Salt and Silver

by Anna Katherine

  “Now,” I say. “Now—please—” I rise up to meet him, pull him down to me, get him in me, in me—

  He puts one hand behind my back and brings me up, moving me easily until I’m sitting upright, my legs spread around him. He’s kissing me again. I can feel him between us, and I don’t know if he’s holding back or if he’s holding on, but I don’t want to wait any longer. Now it’s me rising on my knees, pushing him back off our rubber bed and onto—yeah, it’s his leather coat, where he must’ve dropped it before joining me on the floor, and he’s watching me with wonder, his hands rubbing my sides and curling in my hair and he’s whispering my name over and over.

  I brace myself with one hand and hold him with the other as I lower myself on him, and then—then he’s inside me. I fall against him, nothing left to hold myself up, and the only thing keeping me alive is his arm strong and hot across my back, his hand on my head. My breasts are crushed to his chest, and the hot sparks of pleasure from that offsets the small hurt I’m feeling where we’re joined—not that he’s so big, but that it’s been so fucking long. It’s been so long, but he fits in me like a second half, and it’s all I can feel, him inside me, his breath hot against my face. I dig my fingers into his shoulders and slide down as far as I can, until he’s so deep inside me I can’t tell where he ends and I start, my legs straddling his hips, my thighs stretched.

  “Oh, god,” he says. “Oh, god.” I can feel myself start to sweat. If he doesn’t start to move, if he doesn’t let me move—I just want to move.

  “Please,” I moan, “oh, god, Ryan, please—I want, I want—”

  “Yes,” he mutters, and puts both hands around my hips, and then he presses—

  It’s awkward at first; we can’t find the rhythm. My knees are getting rubbed raw, even through the coat, and he’s shaking from keeping it slow, keeping it good for me. I don’t have the muscles for this. But here is the thing: It doesn’t matter. He’s whispering to me, but I can’t hear him, I can’t hear anything except the thrumming of my body, the slick sounds of skin on skin. I plant my hands on his shoulders, and I press down, and he pushes up, and it’s uncomfortable, but we’re so close, so close to being amazing.

  “I want you,” I groan, “I want you, please—” and at last we’re moving together. I can thrust my hips down, and he’s coming up at the right angle, and it’s all I want, us, moving together, fast and hard, my fingernails in his skin.

  Breath and beat and our mouths together; I don’t see stars when I come, but it’s a damn near thing. He cries out into our kiss and I bite my own tongue, and I think I’m crying.

  It’s minutes and minutes before I come back to myself, sprawled over Ryan, my hands in his hair, his hands like wings on my back. Then his muscles tense like he wants to get up, but I keep my head on his chest, listening to his heart beat. Thump. Thump. Thump. We’re sweaty and gross, but I don’t care. I don’t want to move. Ryan and me together was just as good as I always thought it would be. Six years, we’d been building up to this.

  “Allie,” he whispers. “Allie, come on.”

  I let myself go loose and pliant, melting into him. “Come on, Ryan,” I whisper back. “Just a few more minutes.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Your duster is probably toast.” I stick out my tongue and lick his nipple, and feel his interest pique. You know what I mean. I’m not a prude or anything, but it’s kind of weird to think about; I haven’t been with too many men, not enough to be used to this whole I am interested in having sex with you again, like, right now thing. I decide I am in favor of it.

  “The coat’s lamia skin,” Ryan says, which would be more reassuring if I knew what a lamia was. Ryan twists his hips a little. “It can stand up to more than a little bit of you.”

  I decide I do not care what a lamia is. “I love the way you said that.” I twist my hips back.

  “Allie . . .” He runs his hands up to my hair, digs in lightly, lifts my head until I’m looking at him. “We can’t.”

  “I want to,” I mutter, and he drags my head down for another kiss. His tongue in my mouth is never going to get old.

  “I want to too,” he says when we finally break off the kiss to breathe. There’s something in his voice that’s not quite right, but Ryan doesn’t lie to me, so it must be true. “But we can’t,” he says, “so it’s better if we just . . . don’t.”

  It wouldn’t be an interaction with Ryan if there wasn’t some level of annoyance, and I see that we have reached that portion of the evening. I roll off him and push myself up. “Is that how you live your life?” I say. The concrete of the basement floor hurts my feet, but I’m too indignant to care right now. “Because you can’t have everything you just take nothing?”

  “It’s easier.” He leans up on an elbow. God, he’s gorgeous, all tan skin and scars and worried eyes. And I’m sad for him, because that’s a terrible way to live. I want to make him change; I want to be the change in his world.

  Boy, am I in trouble.

  “That’s a sad way to live.” I run a hand through my sweaty hair. But he’s already getting up and getting dressed again, which just shows that I have made a tactical error by getting up first. Dammit.

  He’s pulling on his clothes and watching me pull my jeans back on when I realize: “We didn’t use a condom. Fuck—we didn’t use a condom.”

  Ryan stops buttoning his pants. Holy shit, the man can rock a pair of unbuttoned leather pants, hair trailing down into them. The part of me that never remembers words like “responsibility” just wants to follow that trail of hair with my mouth and make him writhe under me. Again.

  “I didn’t even—it’s been—it’s—I—” he stammers, and I am pretty sure he’s blushing. What? The great and composed Ryan is blushing.

  “I’m on birth control.” I suck a breath in through my teeth and pull my jeans the rest of the way up. I am gross, and I need a shower, and okay, I am on birth control, but we did not use a condom. Of all the stupid shit. “We should fucking know better, we’re fucking adults.”

  “We do know better, we just . . .”

  “Got caught up in the moment?” I ask sarcastically. “Yeah, that’s great, we’re like every sixteen year old in the tri-state area. Shit.” I pull my shirt over my head, forgoing the bra that I can’t see anywhere on the floor. Someone is going to find it at exactly the wrong time, I just know it.

  “I’m sorry.” He looks at me from under his eyelashes, head bowed.

  “Yeah.” I sound a lot angrier than I am. “I’ve never . . . shit.” I sigh. “I’ve never forgotten before. I’m clean, for whatever it’s worth.”

  “I’m clean too. It’s been . . . a long time.” He sounds almost shy, and it is so. Hot. So. Hot. I almost can’t stand how badly I want him again.

  “I feel like an idiot,” I say, and walk toward him, slide my hands under his pants, around, until I’m almost hugging him. And, honestly, it feels more intimate than the time we just spent rolling around on the floor like animals. I don’t know why. We’ve got our clothes on and everything, but this just feels . . . like more.

  “I want you again,” he whispers into my hair. “This is such a bad idea.”

  “I want you again, too,” I reply in a low voice. I lean my head into his neck, lick his skin, taste the salt of his sweat. “What if—”

  “Don’t borrow trouble.” He pushes me away, steps back, finishes buttoning his pants. “Seriously. Don’t borrow trouble. We have enough already.”

  “I’m not, I just—” I put my hands on my hips and watch him pull his shirt on. He walks toward me and I back away. There’s nothing like forgetting a condom to make a girl feel vulnerable and hideous. Not that I’ve ever forgotten a condom before in my life. Ryan makes my brains leak out of my damn ears.

  He grabs his coat from the floor and swirls it over his shoulders, sliding his arms into the sleeves. I swear to god, everything this man does looks like magic all the fucking time.

  “I’m not
a slut,” I say, “but I sure feel like shit.”

  “Don’t feel like shit.” He’s coming toward me again, and I want to back away again, but I will not.

  “Don’t feel like shit,” he orders. “I—” He stops, and I wait. We’re standing close enough again that I can feel the heat of his body through his clothes. He runs his hands through his hair. “Where’s my goddamn hat?”

  “I don’t fucking know.”

  He stares at me, and I want to cry. Stupid emotions.

  “Allie . . .” I look down at the floor, at my bare feet. I need a pedicure; the last remnants of neon orange toenail polish glow up at me. “Allie.” His fingers slide over my chin, cup my cheek, lift my head. I close my eyes so I don’t have to see his stupid face. “Allie, this was a mistake. We shouldn’t have.”

  “You’re right, it was stupid,” I agree in a monotone. Way to make a girl feel special.

  “I can’t regret it, though.”

  When I open my eyes, he’s smiling. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile at anything before, not like this. Not like there’s something wonderful in the world.

  “Me either,” I whisper, and stand on my tiptoes to kiss him.

  He doesn’t pull me close; the kiss is almost chaste. Our mouths are closed, our eyes open, yet when we pull away, we both take deep breaths.

  “We have to get ready,” he says. “We should have been before—it’s why I came down here, to tell you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Enough,” I tell him. “We made a mistake, and we won’t do it again.”

  “But being inside you . . .” His voice is scratchy and rough, and it scrapes over every nerve ending I have. “Being inside you wasn’t enough. I meant what I said. If we . . .” He swallows, and closes his eyes, and when he opens them again there’s a light shining in them. “We’re gonna take our time next time, Allie, and I’m going to taste every part of you.”

  When he walks away from me, his coat flaps, and I’d rather think about how sexy that is than whatever that “if” might have meant.

  Roxie lifts just one eyebrow when Ryan and I come back upstairs. I shrug. She smirks. It’s like we’re having a conversation, except I have no idea what we’re saying. I totally smell like sex, though, and I know it. “I’m going to shower,” I tell her.

  “You need it,” she says, and I scowl at her, but I’m not really angry. As I head upstairs, I hear her tell Ryan that maybe he should shave next time and leave me some skin. I wish I could go back and see his blush.

  I shower as quickly as I can; I don’t linger, I don’t shave my legs. I just wash up, wash my hair, get the basement dust off me, all the sweat. When I’m done, I don’t smell like Ryan and sex any more. Well—I don’t smell like sex. I smell like my sandalwood soap that Ryan is always stealing. When I first started using it, it was the cheapest soap in the little Indian market around the corner, and I associated it with poverty. Now it’s the sexiest thing in the world because it’s the way Ryan always smells.

  I am so gone. So gone. I have fantasies of, like . . . I don’t even know, actually. I’m not fantasizing about babies or white picket fences. I’m fantasizing about us not dying. That seems so grim. But as long as we don’t die, we can be together. Our orbits can decay around each other until we explode.

  Unless Ryan gets really angry that I might be a little psychic. Whatever I did to Stan . . . that has got to be fixed, I think. That shouldn’t have happened, he shouldn’t have forgotten everything about the Door and the hunters.

  When I get out of the shower I step into jeans, pull on a T-shirt, and towel dry my hair. I’m still damp, but I want to get downstairs, out of my stiflingly hot apartment. What I really want is to curl up on my bed in front of a fan and sleep for about a week, but in lieu of that I’ll take helping Roxie get what we need to get through the Door . . . and I want to talk to someone about Stan.

  Roxie seems like the obvious choice, but Ryan is the one lingering in my doorway when I step out to go back down into the diner. The wood is a little swollen from the dampness and heat in the air, but I force it closed.

  “What?” I say, and it comes out sounding really bitchy. Dammit. I lean my face against the door. Ryan puts a hand on my back, and when I breathe in, it stays firm against me. For no reason at all, I want to cry. Or maybe for every reason—we’re probably going to die, if not in some random Hell somewhere, then here, fighting demons. Because even if we close a million Doors, there will still be a million Doors open, and Ryan will never stop fighting.

  I’ll never stop fighting either. How can I, now that I know what’s out there?

  “Stay here. Don’t come with us,” he murmurs into my neck, into my damp hair.

  “How can you ask me to stay here? Really, how can I possibly—” I cut myself off before I say something stupid and sentimental, but I lean back against him so that he’s pressed all against my back, and his face is hidden in my neck. His breath is hot on my skin, and I’m sweating and uncomfortable, but I love that I am allowed to touch him now.

  “I know. And that’s something I—” He stops. What was he going to say? Is it something he likes about me? Something positive? I am practically slavering for a nonsexual comment from him. “You’re really strong, Allie. And that—scares me. Because the women around me . . .” He stops again.

  “We—” I clear my throat. “We don’t have to have a Hallmark moment, Ry,” I say, and it kills me to say it, but we don’t. I know how hard it is for him to talk about his feelings. I’m dying to know more about him—six years and I still don’t even know his last name—but I’m not going to push it. I’m not going to push him. At the rate we’re going, if we’re still alive in ten or twelve years, maybe I’ll know things like if he has a family somewhere, how he became a hunter, what he wanted to be before he discovered demons. Maybe I’ll make him laugh without that undertone of bitterness and sarcasm.

  Maybe the hunters will declare me Queen of the Hats. Fuck the loa and the Scientologist.

  “No,” he tells me, and turns me so that my back is pressed against the door, and he’s holding me. I’m between his legs, and his arms are against the door, his forehead pressed against mine. “Listen, I want you to know. I want to tell you. I don’t want to make all the same mistakes. I—”

  “Okay, lovebirds.”

  I look up, and there’s Roxie, her face twisted in irritation.

  “That’s e-fucking-nough,” she continues. “Let’s get this show on the road so we can get some sleep before we have to throw ourselves into the birthplace of evil, okay?”

  I close my eyes, and when I open them again, Ryan is staring at me and grinning. A real grin, not a nasty one, or one of those ones where he only lifts half his mouth. Then, in a blink, it’s gone again, and he’s Ryan the Badass Demon Hunter who turns to face Roxie.

  “Whaddya got, Rox?” he says, and it’s back to business. I slump against the door and take deep breaths. Of course she had to interrupt just as he was about to open up and tell me . . . something. Something important. Shit. Thanks a lot, Roxie.

  I take a deep breath, square my shoulders, and follow Roxie and Ryan down the stairs into the diner. It’s time to get started saving the world.

  9

  Roxie is methodical. There are stacks everywhere: leather bottles, wooden stakes, nails, giant pendants covered in script I can’t read, piles of rocks, bunches of herbs. There’s even a stack of clothes.

  “What’s this?” I touch the dark fabric; it feels like what Ryan wears, the leather.

  “It’s lamia skin,” says Roxie. She’s got a cigarette in her mouth, but she’s not smoking it. It’s not even lit. It’s just hanging there.

  “What is a lamia, anyway?”

  “Chère, pray you never find out.” Roxie picks up the topmost garment and holds it up against me. It’s a coat, a bit too long in the arms. “You wear it for protection in this dimension, but for where we’re going,” she says, “it also gets around the rules.”
>
  “There are rules?”

  “Sure. No unnatural fibers, no holy water, no metal alloys, no farmed wood, no—”

  “Where are you even getting these? They seem pretty arbitrary.”

  She shrugs. “Can’t change the Door-hounds, chère. They catch on to man-made things.” Door-hounds? What? She hands me the coat and starts pawing through the pile for the rest of my leatherwear. I run my hand over the skins, gearing up to have to put that shit on. I wonder about my underpants; do I have any that are pure silk? Or maybe cotton—cotton’s natural, right? Except I don’t think thread’s made out of cotton anymore, so that cuts my clothing choices down to nil. But I really don’t feel like going commando in some dead hunter’s suit, because I bet that is the only way they got some lamia skin clothes for me so quickly; there must be a stack somewhere of stuff that’s been stripped off dead hunters.

  I’m sure it’s going to better use than if it had been, like, thrown out or given to a consignment shop or something, but it’s still creepy.

  “Earth and air,” I say to Roxie. “Gimme the straight dope.”

  She gives me a look, which I guess I deserve. Then she shrugs. “Lots of ways for the world to end, chère. One is when all the Doors begin to close and disappear. That ends the world in fire and water. We can work with that, if you get enough hunters together. Just need to open more Doors.”

  “But why? I mean, no more Doors, no more demons or supernatural hijinks or—”

  She shakes her head. “Rookie mistake. The Doors lead to Hell, and they release the supernatural—but that is the way our dimension is supposed to be. We have Doors. We have a balance. No Doors, and the world starts to destroy itself with fire and water. Very messy, from what I’ve heard.”

  “So when Ryan was looking for Owen’s Door this morning . . .”

  Roxie nods. “Seeing if it was fire and water.”

  “Okay,” I say. “But the Door wasn’t gone. And now we know there are more Doors than there should be. So . . .”