Sharing the Darkness

by Marilyn Tracy

  She didn’t dare think about Chris. To think about him was to remember tomorrow, remember that all tomorrows—if she lived long enough to have them—would be spent without Teo. And if she thought about that, she wouldn’t be able to love him now, give him everything in her.

  If she thought about the lack of happy futures, the sad twists of destiny, she would simply curl up in his arms and cry and cry and cry. She had to go and didn’t want to. How could fate have been so cruel as to pair her with this dark man only to have her fall in love with him just as she understood she had to leave him, just as fate was wrenching him from her side?

  His teeth grazed her bared nipple, electrifying her, snapping her back to the present, to this glorious moment. As she arched to allow him even greater access, she understood that tonight she would give the best she had to give, the most she had to offer. Tonight, she would be his wife, his lover, and she would lock away every single gesture, each nuance of taste, touch, smell, and file them forever in her mind, in her heart.

  The heat from the fire seemed to stoke the flames in each of them. His fingers ignited passion even as his tongue fueled an eruption of equal ardor in her. He rolled her over and his long hair brushed across her breasts, making her nipples pucker and ache for a stronger touch. His muscled body rippled gold and his want was evident in his throbbing manhood, hard and vibrant, which pressed against her thigh.

  She rolled again, sweeping his arms out to the side, kissing the sensitive hollow of his throat, letting her own hair tease him. She felt strong and wholly woman as she straddled him, pinning him this time, not with her hands but with her desire, meeting his gaze, seeing him vulnerable for the first time, understanding now what she never had before this moment: that all he’d ever wanted from her was for her to ask him to be with her, was for her to want him back.

  She had to blink back tears at this sudden understanding of him, knowing now how lost he must have felt during the past two weeks, more lost than she perhaps, needing her love, craving her acceptance of him. She wondered if this newfound understanding came from her equally new-found comprehension of her love of him or if it was a product of the moments when their minds had linked, sharing not so much surface, concrete thoughts as those that lay buried deep within souls, the commingling of heart and mind, thought and deed.

  Surely, no matter what she might now comprehend or might be feeling, those remnants of exchanged thought, the unvoiced but recognized thought patterns shared and re-shared, those were the emotions, the enhancers that lent depth to their lovemaking now. And perhaps, because of that depth, he would know that she did want him, that her self-imposed nakedness, her wrapping her body so tightly, so purposefully around his, had nothing to do with their bargain, had only to do with the two of them, with the chemistry—and far more—that sprang so seemingly effortlessly between them.

  But without lowering her mental guard to him, she couldn’t be certain he understood. He had a right to know. It was vital that he be left with the clear understanding that she did want him, that she always had, that she always would. Without the intermingling of thoughts, there was another way…the way used by countless other lovers, a way as old and venerated as the earth itself.

  “No one has ever made me feel like this before,” she said as she ran her hands through the soft, tight curls on his dark chest. “I didn’t believe I could ever feel this open, this…hungry for a touch, a kiss. I have never wanted anyone like this before. Teo…I never will.”

  He looked stunned for a moment, as if by speaking she’d broken some great unwritten law. But his hands raised to her shoulders and in their fierce grip she understood that he was only feeling things that he’d never felt before. Like her.

  She half raised, and in slow deliberation, sheathed him, sliding down, encasing him in her own well of want and need. His grip on her shoulders tightened for a moment, then he shifted his hands, sliding one to a breast, cupping it, snaring a taut nipple between his thumb and forefinger. He placed his other hand behind her, gripping her buttocks, rocking her, sliding her, touching her in ways only he could.

  And she knew from his bowed body, his matching rhythm, what it was to ride the wind, to soar on the edge of the hurricane. How could she even contemplate leaving this, turning her back on the promise inherent in his touch, in his abandon?

  But how could she not, when the alternative meant his death?

  Teo gave himself to the rhythm she created for them, arching to stay with her, dying to explode, determined not to lose control. With each thrust, he seemed to hear her voice, her honey-rich tone. And, whether in reality or in his heart, he heard her say, “I have never…wanted anyone…like this before…Teo…I never will.”

  He felt he was drowning in her, in her words, in the concreteness of them, in the pure solidity of them. They were real, vibrant, viable. He felt he could build a mansion with them, create a stairway to heaven with the sheer weight of them. He felt they were drawing every bit of him into her…mind, body and loneliest, darkest soul.

  Tonight, it didn’t seem to matter that their thoughts didn’t mingle, that he couldn’t probe the secrets of her mind. Tonight, she’d given him words, had granted him the benefit of speech. Tonight, she had offered him the solace, the impetus of her desire. If he couldn’t have the deepest parts of her, he thought in wonder, then he had to believe that she had given him something in exchange that was beyond price. She had given him the promise of a tomorrow.

  As miraculous as her loving had always been, this time, this night, transcended them all. Faster and faster they rocked, intertwined, woven together, losing their separateness in a unity so absolute that it seemed to defy the laws of physics. Somehow, sometime during their joining they had truly become one.

  And when he felt her suddenly freeze and heard her cry out his name, he clasped her sharply to him, holding her, letting her fly, but staying with her, keeping her with him, as he knew now that he wanted to do so for all time. He wanted this, knowing in his soul that it could never be, that for him there was no future. Yet the thought persisted…for all time.

  Her muscles clenched around him, spasmed, and she cried out yet again— ”Teo!”—and for a flicker of a second he felt her in his mind, also, her rich melody of unveiled thought searching, brushing, mingling with his. She drifted away, as softly as a midnight kiss, and he let her go, didn’t attempt to probe any deeper, didn’t try to hold her with him.

  She would never know how much he wanted to believe there was all the time in the world to try to reach her, to slip into her thoughts, intertwine there as they were now intertwined, commingled touching.

  He sensed a great difference in her tonight, felt it in her loving, in her shuddering, exquisite release, and he felt that difference echo inside himself, as well. She had granted him words, had touched his mind, however briefly.

  What she had done was what he had most feared when she’d first arrived. She had caused him to doubt the burial of his dreams, the funeral of his youth. She had made him think things were possible, made him want things, want more and more, not just of her, but of Chris, of day-to-day living, of life itself. Of time.

  He truly wished that all they would need was time. But six months was only a moment, just a whisper of a name during a long lonely night or the brush of a like mind during a rare moment of passion. And in six months, she would be gone. She would live up to her bargain and be gone then. Out of his life. Disappearing as thoroughly as ever he might have done.

  She slumped against his chest, her breathing ragged, her hair blending with his. Her eyes opened, luminous with unshed tears, a question, a sorrow too great to express trembling on her lips. Why did she look at him so? What was she thinking? Was she reading his mind, knowing he couldn’t believe in the future no matter how much she made him want to?

  The entire world seemed off-balance suddenly, as though from the time of his birth until this very moment, it had been a spinning top, whirling in a frenzied, furious line, and now, abruptly,
it had keeled askew. It was as if his entire life had been spent waiting for this one woman. If it had been any other time, any other circumstance, and he’d been alone, he might have dropped to his knees, planted his lips upon the ground and thanked the powers that be for understanding his need for relief, his need for delivery from the pain he’d endured his entire life.

  He felt her tears upon his face and raised his hands to cup her cheeks, feathering his thumbs across her sculpted features to smooth the moisture away, to tell her, without words, how deeply he was moved. Don’t ever leave me, he thought at her. You must stay with me. Forever. I will not let you go, now. You woke the dreams, you have to stay to tend them.

  Did she hear him? Could she?

  She opened her eyes, looking down at him, her lips parted, her breathing still rapid, shallow. She rocked slower now, but tightly, liquid and steel combined. Her eyes were glossy with unshed tears, her skin dewy, and she appeared wholly vulnerable. A single tear crept down the curvature of her cheek. As he gazed deep into her eyes, he felt the explosion gathering in him.

  He wanted to say something before his hopeless struggle with control was gone. He wanted to say something miraculous, a phrase or word that would bind her to him for all time.

  “Melanie…” he breathed out, feeling himself going, feeling the tightening spirals forcing him upward, arching him, bucking him. Now, he thought. Now. And faster and faster the coils tightened, pulling him with them. Now. Now.

  The words broke free, even if his greatest thought couldn’t. “Stay—” I’m losing myself in you. “—with—” I’m dying/living/believing in a tomorrow. “—me!” I’m drowning in you, filling you with all I have to offer. “Melanie!” he rasped. He bucked against her, in her, and felt as if she pulled all of him inside.

  Over her shattered sob, he commanded, “Stay…” Oh, dear God, Melanie, stay with me! “You must stay!”

  And then he was gone, whisked away into an explosion of thought, body and emotion, whirling in that universe she seemed to create for the two of them, and he felt her there although he didn’t understand the thread of sorrow that seemed to permeate her.

  When he opened his eyes, he found her crying. “Ah, señora…querida,” he said. Darling. And then, as though dragged from him, he murmured against her cheek, holding her tight to his chest, “Don’t cry, querida. There’s time. God willing, there’s time.”

  And though his words should have made her relax, smile at least, she didn’t, she convulsed in swift release of pain. And while he didn’t understand her sudden flood of tears, he held her to him, rocking her gently, murmuring her name over and over.

  But for the first time in his adult life, even as he held her weeping in his arms, he felt the glimmer of hope that tomorrow could be a reality, that belief and trust might be words that could be used and relied upon.

  “You will stay,” he said, and then again, “You will stay with me.” It was only much later that he understood he hadn’t asked her to stay, that he’d commanded it. And only much, much later that he remembered he’d spoken the words as a talisman against losing her.

  Melanie woke and lay perfectly still, listening to Teo’s soft, steady breathing. His long black hair, smelling of herbs, of pine, of her, spilled across the pillow, half masking his face, blanketing her hand, which had rested the night against his shoulder.

  She remembered the tenderness with which he had carried her to the bedroom after her tears had abated. She hadn’t been able to tell him why she cried, that his harsh command for her to stay with him—a demand she would have given all she owned or ever knew to accede to—had totally undone her, that she had no reserves left to hide behind. Except her carefully guarded mind, and that, now, was only focused on his safety, on Chris’s.

  He’d ground out the words in his height of passion, but she hadn’t been deluded into believing them extravagant, words tossed away at the moment of release. No, his command, his order, had come from the depths of his heart, his soul. With those words, he hadn’t needed to add others, such as longing, need, want, love. He had shown her, had demonstrated the emotions she’d craved every night for the longest weeks of her life. Everything he had to offer her had been steeped in each syllable, each desperate sibilant, even if he didn’t know it, or wasn’t willing to admit it.

  And that he’d said them even as she knew that she was leaving—had to leave for his sake—had torn her apart, cut at her in a way she’d never known before, would never know again but would remember every day, every night, for the rest of her life.

  Somehow, his doing so now, on the eve of her departure made a mockery of everything he’d said, every emotion he’d dredged up. Because she knew instinctively that only he could have done so had he begun to believe that she might stay, that she could stay. He hadn’t asked her to stay with him that first day in his kitchen, he’d tried forcing her into a corner.

  And while she might have believed that he had manipulated her all that long, long second day in his home, she had known at his first kiss, and truly knew now, that she would have stayed with him no matter what the terms of his bargain might have been.

  But not Teo. He wasn’t the type of man who stumbled around in a morass of self-pity, of self-questioning. He was, as the PRI files had designated him, a man of extreme conscience. That didn’t mean he would always fight on the side of right or good, that he would forever wear a white hat and ride off into a sunset. On the contrary, it meant he would only fight if he saw a ferocious need to fight…and it wouldn’t matter whether right or good had anything to do with it. It would only matter how Teo Sandoval perceived it.

  And Teo Sandoval wanted her to stay.

  And, for his sake, she had to go.

  Somehow his acceptance of her lame excuses for her tears had made her feel all the worse, made her ache to tell him the truth, to let him know how much she wanted to tell him yes, she would stay. If only she could.

  One of his muscled arms covered her, all the blanket she’d needed through the dark, cool night. She had seen him angry, sending thunderbolts to strafe the sky; she had seen him passionate, exhorting her body to heights of intensity she’d not believed truly possible before; she’d seen him confused, perplexed by her, amused and tender with her son.

  But until now, asleep, lips parted, brow smooth and untroubled, long, dark lashes fanning golden cheeks, watching him with love in her heart, departure in her mind, she realized she hadn’t known him at all. Spent, passion laid to rest, he looked as impervious to the world’s chaos as ever and yet there was a vital difference. He was so very young.

  In his power, with his multilayered talents, his forbidding stare, his glittering silver-blue gaze, she’d forgotten that he was only thirty-four or thirty-five years old. The anger gone, the keep-the-world-at-bay attitude absent, Teo appeared what he was: a man on the threshold of life, decades before him, a long stream of time stretching into the future. Time to find love, family, creativity.

  He could find all of that now, she told herself. She tried believing he would seek out the world now, because now he would want it more than he would need to shut it out. She tried to convince herself that he could find all that once she left him.

  But she shivered as a stray truth, an understanding of him, chilled her. He wouldn’t see her departure as helping him, as a noble gesture. He would see it as betrayal. As another betrayal. She knew how thoroughly he’d poured his heart free tonight, and he would see her leaving him as ultimate repudiation of his request. Of him. And he would damn her for it.

  As she was damning herself. Because now, knowing she loved him, she couldn’t understand how she was supposed to imagine living without him. Was this why she’d traveled all those miles, run that fast and furious, only to find him and then have to leave?

  With tears threatening her anew, she slid from beneath him, pulled the covers over his bare, half-turned shoulder, and quickly dressed. She kept her mind firmly sealed as she snuck from his bedroom, across the cavernous l
iving room and through to the kitchen. Once there, she found pen and paper in a small drawer and after two or three false starts, managed to leave Teo a note.

  This horrible task complete, she quickly roused Chris, dressed him, and with only one or two reinforced mental messages—done so quickly that Teo couldn’t have heard them in his deep sleep—managed to collect her son, his few things and, hopefully, her own thoughts.

  She carried Chris out to the living room, holding a finger across her lips, again adding the notion of Teo sleeping.

  The first light of morning crept down the abyss, sending shards of shadows across the huge windows, letting in the grayest of dawn’s rays. Melanie held Chris for a moment, standing before the mammoth windows, looking out for the last time, wondering how she’d ever been frightened of the glorious view, the expanse of quiet and peace, wondering how she’d ever found it strange, bizarre. This view, this room, these windows, all were simply an extension of Teo. All—the cavern, the monolithic mirrorlike windows, the view of the abyss and the mountain wall facing it—were breathtaking, spectacular, a little frightening. Unique. Like the man who had created them.

  Chris stirred in her arms. “Feed Gina?” he whispered.

  “Not now,” she murmured, and felt a pang of guilt. The first time in his young life that he’d ever had a semblance of normality, a creature to feed, to love, a man who wasn’t frightened of him, who had worked with him to strengthen his gifts, and she had to take him away.

  They’d run to get here, to be safe in the home of the mountain king, and now were running for safety, both for the safety of her son and the very man they’d sought for protection. How many times would they be running in Chris’s lifetime? Would the running turn Chris into another Teo, a man who hated society, who shut it out, who demanded rather than asked, who repudiated rather than sought in even the most simple of contacts?

  But if Pablo was right, if she didn’t leave now, there wouldn’t be any running at all. At least not for her. Not for Teo. And Chris wouldn’t be allowed the opportunity to escape a second time.