Bone River

by Chance, Megan

  He made a sound deep in his throat and pulled me from the door, pushing me—not gently—so I fell upon the bed, shedding the rest of his clothes. I reached for him and he came to me, and his kiss then was rough and desperately needy and I could not keep from twisting beneath him; I could not keep still and he did not ask me to. Instead he urged me to it, permission to be savage, to be who I was: “Yes, Lea, yes.” I was burning beneath him and I felt alive in a way I never had, and I could not get enough of him. And I knew that she was right, that he was meant for me, and the danger of him roared in my ears along with the river and I let myself drown.

  CHAPTER 21

  I WOKE TO the late morning light coming through the window over my father’s desk, the curtains open to reveal the bright overcast, the trees blowing lightly in a breeze, the river coursing.

  I felt Daniel’s warmth against my back where we were spooned together, where his arm was flung over me, his hand cupping my breast, his face buried in my hair. The memory of last night washed over me, the way I’d come to him, the fierceness of the way we’d taken each other, and I let myself think only of that, of nothing else. I had done things with him I had never before thought to do. I had been...not myself, and at the same time more myself than I had ever been, and he had been my match in passion and desire, so we had been unable to stop even in exhaustion, and the hours had been filled with not yet, not yet. I want more.

  I felt both sated and starving, as if I’d suddenly discovered something I hadn’t known I craved. And along with that came a reckless joy that took every consequence and flung it away to wisp into the clouds like smoke, to disappear.

  Daniel stirred, murmuring whispers into my hair, and I turned to face him. He pulled me with him as he rolled onto his back so I lay half on top of him. I traced down his throat, his chest, letting my hair fall forward to cascade over us like a waterfall. He stroked it idly, tangling his fingers in it. I smiled and kissed him.

  His other arm, tucked around my waist, tightened, his hand splayed flat against my hip. “I thought you were a dream last night, when you came through my door.”

  “I was surprised to find you awake.”

  “You meant to take me like some succubus?”

  “Hmmm, I don’t know. What is that?”

  “A demon in a woman’s form, come to seduce a man in his sleep.”

  “Like in the Indian legends. Spirits who play tricks on men in their dreams.”

  “Tricks,” he repeated, smiling. “I like that. Spirit, play more tricks upon me.”

  “Angel or demon?” I teased. I dug my nails into his chest and leaned close to whisper, “Which spirit do you want me to be?”

  He grabbed me, twisting me around so I was on my back again, holding me down, teasing me in kind. “You’re a bewitchment. Is that what you want to hear? I’ve never wanted a woman so much.”

  “Yes, it’s what I want to hear,” I said, laughing. “You sound tormented. Perhaps I should lift the spell.”

  He pressed closer. His mouth was a bare whisper from mine. He took my arms, stretching them above my head, weaving his fingers through the twine of my bracelet. “Don’t lift it. Make it stronger. Bind me.”

  The tease was gone. He was fervent, his eyes burning. I shivered and answered in kind. “I would. I would bind you if I could.”

  My words lingered like an incantation. His hands tightened, his fingers pressing into my skin, fetters lashing his wrists and mine. He said softly, “I’ll hold you to that, you know. You promise you won’t release me, whatever happens?”

  I loosed my hand and pressed my finger to his mouth. “Ssshhh, no promises. Not today. Today let it just be...this.”

  He moved away from my finger. “Leonie—”

  “Just you and me in the world,” I murmured. I arched a little against him, my hips to his. “No one else. Nothing else.”

  I felt his sigh against my breasts, and I twined my fingers in his hair, pulling a little, bringing him to meet my kiss, gentle at first, and then, when he deepened it, fierce and possessive, rousing that fever in me again, and willingly I went into that wilderness with him, where there was no other existence, where the promises we made to each other were the only ones that mattered.

  It wasn’t until much later, when I heard Edna lowing outside, that the world encroached again. I lay there and watched him as he dressed, hastily pulling on trousers, a shirt. “I’ll milk her and be back,” he told me. “Don’t leave this bed.”

  I stretched and smiled. “I’m too lazy to leave it.”

  He leaned down to kiss me quickly. “I won’t be long.”

  He was out the door, racing down the stairs as if he suspected that more than a few minutes could be disastrous. I smiled to hear it, and stretched again, feeling swollen and ripe, aching and glazed with sweat and sex and with no other will than to have him.

  I angled my arm beneath my head and my glance fell upon the papers on the desk that Daniel had shoved aside, my father’s relics pushed to the edges, and it seemed strange to see the two things together, the two halves of myself.

  I sat up, pulling the sheet up around my naked breasts, looking at what remained of my father in this room, the relics and the journals. Daniel had taken it over so completely, and yet my father’s spirit was so strong it seemed to permeate the very walls. I felt it grow even as I thought it. And that, of course, opened the door to recriminations, to promises made that I’d broken, to the future my father wanted for me that I’d just thrown away. There could be nothing but pain from this point on; there was no way to continue without hurt and anger, and yet...could I make myself go back? Could I even be what I’d been before?

  And that was how Daniel found me when he returned bearing a pitcher of milk and some bread. He came inside, and I looked at him, and he set down what he carried and said, “I took too long, didn’t I?”

  Suddenly I was crying; he came to the bed and pulled me into his arms, and I felt his kiss on my hair as I buried my face in his chest. He smelled of cold air and cow and milk; he smelled of me.

  He whispered, “We’ll talk of all this later. I promise we will. But not today. Just you and me in the world—that’s what you said, isn’t it? Nothing else. No one else.”

  I said, “But that’s a lie.”

  “The world runs on lies,” he said. “What’s another day?”

  I shook my head against him and he eased away, pulling off his shirt, taking my hand and pressing it to his bare chest, and I shivered at the desire that leaped through me and felt him shudder in response and marveled that such a simple touch should have such an effect. “You see?” he asked softly, muscle flexing beneath my hand as he raised my chin so I must look at him. “I don’t understand it either, but I can’t deny it. We belong together, Lea. You know it too. Why make ourselves suffer?”

  “Because it’s wrong.”

  “What’s wrong is everything else,” he said. “We did things...we made promises before we knew each other.”

  “But we did them, we made them. They’re real.”

  He smoothed my hair behind my ear. “The first time I saw you I felt as if I were waking from a long sleep. Don’t tell me you didn’t feel the same.”

  “If I did, it doesn’t matter—”

  “This is what’s real, Lea. The rest is the dream. What’s between us—you can’t want to throw it away.”

  “I don’t want to. Believe me, I don’t. But Junius will come back and—”

  “He’s not back yet. We have days to ourselves.”

  “We can’t ignore this, Daniel.”

  “Yes we can. For now, we can. We have these days, Lea. Let’s at least take them. There will be time enough for the rest later.”

  And my reason melted away. I wanted what he did, to not think, to not decide. I wanted to pretend that there were no promises to keep, that he and I were both free. I wanted to keep feeling as I did when I was with him, that stinging awareness, that knowledge that the world was alive and I was alive w
ithin it. He was right; I’d been sleeping before I’d found the mummy and she had brought him here to show me I was dreaming, to show me that the real Leonie was the one who danced. And now...now I wanted to be awake.

  We stayed in bed for days, leaving only to milk the cow or get something to eat. Chores went undone, everything in my life falling away. I did not think it was possible to be sated with him. I’d forgotten my distrust and my fear; I wanted to know everything about him, and he obliged with a laugh.

  “I helped my mother with the laundry from the time I can remember. My job was to stir the pots of lye and soap, and pull clothes from the water because they were too heavy for her so she could wring them and hang them to dry. At twelve I had to get a job. I sold newspapers because I could still attend school. At thirteen I first kissed a girl—she was an orphan who lived on our street, and my mother used to feed her sometimes, like a stray cat. She became a whore, and so...well, you can imagine what happened between us. I worked the docks at fourteen. Fifteen, a printer’s devil at the Call. Then back to the docks again, doing whatever I could. Shall I go on?”

  I ran my finger over his mouth. “Yes.”

  “I can’t concentrate when you’re doing that.”

  Obediently, I removed my finger.

  He smiled and went on, “From there...too many jobs. I can’t remember them all. I worked for a blacksmith for a while, and a lithographer, which I had to quit when my mother turned ill. When she was well again, I took a job working for a set builder at one of the theaters and ended up working the circuses that came through town—hauling things for them, mostly. Cleaning up elephant and dog shit and watching to make sure customers didn’t get too familiar, kicking them out when they did. There were women, enough of them. No one the least bit respectable; there wasn’t time for it. Actresses and whores, a contortionist at Selling’s Circus—that was interesting—”

  “I imagine,” I said dryly. I let my hand drift down his chest, to his stomach.

  His grin was quick and fleeting. “Mostly I worked. I took whatever job I could, whatever someone would pay me to do. Sometimes I worked two or three. By the time I was twenty, my mother had to quit taking in laundry. We had to give up the house. I moved her into a boardinghouse—the best I could afford, which wasn’t much, but the landlady offered to watch over her, and I couldn’t afford to hire someone to do it, and so...The room was tiny and we had to share a bed, which was fine until she became too sick, and sometimes I was working late hours, or hours in the middle of the night and it disturbed her sleep too badly. So I slept on the floor. My life...my life consisted of taking care of her and working. She liked to be read to, so I obliged. Poetry and novels. Dickens and the like. Some philosophy, though in her last days she was too busy railing against the world and my father and it only upset her.”

  “She must have been happy when you got the job at the newspaper.”

  “I can think of better things to do than discuss my mother,” he said, leaning over me, kissing me.

  I said, “I want to know you.”

  He laughed. “There’s plenty of time for that. A whole lifetime.”

  In that moment, I believed him.

  After a time, we began to move about. The world didn’t stop for us, though it felt sometimes as if it had, and I kept reality carefully at bay, as if by not thinking about it I could make it nonexistent. So we did chores and I told him Indian stories; we read my father’s journals and made love, and I went back to drawing the mummy. Now, capturing her seemed even more important, something I could do out of gratitude—she had given me Daniel, after all.

  The day I finished the drawing, I felt an astonishing satisfaction. It was the most perfect one I’d ever done.

  I said, “I’m finished,” and Daniel glanced up from where he lay on the floor beside me, reading my father’s journal, which had seemingly captivated him. He brought himself up to look at my drawing.

  He kissed my shoulder, my bare skin, where my dressing gown had half fallen. “It’s beautiful. Your talents are wasted on science, Lea.”

  “Have you found anything else in Papa’s journal?”

  “Only more about this experiment of his,” he said. He opened to a page and read, “‘I would have preferred a more quantitative measure for this experiment, but such things are impossible given the circumstances. I can only watch and evaluate; I cannot gain access to thoughts or feelings, but can only make assumptions about them. Phrenology is a great help in this regard. Palpitations show cranial bumps not so pronounced in the animalistic areas, but for one exception: vitativeness and also disturbingly so in amativeness. Very pronounced in perceptiveness areas, particularly tune, time and individuality. Also spirituality and benevolence, therefore perhaps some may cancel out others.’”

  “So the experiment was human.”

  “He doesn’t say that.”

  “But whatever it was, was alive. He says it: ‘We can’t gain access to thought or feelings.’”

  “Nor could he if it was a corpse,” Daniel pointed out.

  “But in other places, he says he hopes blood overcomes. So it must be a living thing.”

  Daniel murmured an agreement. He sounded distracted and lazy. He was playing with my hair, which I hadn’t pinned up since the night we’d spent together. He liked it down, his Pre-Raphaelite painting come to life, he’d said, and I obliged him because I liked feeling that we walked at the very edge of control always, that our desire was an entity with a will of its own, and it took almost nothing to ignite it.

  “You’re not paying attention,” I accused.

  He pulled me down with him. “I’m enchanted by your hair. Have I said it to you?”

  “Almost every moment,” I told him.

  He laughed, his chest vibrated beneath my hand. “So many colors of yellow,” he mused, combing a strand through his fingers. “What blond children we would have.”

  I froze.

  He went still, as if he’d just realized what he’d said. “I’m sorry, Lea. I didn’t mean it. I was just...thinking out loud.”

  I made myself smile. “Is that what you want? Children?”

  “No.” His arm tightened around me as if he were afraid I would flee. His voice was so careful it squeezed my heart. “I’ve never cared much about it. It doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re young still. You’ll have them. A dozen, I should think.” I tried to keep my voice light.

  “Don’t say things like that.”

  “I’m certain Eleanor will make a wonderful mother.”

  “Lea, don’t—”

  “And you would be a good father, I think.”

  He gripped my arm, squeezing it almost painfully. “Stop it. Stop torturing yourself and me. It’s not what I want. Not unless it’s with you.”

  I tried to draw away, managing only a few inches before his grip stopped me. “It won’t be.”

  He hesitated. “Are you so certain? I haven’t...I’ve taken no precautions.”

  “There are precautions?” I asked in surprise. “You mean you could...keep a woman from getting with child?”

  He looked equally surprised. “You didn’t know that? Well, no, I suppose there’s no reason you should. I forget what an innocent you are.”

  “I’m hardly innocent,” I said.

  “About some things,” he agreed with a grin. “You’ve an uncanny instinct. It’s why I forget. Yes, there are things I could do so you wouldn’t conceive. But I haven’t done them. You could be—”

  “No. There’s no need for precautions.”

  “Have you ever—with him, did you ever think—”

  “A few times,” I said tersely. “But it never amounted to anything. I can’t have children, Daniel. I used to think perhaps it was Junius. But now...you exist and...well, it’s obvious it’s not him, isn’t it?”

  “He’s an old man. He was old when he married you.”

  “It’s me,” I said gently. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I
told you I didn’t care.”

  “It’s not as if it matters, in any case, does it?” I pulled away again; this time he let me go. “It’s not as if you and I...”

  “Lea, please,” he said, sitting up, reaching for me again. “Don’t make more of this than there is.”

  I felt bereft and sad. “I suppose...it was better this way, really. It gave me more time for...for study, and...and one can’t have children stumbling over skulls, can one?”

  “You did,” he said gently. He wrapped his arms around me, bringing me down with him again. “Your father had you stumbling over all kinds of things to hear you tell it, and you suffered no ill effects.”

  “It would only make things harder than they are. I already suffer because I’m a woman. Do you know of a single famous ethnologist who is also a mother?”

  “I don’t know any famous ethnologists at all. Much less any who are mothers. But artists...that’s another matter.”

  I laughed at his persistence. “You are so different—”

  “Don’t say it,” he whispered. “Comparisons are odious. I already suffer for it enough in my own mind.”

  “You do? How so?”

  “The usual things,” he said wryly. “Has he ever heard you cry out in pleasure? Does he touch you as I do? Have you ever served as his succubus?”

  I was burning. “You shouldn’t think such things.”

  “I know. But I do.”

  “The answer is no,” I said, meeting his gaze. “No to everything.”

  He smiled. His hand came to my cheek, his thumb caressing. “You’ve no such questions for me? You’re mercifully free from jealousy?”

  “You said you’ve never wanted anyone as you want me.”