if there was a normal way to ask Levi to carry the urn, but I couldn’t think of one, suffering silently over its strange weight in my hands.

  “Okay.” Levi looked strangely relieved.

  “Did you think I meant that house I used to live in?” My lip curled up derisively. “Because that wasn’t my home. I was only sleeping there.”

  “My townhouse is home now?” Levi and I motored down the road, and I pushed Matt’s urn to fit in the cupholder, able to breathe easier when not touching it.

  “Your townhouse feels more like home than anywhere I’ve been.” It was a stretch of the truth. That house had been home, once, but that had been so long ago that it was lost in the sea of painful memories. It was better to hate all of its history than to cling to the handful of happy moments.

  We arrived and Levi took the urn without me asking him, setting it on a table in the entryway of the townhouse.

  “What do you think you’ll do with him?” he asked. “Keep him in the urn? Take him back to your town?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There were places in this city he loved,” Levi offered. “We could spread some of the ashes there.”

  Grief was a sudden tidal wave, and I grabbed at Levi, tearing at his shirt, casting about for the lifesaver that was going to keep me from drowning in it.

  “Meagan, wait.”

  “I can’t.” I pushed him to the city room, pushed him down on the satin couch that seemed like no one should ever sit on it, and unfastened his pants in one practiced movement.

  “We should talk about this.”

  “This is no place for words.” My pants were down, then off, and I straddled him, much as we had in the plane, but hungrier, angrier—the feelings I was used to. Levi wasn’t a novelty to me right now. He was an aching need. I needed to disappear. I didn’t care if it was light or dark on the other side. I needed to go.

  I impaled myself on him and rode him until I gasped out that completion, burying my face in his shirt that I’d only managed to half remove, cognizant of the fact that he was holding me, continuing to thrust upward, reaching his climax soon after I did. Even as he exhaled his release, his chest heaving, he picked me up, still buried to the hilt inside of me, and carried me to the bedroom.

  There, we did it all over again, rearranging the words in the verses, perhaps, but keeping the chorus the same, both of us coming again, pressing our bodies against each other.

>   Losing ourselves.

  I didn’t know how long we’d been silent until Levi spoke.

  “I don’t know if we should do this anymore, Meagan.”

  “What do you mean?” I demanded. “Why would you say something like that?”

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  I laughed in his face—a bitter, crumbling sound. “You can’t tell me it isn’t any good. I know just how good you feel because I feel like that. It doesn’t make sense to me that you would want to just stop. Why turn down a good thing?”

  I was so pissed. Did Levi just think he could just discard me without regard for what I wanted to do? At the same time, I was confused at my own visceral reaction. I’d never cared about keeping the same sexual partner prior to meeting Levi. I’d satisfy my needs with whoever came along.

  It scared me to think about what that might mean. Could my feelings for the man sitting with his back to me be more than physical? Was that even possible for me? It had never happened before, not even before the man I refused to think about but kept coming back to helplessly, a slave to memory.

  “It’s too good, Meagan, that’s the thing.” Levi turned around, those blue eyes burning. “I’ve never met anyone like you. I can barely match your appetites, and you fascinate me. I don’t understand who you are completely. You scare me sometimes. There’s something deeper there that I haven’t figured out yet. I want to figure it out, even if I think you don’t want me to.”

  I sneered at him even though I knew exactly what it was that he’d find if he dug deep enough. He had more than enough resources to do so. And I’d be helpless, absolutely unable to stop him from discovering my darkest secret.

  That frightened me enough to try to drive him away.

  “You’re a billionaire,” I said, flipping my hair at him. “I guess you’ll be able to buy the next best thing.”

  I rose to go, to flee from the inevitable, but Levi lunged across the bed, snagging my wrist.

  “What do you want from me, Meagan?” he asked. “Do you want my money? I’ll give you every penny. You can be on the cover of Forbes. You can have my company. My home. Every single thing I own. Just tell me what you want from me.”

  I didn’t know what to say. There would’ve been a time when I would’ve gladly taken a check for much less than a billion dollars and been on my way, whistling cheerfully until I found the next life to collide with, but this was so much different than anything I’d ever experienced. It was insane to consider, but I felt like anything was possible as long as I was with Levi. He was different from everyone else. He made me want to be different, too.

  “Do you want me?” he asked. “Is that what you want? My body? My soul? Just name it, Meagan. I’ll give it to you. You can have it. It’s all yours. All of it.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to do this anymore,” I said, my voice small. “You can’t say that and then offer all of this.”

  “It’s too late,” Levi said. He took my hand and lifted it to his lips, kissing it softly before turning it over, kissing my palm, the translucent skin of my wrist.

  “What’s too late?” My words were hardly louder than a whisper, but they sounded like a shout in the quiet room.

  “It’s too late to stop what we’re doing.” Those kisses continued up my arm—the bend of my elbow, the swell of my bicep, my shoulder.

  “Too late to stop?” I was breathless by this point. I didn’t want him to stop. I didn’t ever want him to stop.

  “Yes, too late to stop,” he said, scraping his teeth along my neck, making me moan. “I think I’m getting addicted to you, Meagan, and it scares the shit out of me, but I just can’t stop.”

  His kisses moved down between my breasts, around my bellybutton, lower, lower still, and I didn’t care. I didn’t want him to stop. He was addicted to this? Fine. That made two of us.

  Chapter 6

  It shouldn’t have been sunny today. The weather was a betrayal, the unseasonable warm air, chirping birds. The autumn leaves were holding on to their color. If not for the fact that we were all standing in a graveyard, it would’ve been a fine day to be alive.

  There weren’t many people here, but I guess I should’ve expected it. There weren’t that many people in our lives, either, or I would’ve hoped something would’ve turned out differently.

  Matt stood beside me, his hulking physicality a comforting presence. It would’ve been even better if I could’ve leaned into him, let him do my standing and my mourning for me, and he would’ve. He was that kind of person, my brother. He’d breathe for me if I asked him to.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to look at him, let alone touch him. I couldn’t even touch myself, my arms held stiffly out at my sides, the droning of a preacher I’d never seen before in my life washing over me. I wondered idly if the funeral home rented them. When I’d called Matt with the news, too horrified to feel anything but numb, he’d left New York City instantly, boarding a bus even as he continued to push me for details I couldn’t give him.

  He was a good brother—the best. He’d been mostly responsible for making the arrangements. It was his nature, as the older brother, to speak up for me when words stuck in my throat, to explain me to people who asked me questions over and over again when I failed to summon the voice to answer.

  “They were pretty close, Mom and Meagan,” Matt would say, crossing his arms over his chest. “Meagan was the one who found her. I think you can find some sympathy inside of yourself and ask me the hard questions instead of her. Don’t you think she’s been through enough?”

  That was what he’d said to the cops, anyway, who found it hard to believe that theirs wasn’t the first number I’d called when I found her, lifeless, in her bed.

  And yet for all of his strengths, my brother’s biggest weakness was that he didn’t have a clue what I’d been through. He didn’t have a clue what had happened to our mother. To me.

  I flinched violently when Matt took my elbow.

  “Easy,” he said, his tone light, reasonable. “Funeral’s over, Meagan. Unless you want to stay here longer.”

  The preacher had long since completed his droning and wandered off across the graveyard to his battered compact car, and a piece of heavy machinery loomed a few yards away, ready to shove a pile of dirt over my mom’s coffin. I didn’t want to be here, but I was here all the same. I’d done everything in my power to avoid this day, and yet here I was.

  And there was my mom in the ground.

  “Meagan?”

  “This is all my fault,” I muttered, my throat thick with the tears I wanted to shed but couldn’t. I was too sick. This couldn’t really be happening.

  “Don’t say that,” Matt commanded. “Mom was sick. She’d been sick for a long time. She’s in a better place now.”

  The heavy machinery chugged to life, heaving toward the dirt pile at the edge of the open grave. My brother, still gripping my elbow, steered me away, seemingly certain that I shouldn’t watch.

  She hadn’t raised us with religion, but I was certain of one thing—my mom really was in a better place. Anything was better than the place she’d been in…the place I’d been in, as well.

  I thought about going back to that silent house, smelling of bleach and sickness, and my knees gave way.

  “Meagan!”

  My brother caught me before I could fall, swinging me toward a cement bench erected beside a grave by some other grieving family.

  “Don’t make me go back there,” I babbled, terrified at the idea of the ghosts that would be there, waiting for me in that house. “Please. I can’t go back there.”

  “Go back where?” My brother’s face was pinched with concern, and I hated being so weak in front of him. He had his own concerns, and he hadn’t understood what it had been like in the house. He couldn’t know because I’d never told anyone.

  “Just take me with you,” I begged. I knew I sounded desperate, and I hated it, but it was the most honest I could’ve been.
I was desperate to get out of that house, out of this town, out of my life.

  “Meagan, you know that I’m still trying to get on my feet,” Matt said, looking chagrined. “I’m sorry that you were the one who found Mom like that. You don’t want to go back to the house, and I understand that, but you have to.”

  “I won’t be any trouble,” I promised him, shaking my head back and forth violently. No. I couldn’t go back to the house. I wouldn’t. I was going to escape. This was the only chance I’d get. “You know that I’ve always wanted to live in New York City. I would be able to help you with your rent. I’d get a job anywhere to start, and I’d be so good that I’d start climbing the corporate ladder, or whatever. You just have to give me a chance.”

  “I know you’re going to be great at whatever you choose to do,” he said, his face sad, “but I’m living in a hole in the wall with three other guys. I can’t bring my sister into that kind of living situation, understand? I don’t trust them.”

  “I’ll sleep with a baseball bat,” I said, the words rushing out of my mouth. “I can handle myself.”

  Matt snorted. “You’re from Nowhere, New York, Meagan. This is New York City we’re talking about. You have no idea about the kinds of things that can happen there.”

  With that statement, I knew I was much more worldly than my big brother. It was a moment that should’ve upset me more. I’d always felt that he was the one who was going to whisk me away from all of this pain and suffering and torment. He was going to be the one who was going to save me.

  But he couldn’t save me. He hadn’t. And he wouldn’t.

  I hadn’t been able to save myself, either. Or my mom.

  “Meagan, you know I don’t want to leave you here, alone in that house,” he said, “but you have to give me a chance to establish myself in New York City before I can just bring you there to live with me. I have to pay my dues.”

  He continued talking, and I let his words wash over me, unfeeling. He was promising to move me to the city in a year’s time, after he could determine how some job prospect was going to pan out. Matt sounded hopeful, determined, and that was all well and fine, but I knew I couldn’t trust my big brother to save me anymore. He didn’t have a clue about what could happen to a girl left on her own.