The Flame: A Desire Exchange Novella (1001 Dark Nights)

by Christopher Rice

  “Or made love to her,” Shane says softly, with a hint of childlike innocence.

  “Yeah, well,” Andrew says. He’s got one arm wrapped around Shane’s waist, but he’s gazing down at her. They’re both gazing at her. “I’ll teach you how to do both.”

  Andrew leaps off the bed. The next thing she knows, he’s sliding under her, hoisting her surrendered body up onto his, keeping her face up. His throbbing cock presses into the small of her back, his mouth finds the seats of pleasure along her neck, his hands knead her breasts, and his fingers find her nipples.

  Shane is frozen, his sheathed cock hard and jerking in the air in front of him. When he senses their hesitation, Andrew draws one knee up in between Cassidy’s thighs and uses it to open them further. Suddenly Shane’s nose is grazing hers. Their lips are inches apart. He presses into her for the first time. Carefully. Gently. Reaching down and aiming with one hand. Never once breaking eye contact.

  Once Shane is buried inside of her, Cassidy lets loose a series of wild sounds, unbidden and unrehearsed, only a few of them becoming words.

  “Big…” she whispers. “Both of you…such big…boys.”

  “Your big boys,” Andrew growls into her ear.

  Shane starts to fuck her with long, slow strokes, allowing her to get used to the feel of him. Meanwhile, Andrew’s fingers do a dance on her clit he’s learned after years of memorizing the rhythms of her pleasure.

  Over the course of their marriage, Andrew has taken her every which way from Sunday, but never quite like Shane is doing now; steady, determined, cupping her face in his hands, studying her, their lips grazing, each attempted kiss turning to gasps of pleasure. She has never cheated. For years it has been only Andrew, but now her body is being discovered again and by the man who already knows and loves every other part of her.

  They work together. Her husband’s hard body rocks up against her in time to Shane’s strokes, his cock sliding teasingly in between the cheeks of her ass. For the first time in her life, pleasure feels like comfort, bliss like safety.

  There’s still a part of her that’s convinced Shane might be faking the whole thing. So when he starts to grunt and pull away from her suddenly, she’s afraid he might be flipping out. It doesn’t even occur to her at first that it could be something else. Something far more obvious. He slides his condom off and unleashes his seed across her heaving stomach, grasping her shoulder for support. His mouth against her ear, Andrew says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” over and over again. Encouraging, cheerful—the perfect director, the perfect coach.

  And that does it. Together, Shane’s pained sounding moans mingled with her husband’s full-throated grunts of encouragement send the first wave of ecstasy arcing through her.

  When she cries out, Shane cups the sides of her face, rests his nose against her nose, as if her orgasm were a shimmering, radiant thing from which he can draw more strength if they’re as close as possible.

  Andrew’s hand slides between their stomachs, and then he slides a finger coated in Shane’s cum in between Shane’s lips. The debauched sight makes for a shuddering finish. She is wrapped in their heat and in their strength. Shane’s body molds into hers. Andrew strokes her hair, then Shane’s. Her shoulder, and then Shane’s. He’s in no rush to add his own orgasm to the mix but his groans are soft and satisfied too, as if he came as well. And for the first time in a long while, Cassidy is rendered silent by something besides fear, by the bliss of a dream realized.

  “Belong to you,” Shane whispers.

  “Both of us, “ she whispers back.

  “Always,” Andrew growls.

  10

  Cassidy awakens to the feel of Shane’s breath against her collarbone and the delicious weight of Andrew’s arm around her waist. The comforter slid off them during the night, leaving their entwined, naked bodies exposed to the morning sun. Daylight beats through the bedroom window, falling in a precise, accusing rectangle on their discarded clothes. Andrew usually draws the window shade at bedtime. But they slipped into unconsciousness as soon as Shane and Cassidy were leveled by their respective, toe-curling orgasms.

  Were they truly exhausted, or was their sudden, deep sleep another result of the spell?

  The spell. It’s the first time she’s used that word to describe Bastian Drake’s candle, and it sends a bolt of fear through her.

  A spell means it wasn’t real. A spell means it was no different from being in a drunken blackout.

  Slowly, she rights herself, gently lifting Andrew’s arm off her waist. She scoots down the bed in between them. Only when she’s free of the sheets does she look back to see if she awakened them by mistake.

  Andrew stirs gently and takes Shane into his arms. By the time she’s pulled her robe from the closet, her husband and her best friend are spooning. The sight of them together like this would have filled her with confusion and jealousy weeks before. Now it quiets her fears, fills her with a desire she no longer feels a desperate urge to contain or dismiss. The only thing she’s wanted more than to be sandwiched between them, as she was last night, is to see them like this, their delicious physical contrasts entwined. It’s as if her sun and her moon have met on the same horizon and their combined radiance is neither night nor day, but something almost otherworldly in its ferocity.

  Maybe too otherworldly. But if it were just a spell, wouldn’t it have broken by now? Maybe this is—her mind stutters before it gets to the word real. It happened; that’s for sure. And it was good—dizzyingly, delightfully good. But if she’s going to call it something real, that means something will have to come of it, something lasting. And the only way to tell if that’s even a possibility is to find out just what the hell Bastian Drake put in that candle.

  Halfway down the stairs she can tell the footprints that greeted her the night before are gone. There’s not a single trace of gold residue anywhere on the hardwood floor.

  How is that possible? Did they evaporate? Or did they disappear? She imagines them wafting up into the air like smoke while she and her two men slept upstairs. This vision sets her heart racing to fear’s beat once again. If the spirits that literally moved the three of them to this place abandoned them this quickly, it doesn’t exactly bode well for the future of this… What should she even call it? Threeway? Thruple? Group possession?

  Belong to you…both of us…always. Were those last words the three of them whispered to each other before postcoital sleep the result of black magic? Her gut twists at the prospect.

  Someone is coming down the stairs behind her.

  For several seconds, she savors the uncertainty of not knowing if it’s Andrew or Shane approaching her with quiet confidence, if it’s Andrew or Shane sliding his arms around her waist, dipping his fingers under the flaps of her silk robe and caressing the skin underneath. Is it Shane or Andrew kissing her neck lightly, causing her to sway back and forth on her bare feet within the strong confines of his embrace?

  “Are we glad or sad?” her husband whispers.

  It’s an old line that’s turned into an old joke. When he was a teenager, Andrew’s mother had been a self-help junkie, constantly modifying her parenting techniques in response to whatever faddish book on child rearing she’d read that week. At one point, she became so addicted to what she called “emotional temperature checks,” she started greeting her kids every morning with the same question: Are we glad or sad, dear?

  She turns to face him, and he takes her face in his hands quickly so he knows she’s not trying to pull free, that what she really wants is to stare into his eyes, because her one-word answer requires all the bravery she can muster.

  “Glad,” she whispers.

  “Good,” he says with a smile. “Me too.”

  His lips meet hers. Their kiss is long, unhurried, his embrace so tight he’s lifting her onto the balls of her feet.

  “What’cha doing down here?” he finally asks.

  “The footprints last night. You left gold footprints everywhere and I wante
d to see if any were left.”

  “But they’re not,” he says.

  “No. They’re not.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know yet. But someone does.”

  And it all comes out of her as she guides him to the living room sofa. She describes her visit to Bastian Drake’s strange little shop, the candle with the invitation taped to its side. She keeps her voice to a whisper the entire time; the last thing she wants to do is wake Shane. If she’s going to make any sense of last night’s threeway, she needs to start by having a serious one-on-one with her husband.

  “So you think we only did what we did because of this candle?” Andrew asks once she’s finished.

  “I think it had an effect, for sure.”

  “So you’re afraid it’s not real? You’re afraid it was just a spell?”

  “I don’t know what it was. That’s why I’m afraid. But what happened to you last night? Before, I mean. I saw the footprints when I got home, but what happened right before then?”

  “I thought it was a hallucination, to be honest. It—something came out of one of the gas lanterns by the pool while I was swimming. It was a shape. I think it was a person. But if it was anything, it had to be a ghost.”

  “A ghost. And it came out of the flame, right?”

  “Yeah. But, Cassidy, I don’t think it was real. I think it was just a—”

  “It’s not possible for three people in three different places to have the same hallucination, Andrew.”

  “Well, we don’t know what happened to Shane.”

  “Whatever it was, it made him come straight here. And his face was covered in the same gold stuff you tracked all over the floor, the same stuff that was all over my arms.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So? Andrew, I have to find out what I did to you two. There might be long-term effects.”

  “Come on. It’s not radiation, Cassidy.”

  “We don’t know what it was, and we don’t know what I did.”

  Andrew takes both of her hands in his, leans forward. There’s a passionate gleam in his eyes, the same fire he gets when he’s defending his political beliefs. For the first time since he’s come downstairs, she takes in the fact that he’s still naked; still beautifully, unabashedly naked. And still there, still hers, even after all the rules they broke together the night before.

  “What you did, Cassidy,” he says, “what we did was something we have wanted to do for years. When I fell in love with you, I fell in love with all of you—every part of you. And Shane is part of you. When the two of you are together you make something so beautiful I don’t have words for it. And I’ve always wanted it.”

  “So you’re in love with Shane, too?”

  “It’s not possible to be in love with you without being in love with Shane.”

  “Some people would say that’s a bad thing.”

  “Yeah, well, not me. Maybe another man would have run from it. But the moment I first laid eyes on you together—remember? I’d been trying to find you for days after I met you in class, and then I finally tracked you down on the green, and the two of you…the two of you were…you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

  Tell me his tears are real. Tell me he’s not crying because of some damn spell.

  “But you’re not…gay?”

  “Honey, you know the answer to that question,” Andrew says, and then he slides a hand up her robe and caresses the inside of her thigh. “But I’m always happy to remind you.”

  “Is it like Danny?” she asks. “The way you feel about Shane?”

  Andrew told her years ago about his only sexual experiences with another man, but they’ve rarely discussed it since then. She’s afraid the mention of it now might send him reeling. But no, her husband appears utterly confident, utterly in control.

  “Maybe,” he says. “A little. My feelings for Danny…they happened over time. He was my best friend. I loved him so I wanted to make him happy. And it became more than that. It became a desire to make him happy. And that desire, well, my whole body responded to it. So yeah, maybe it’s like what I feel for Shane now.”

  Or what Shane feels for me, she thinks. But her husband is still speaking so she gives him back her full attention.

  “One thing’s for sure,” Andrew continues. “I’ve never looked at a man I didn’t know and wanted to have sex with him. It’s just not how I’m built. So who knows? Maybe I couldn’t have done something like this when we all first met. But it’s been years since then, Cassidy. Years of watching you two dance together at parties, years of listening to you two singing off-key to the same crappy songs on the radio.”

  “Why does it always get back to my taste in music?”

  “Because you have really, really weird taste in music,” he says, smiling. “But you know, Spice Girls aside, you’re the most important person in my life, and Shane’s the most important person in our lives. In the life you and I have together. Can’t you see? For years we’ve been building this, and last night the final piece just fell into place. That’s all.”

  When she doesn’t respond, he slides across the sofa toward her, slipping behind her and taking her into his arms. It’s similar to the reverse embrace he used to spread her open for Shane the night before. This fresh memory causes her head to spin, her breath to quicken. When the relaxing, narcotic effect of her husband’s touch starts to wear off, she says, “I have to talk to him.”

  “Shane? We both do, I think.”

  “No. Bastian Drake. If that’s even his real name.”

  “Maybe he’s not real at all. Besides, it was just a note taped to the side of a candle. So what if you did what it said? How were you supposed to know what was going to happen?”

  “His eyes.”

  “What?”

  “His eyes. In the shop. When he was offering me the candle, when I wasn’t going to take it, his eyes—they turned gold. Just like what you saw last night, just like what I saw. Pure gold. That’s when I knew something… Part of me went into denial. I knew if I lit that candle at The Roquelaure House, something was going to happen. And I only did it because I was too afraid to come back here and talk about what we did during Mardi Gras.”

  “You were afraid to tell me how much you wanted it to happen again,” he says.

  It’s not a question.

  “Pretty much, yeah,” she answers. “But still, the candle. I shouldn’t have just—”

  Andrew rights himself, cups her chin in one hand and draws her face to his. Their lips are inches apart, but his gaze is intent. “This is real, Cassidy,” he whispers. “It’s real. We’re not here having this conversation because our heads were messed with by black magic. We did what we wanted to do. Didn’t we? Wasn’t it what you wanted?”

  “Yes,” she whispers. “But now that we’ve done it, I have got to make sure we’re going to be okay.” She kisses him quickly and slides off the sofa.

  “Now?” Andrew asks. “You’re going to talk to him now?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, well I’m going with you.”

  “No. You’re staying right here.”

  “Why?” Andrew asks, dropping his voice to a whisper as he follows her up the stairs.

  “As soon as he wakes up, Shane’s going to freak. I need you to keep him from running. Do whatever it takes to keep him here.”

  “Whatever it takes?”

  “Use your imagination if you have to.”

  Oh my God. Did I really suggest that?

  Yes, you sure did. And if you keep thinking about it and don’t start moving, you’re going to end up in bed with them both again before you manage to track down Mr. Not-Your-Average-Candlemaker.

  “How do you know he’s going to run?” Andrew asks.

  “He went missing for a week after the three of us made out for five minutes. Last night’s gonna have him on the first plane to China.”

  “This was different, Cassidy.”

&nbs
p; They’ve reached the closed door to their bedroom.

  “Trust me. He’ll freak.”

  “Because he slept with a woman?”

  “Because he slept with someone he has feelings for,” Cassidy says. “Two someones. Look, Shane acts like he’s this big player with no feelings. But that’s only because he always keeps his feelings out of it. He never plays with anyone he actually cares about.”

  “And there’s no one he cares about more than us.”

  “Maybe,” she whispers, but everything inside of her yearns for this to be true, yearns to believe it with the same conviction Andrew does. She lifts Andrew’s hand to her mouth, kisses the tips of his fingers. When she remembers the way he slid one of them in between Shane’s lips the night before, her lips get tingly and her thighs flush. “Maybe,” she says again, only this time it sounds more like a sigh.

  “Cassidy, do you really think Bastian Drake is dangerous?”

  “I don’t think he’s dangerous. I just don’t think he’s very direct when it comes to his product. And I have to know I didn’t do something that’s going to end up hurting the men I love.”

  At the sound of the panic in her voice, Andrew takes her in his arms again, brings his lips to her ear. “Well, I’m not feeling anything right now that feels like pain.”

  “An hour, maybe two,” she says, returning his embrace. “If I’m not back by then, you and Shane can come down to the Quarter with guns blazing. Start on Dumaine Street between Burgundy and Dauphine. That’s where his shop is, if it’s still there. If I didn’t imagine the whole damn thing.”

  Her husband’s compliance is in his silence. But that’s not enough. She takes his face in her hands, brings the tips of their noses together. “In the meantime, you do anything it takes to keep Shane from running again. Anything. And when I’m back, we’ll figure this out.”

  “Two hours,” Andrew says. “Two hours and then I’ll call the cavalry.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to want to explain any of this to the cavalry.”

  “I don’t care who thinks I’m crazy. I just want you back safe.”