No Trespassing

by KD Robichaux

  He stares into my eyes, the look of love so blatantly clear inside his that it takes my breath away, as he cups my cheek and uses his thumb to brush away my tears. And with the sweetest smile lifting the corner of his lips, he whispers back, “I just did, love.”

  I’VE NEVER MADE a promise I didn’t intend to keep. I’ve also never made a promise to a woman before. I’ve never told someone I was dating that I loved them, because I’ve felt like I knew what love is. I saw it growing up with Mr. Watson and Miss Potts, and I never felt for a woman what I saw in the eyes of those two when they looked at each other.

  Until now.

  When I was young and would stand between Mr. Watson and Miss Potts, there was a swirl of feelings in the air. An electrical crackle soothed by a feeling of comfort and calm. Almost like the sting of alcohol being poured on a scrape, and then the immediate feeling of relief when someone blows on it. Worth the pain to feel that overwhelming reprieve.

  It’s the same feeling I get when I’m with Emmy. Not having been around it in years, it was easy to recognize. Like a familiar scent. I can’t smell blueberry muffins without thinking of my college roommate, Lee, because he lived on them when he was studying for a big test. He had so many containers of them that it permeated the air of our dorm room. So now, whenever I smell anything blueberry, it takes me back to cram sessions with Lee, staying up late, crushing Red Bulls and junk food, even this many years later. I haven’t been around that feeling of all-consuming love since Miss Potts passed away, but as soon as I had Emmy in my arms, there it was. But instead of sensing it between two other people, it was me getting to experience it firsthand, and it’s a full-body experience.

  My head is filled only with thoughts of her. My hands itch to touch her, whether to bring her the most intense pleasure, or just to feel she’s really right here, within my reach. My heart pounds inside my chest with excitement, every moment spent with her filled with anticipation of learning something new about her. My stomach is full of butterflies, and they set off in flight every time she looks up at me with those hypnotic green eyes, which right now are filled with tears. But hopefully I’ve turned those salty drops of fear into ones of happiness at my promise.

  She doesn’t say anything, but I’ve learned that when something I tell her really affects her, she can’t respond. It’s like I steal the words from her mouth; she doesn’t know what to say. But I can see her taking it all in, internalizing it, and storing it to keep for a while. She’s not ignoring me. She’s not blowing off the things I’m saying. She lets them live inside her, almost like they break apart into little workers that find her scared and broken pieces and heal and glue them back together again. I’ll take that over flowery words any day.

  The panic that had been written all over her face slowly fades. The exhaustion weighing down her shoulders seems to lift, replaced with determination. The light that had dimmed inside my girl suddenly flips back on. It’s remarkable to watch. I’ve never been so tuned in to another person in my life. She gives me a nod, leans down to kiss me swiftly before placing her hands on my shoulders to help steady her as she stands, and then faces the wall of miniature tombs.

  I place my hands on the ground behind me and lean back, tilting my head to one side to watch her as she walks up to the wall. She paces back and forth along the full length of it, stopping every once in a while to read a nameplate, squatting down to look at one below eyelevel, standing on tiptoes to read one up high.

  She takes a step back, using her finger to count up then across. She tilts her head back, and I hear her mumbling, but can’t quite make out what she’s saying.

  “What is it, love?” I ask quietly, wanting her to know I’ll help her with anything she needs, but not wanting to disturb her train of thought.

  “Twenty-five up and thirty across. How many tombs is that?” she asks, still facing the wall.

  “Ummm…” I close my eyes and do the math in my head. “Seven-fifty,” I reply.

  “That’s what I thought. So why is the very last tomb marked 749?” she questions the room. My brow furrows, and she turns to look at me. “This wall, the tombs are marked by a number. Still not in order by date, but each mailbox, basically, is numbered.”

  “I guess so they could find a specific one more easily, since there are so many of them,” I suggest.

  “So if it’s in order, with tomb number 1 at the bottom over here,”—she walks to the far left corner that butts up against the back wall of the mausoleum—“and the numbers proceed up, then back down the next column, then up again, like a zigzag,” she hurries over to the opposite side and points to the very last square at the bottom, “then that tomb should be number 750. Not 749.”

  “So let’s find the missing number,” I tell her, getting to my feet.

  We meet at tomb number 1, and together, we start counting upward.

  “One… two… three…” we murmur in unison, slowly taking a step back and using the light to illuminate each one of the boxes as we make our way higher.

  “Fourteen… fifteen… sixteen… eighteen…” Our heads jerk to face each other.

  “It jumps from sixteen to eighteen. Sixteen to eighteen, Dean. Sixteen-eighteen,” she whispers, her eyes filled with incredulity.

  “1618, love. You did it again. You fucking figured it out,” I say on an exhale, but before I can swoop her up in a celebratory embrace, she takes off past me. I watch as she reaches one of the stone benches in the center of the room, grasps one end of it, and starts to tug. It barely budges, so I hurry to help her.

  We drag the bench across the floor to the spot directly underneath the missing box, and Emmy hops up on top of it. “Holy shit,” she hisses, then looks down at me. “You have to see this.”

  Careful not to knock her off the bench, I step up and hang onto the wall to discover what’s got her so excited. And then nearly fall off when I see it for myself. In the same gold separating all the tombs into a grid, the line separating the boxes marked 16 and 18 is actually a row of Atlantean rings, their triangles lined up point-to-point across the width of the column. Unless you were up here, looking at it straight on, you would never see it from the ground.

  “How do we get it open, Dean?” she squeals, unable to contain her excitement, and I feed off it.

  “We need something to fit in the cracks between the rows,” I say, jumping down and looking around the chamber for a flat rock, or anything we could shimmy in.

  “Dean, my purse. Grab my knife out of my purse,” she tells me, and I glance up at her with a surprised look. “What? I love my city, but some areas aren’t the safest, especially at night, when people like to get wasted.”

  A feeling of pride that she has that protection with her mixes with a feeling of anger at the thought of her ever having to use it swirls inside me. But as she calls, “Dean!” it snaps me back into action, and I run to grab her bag, still out in the chamber of bones. When I return with it in hand, I hold it up to her, not wanting to scavenge through her things. Miss Potts taught us boys a long time ago to never go into a lady’s purse.

  She rifles through it, my anxiety growing with every second she takes to find the knife. “We’re going to have to fix this,” I growl.

  She glances up from her giant red bag to meet my eyes for a moment before continuing her search. “Fix what?”

  “What’s the point of you carrying a knife for protection if you aren’t able to get to it quickly when you need—”

  “Got it!” she interrupts, paying me no mind as she takes hold of the strap of the purse and lowers it gently to the ground beside us, turning to face the tombs once again.

  A conversation for another day, I suppose, but soon. I set aside my aggravation and hop back up on the bench with her, only for it to return tenfold as I watch her struggle to get the knife open. Jesus. If she were attacked and needed the damn thing, even if she found it in time, it’d be useless, since she can’t even get the fucker open. I wrap my hand around her trembling ones as her o
wn frustration starts to show.

  “We’ll be talking about this later, love,” I warn her, my tone deep as I hand her back the open knife.

  “I haven’t had to use it since my dad brought it back as a souvenir from Egypt when I was seventeen. It’s always in there as a just in case. Never had to open it before,” she explains quietly, looking up at the tomb she’s about to open. “I have a whole actual set of dig tools at my house. I wasn’t expecting this adventure or I would have grabbed it on my way out the door.”

  At least I don’t have to worry about her slicing her hand open. With her degrees and parentage, and how careful she was with all the clues and bones, she knows her way around an archaeological dig. I have no doubt she’ll do her best not to damage the tomb nor herself.

  I watch on with bated breath as she sticks the tip of the knife in the crack between the first and second column of marble cubbies. Placing her hand over the square of marble marked 18, she wiggles and leverages the knife, gently prying until the side finally pops up, and she catches the tile in her left hand before it even has a chance to move an inch. She turns just enough to place the square of marble and the knife into my hand before facing the mailbox-sized opening.

  She lifts her hand to reach inside, but then stops herself. Glancing over her shoulder up into my eyes, she asks, “What if it’s booby-trapped? Or cursed? What if—”

  “Em, our tattoos, remember? You got this, love,” I assure her, fully believing in the power of the symbol, and she nods. I step directly behind her on the bench, my feet planting on the outside of hers, and I reach my arms out to brace myself, a hand on each wall, forming a protective cocoon around her in case something scares her and she jumps back. Part of me, the alpha in me, wants to check and make sure nothing is in there to hurt her, yelling at me to lead the way to keep her safe. But this is her discovery. I don’t want to take this experience away from her, so I grit my teeth and wait as she reaches her delicate hand inside the yawning space.

  “It’s open,” she tells me excitedly. “There’s no bottom in the eighteenth tomb. It combines with the sixteenth below it to make one big box.” She leans up on her tiptoes to reach down inside the tomb, feeling around the bottom of the sixteenth. When she finally stops rifling, she lowers onto flat feet, slowly pulling out a box made of a cream-colored stone.

  “Calcite,” she breathes, as if reading my mind. “It’s one of the same materials Egyptians used in making canopic jars. Where they stored the organs when mummifying the deceased.”

  I hop down, wrap my arm around her waist, and set her on her feet on the ground, then pull her to sit on my lap when I lower myself onto the stone bench. “You ready?” I prompt, as she holds the box in the palm of one hand and lifts the other to the lid.

  She takes a deep breath, blows it out, and then nods. Fitting her fingernail in the tight crack, she pops it open and pulls off the white top, handing it to me. She tilts the box carefully toward us, and there, sitting in the bottom, just as all the clues had led us to believe, is the Ring of Atlantis.

  “Do you see it too, Dean?” she whispers, as if the sound of her voice could make it disappear. “It’s really in there, right?”

  “Yeah, Em. It’s really in there,” I assure her quietly, letting her take it all in.

  “I’m scared to touch it. I don’t want it to fall apart,” she confesses, her eyes locked on the small white ring made of sandstone, afraid to look away from it.

  “You don’t have to touch it, Em. It’s your discovery. You found it,” I tell her gently, and I feel her relax against me for a moment before she stands, taking the lid from my hand and carefully putting the box back together. She grabs the strap of her purse sitting on the ground next to the bench and carries it over to the stone table in the middle of the room, setting everything down so she can untie her jacket from her bag. She lays it out flat on the table, folds it in half, and then folds the sleeves over the body, making it into one long rectangle. Placing the white box at one end of the fabric, she starts to gently roll it until it’s completely wrapped up inside, then takes it over to the sparkly backpack I’d set just inside the doorway when I’d gone to grab her purse for her. Securing the pull string and then the button, she places it back on the ground with great care before turning back to me.

  And before I know what’s happening, she’s rushing toward me where I still sit on the bench, and then she’s on my lap, straddling me, kissing me like she needs me to breathe. My arm comes around her hips and I yank her against me, her blistering heat coming to rest directly on top of my pulsing hard-on. I stand and she wraps her legs and arms around me as I walk up to the table. Grabbing her purse, I set it on the remaining bench, leaving the tabletop clear to first set her ass on the edge before lying her back. It’s the perfect height to grind my rock-hard cock against the wetness I feel through her jeans as I reach between us to cup her, pulling a whimper from her as she shoots her hand behind my neck to pull my lips back to hers.

  Gone is my timid, skittish kitten. In her place is a woman so engrossed in her passion for me that I let her do what she wants. I feel her other hand lift the edge of my shirt and then her not-so-gentle touch as she caresses my abs and chest, making my hips instinctively thrust against her. God, she’s maddening. And then she’s yanking at the fabric, desperate to pull it off me. I break our kiss and stand up to take off my shirt, watching as she sits up to do the same, and then to my proud astonishment, she bravely unbuttons her jeans and slides down the zipper.

  “Help me, Dean. Get them off me. I need you,” she whispers, lying back, lifting her hips, and shoving her jeans down. I step back, pull off her Converse, grab ahold of the snug fabric around her ankles, and yank, and the skintight denim comes off, along with her panties. “Now yours,” she instructs, the urgency filling her voice and face causing me to jump into action. I swiftly shed the rest of my clothes, and I’ve barely stood to my full height when her legs wrap around my hips and one arm comes around my neck, hauling me down on top of her.

  I’ve never felt more desperately needed in all my life as our lips connect once more and she reaches between our bodies to take my painfully hard erection in her hand and guides it toward her soaking wet entrance. And with her ankles locked around my ass, she fills herself with my cock, letting out a whimper before a sigh of relief. I feel my eyes cross behind my lids, her blazing heat feels so perfect.

  With frenzied movements, our moans and breath echoing off the marble walls of the enclosed mausoleum, along with the smack of flesh against flesh and the sound of her wetness, I take her almost violently, her urging me on with digging nails and strong legs pulling me against her as she meets my every rough thrust. She’s made me lose control, but as I watch her face, there is nothing but utter bliss written on her features.

  “Oh, God,” she breathes, and her brow furrows, her lips part, and her head turns to the side to press her face into my bicep as I rest my elbows on either side of her. I feel her hands slide up my sides and around my back to eventually hook onto my shoulders and she then lifts herself enough to bury her face in my neck. With my left elbow down to balance me, I slide my right hand down across her throat, feeling her clench around me. Something to explore later. It travels lower, squeezing her breast, before making its way down her side and finally beneath the small of her back so I can lift her enough to pound into her, making her scream out in ecstasy.

  “I’m coming,” she cries into my neck, and her grip on my shoulders tightens, her nails digging in as she explodes, causing my own orgasm to detonate. I groan loudly, shuddering against her, hearing her sexy moans as she continues to come around my cock.

  I lay her back, kissing her gently, sweetly on the lips as she comes down from her high and her trembling legs begin to relax. And that’s when we hear it.

  It starts as a low rumble. And then the rumble gives way to loud, mechanical noises and the sound of rocks smashing into other rocks. I pull out of her gently, kissing her stomach as I bend down to
pull up my underwear and pants wrapped around my ankles. She sits up quickly and then wobbles, putting her hand to her head, and I reach out to steady her. “Don’t move so fast, love.”

  “What is that, Dean? Did we make more of the tunnel collapse? I… I couldn’t be quiet. I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying atten—”

  “No, Em.” I take her face in my palms and kiss her gently. “We’re being rescued.”

  WE COME OUT the unmarked door on the front of the building disguising the catacombs’ entrance to a sea of flashing lights, from both cameras and attached to police cars and fire trucks. Dean’s arm is firmly around me, so I can’t run.

  “I’ve got you, love,” he says against the side of my head, kissing me there. But it does nothing to soothe me. I’m about to go into full-on panic mode.

  So many people. So many sirens. So many news vans with cameramen standing next to reporters with microphones and all dressed up in business suits or dresses.

  Dean guides me up to where Mr. Hosea is giving an interview. I recognize his voice from when I hid behind the door. God, was that really just yesterday? It feels like months ago.

  “—pretty easy, because only the entrance to Tunnel 3 was blocked. A little help from a jackhammer and a pulley system and we were able to move the boulders out of the way. Oh, here they are now! Found these two right as rain touring the tunnel, just waiting for us to discover they were stuck inside. Doesn’t look like they had a rough night at all. And it turns out, the little lady found something pretty interesting…”

  And as all eyes and cameras turn on me, the world goes black.