Rites & Desires

by Amanda Cherry

  But Jaccob shook his head. "No," he said decisively after a moment. Jaccob turned and took a broad step back into the center of the seating area. He looked back at Elizabeth, who it appeared had spotted him but was trying not to stare, and waved; he waved at her just the same as he had waved at any of the random strangers who’d called out "Stardust" in the lobby.

  And when he turned back to Ruby, his jaw was set. "She’s the one who walked out on me." He reached out and took both of Ruby’s hands in his. "She’s the one who left. I’m not the one who caused this, and I’m not about to start running and hiding every time she and I wind up in the same place at the same time. I have nothing to be ashamed of," he asserted. "She left me more than two months ago, and I have every right to be out at the Pops with a lady of my choosing."

  Ruby smiled up at him. She had decided against trying to bring along the Eye of Africa for the night, as she wasn’t entirely confident in her ability to shield it from detection when out in the open. But the fact of the matter was this episode couldn’t have gone better if she had.

  "If you’re sure," she said, squeezing both of his hands before turning to head to her seat.

  Jaccob nodded. "I’m sure." But instead of following her, he gripped her hands tighter and pulled her toward him until the two of them were standing scandalously close together. "If you’re okay with being out with me," he said quietly, "then I’m happy to be out with you."

  Ruby nodded, meeting his gaze as she moved her hands to his waist. "I’m more than okay," she assured him. "I’m honored to be here."

  Jaccob placed his hand on her cheek, tilting her face upward before leaning in to find her lips with his.

  Ruby pressed herself into the kiss, wrapping her arms around his waist and seeing to it that they lingered there long enough for not only Elizabeth Stevens to see, but for even the slowest social media photographer to retrieve their Starphone and snap a picture. The kiss was sweet and lovely, and Ruby felt her face flushing pink as she finally stepped away from him. That had been unexpected and marvelous. The degree to which that moment had been a victory was more than Ruby was even ready to analyze in the moment.

  Jaccob had kissed her--had really kissed her. In public. And this had not been the tentative brushing of his lips against hers that she remembered from the other night. This had been a real, honest-to-gods kiss and it had been given in a box seat at the Pops in front of an audience who, she was sure, was at this moment already making the surreptitious photos they’d snapped go viral online. This had been both a private statement--a stepping up of the intensity of kisses between them--and a very, very public one.

  As the house lights blinked and Ruby moved to settle into her seat for the concert, she could not have been happier with the state of her world. The power of the Eye of Africa was reawakening the magic within her. And Jaccob Stevens had just kissed her in the face of his wife. There was almost no way this night could possibly get better.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Ruby’s perfect night out at the Pops had grown slightly less than perfect during the opening movement of the second act. The musicians were just getting into the medley of selections from little-known musicals of the 1930s when Jaccob seemed to panic at something having to do with his wristwatch. He shook his head and frowned at the thing. Ruby knew it was much more than the designer wristwatch it appeared to be--he’d already shown her where the receiver to her own bracelet was attached. There was probably some crisis somewhere that required Stardust.

  Either that, or Elizabeth Stevens still carried her own panic button and had triggered it just to spoil Ruby’s night.

  Jaccob leaned over in his seat and whispered in Ruby’s ear. "Excuse me for a moment," he implored.

  Ruby turned her head and nodded. "Everything all right?" she asked.

  Jaccob was shaking his head as he stood and he shrugged his shoulders in reply. "I don’t know," he admitted. "I’ll be right back."

  Ruby nodded again and did what she could to turn her attention back to the performance. The musicians were good, and the selections were interestingly arranged. This record would have no trouble selling. She tried to concentrate on facts and figures related to sales of albums that cost this little to produce, and on the percentage of the people in tonight’s audience who might otherwise pass but who would be tempted to buy the record as a souvenir of the night they saw Stardust kiss a woman who wasn’t his wife--and absolutely not on the fact that Jaccob had gotten up and left the box.

  He was back in the box right around the time the movement was over. The audience had just begun to applaud; the conductor was turning on his podium to bow when Jaccob slid back into his seat with a sour expression on his face.

  "Let me guess," Ruby whispered. She was still clapping politely, but the gloves she had worn meant the sound was deadened to the point of making the action all but pointless. "The city needs you?" She tried not to sound too annoyed or too disappointed. But she was both. She’d said before that she knew who he was and what he did, and that she absolutely understood there would be times he would be called away from her. But that didn’t mean she had to like it.

  "Yeah," he answered curtly. "I’m sorry, but--"

  "No, no," Ruby countered, remembering that taking the high road on matters of Stardust had been a successful tactic up until this point. She knew she really ought to keep from souring things on a night when everything had gone so brilliantly. "Go and take care of things," she insisted, turning to pat him lightly on his knee as the applause was ending. The conductor was lifting his baton to begin the next movement as she continued. "Slip out the back. I meant it when I said you can have your car pull up to the stage door. My security people are down there, you won’t have any trouble getting through."

  "Okay," Jaccob agreed with a nod before once again standing from his seat. "I’ll call you later."

  "You’d better," Ruby mouthed playfully before blowing him a kiss and waving goodbye.

  As soon as he was through the curtain, Ruby reached into her satin clutch and turned on her Starphone. She couldn’t pull it out up here; the light would be bright enough to advertise to the rest of the auditorium that she’d been on her phone in the middle of the concert. But it was easy enough for her to fire off a text message to the number the Blights had given her for their recovered phone. "I don’t know where Stardust is going," it read, "Please find out and be sure it makes the news."

  People would see that Jaccob had left before the end of the concert. It needed to be clear as day it had been an emergency. "Make it a bigger deal than it is if you need to," she added, just to be sure. As long as everyone in town heard that Stardust had saved the city tonight, then they wouldn’t be questioning why he’d left the Pops alone. And that, as far as Ruby Killingsworth was concerned, was absolutely necessary.

  The rest of the Pops had been lovely, even without Jaccob there to enjoy it alongside her. Ruby could only hope that whatever had called Stardust into service during the concert would turn out to be high-profile enough to make the news. And if it hadn’t been a big enough deal to begin with, the Blights should have been able to do enough to make it so. Not that she cared so much what the gossips would be saying; whether or not the photos went viral, that kiss in the box had been progress. And progress was a good thing.

  She’d stayed for a few minutes of the onstage reception when the concert had ended, but very quickly the questions about Jaccob and his whereabouts had become grating. So after checking with the engineers that the recording had gone swimmingly, she’d called her car to the stage door and made a quiet exit. One calming snifter of brandy in the back of the car later, and she was back in her penthouse with the Eye of Africa. Tonight had been the first time she’d been so far from the jewel since she’d begun to connect to its power, and she felt a visceral difference in herself as a result.

  It wasn’t so much that she’d noticed herself diminished or her burgeoning power reduced while she was away; it was more that returning to her nigh
tstand, unfolding the salt-lined cloth, and laying her eyes on the gem had invigorated and energized her to an unexpected degree. Returning to the presence of the Eye had acted on Ruby like a bump of pure cocaine. She’d been tired when she’d gotten home, not completely exhausted, but tired enough that she’d planned to get changed for bed and turn in for the night. Merely peeking in on the Eye where it sat in her drawer had been enough to give her a second wind.

  She’d opened up the floor-to-ceiling bedroom windows and gone into her closet to change out of her gown, figuring she’d stay up for a while and work with the Eye. Surely she was accessing its magic unconsciously if just the sight of it was having an effect on her. And it had been a very encouraging development to have realized that some part of its power had stayed with her even as she’d been across town for hours. Maybe she would be able to see some real progress tonight.

  Ruby was confident enough in the power she felt courtesy of the Eye that she was at least sure she could use it to reinforce the wards on the penthouse. That was a reasonable size job for the rest of the night. It would give her a chance to consciously and intentionally apply the magic of the thing in a rite of her own and, as long as the ritual proved successful, set the stage for further magic in the days to come.

  She’d only just gotten out of her gown and corset and was beginning the rather tedious process of unpinning the complicated coif of her hair when she recognized a sound coming through her open windows. That was certainly a way to derail her plans, but she couldn’t bring herself to mind. Her plans would keep. She slipped a black silk dressing gown on over her lace underthings and headed back into the bedroom.

  As she made her way across the carpet, it was easy to spot Stardust through her open windows. He was flying past her penthouse at an unusually slow clip, with his head turned directly toward her building. And even at this distance, and even with his helmet visor down, Ruby had no trouble at all making out his chagrined expression when he realized he’d been caught peeping. She waved coyly at him. It seemed the acknowledgement caused him to abandon any premise he may have been holding to that he happened to be there by chance. Stardust stopped his tentative forward motion and hovered there, eight or ten meters outside Ruby’s open windows, and gave her a tiny salute. Ruby shook her head and chuckled. Sometimes Jaccob Stevens, even when done up as Stardust, could be painfully adorable.

  She gestured upward, hoping he would understand her invitation to meet her upstairs at the terrace.

  Stardust nodded. With a brief firing of rockets in his boots, he was gone from Ruby’s view, and she scrambled to slip her marabou slides onto her stocking feet and push her bedside drawer closed before heading upstairs to meet him. When she reached the terrace door two floors up, Jaccob was waiting for her just on the other side.

  She grinned, but shook her head as she slid the door open. "You know you could have let yourself in," she scolded gently as he came through the door, pulling the Stardust helmet off as he did. Ruby took the helmet from his hands and set it on the nearby bar.

  "I’ll start letting myself in over here," he countered, beginning to fiddle with a series of switches on his robotic suit, "when you install a lock on that door and give me a key."

  Ruby smirked, impressed at his unexpected trickiness. "Well, aren’t you full of surprises," she teased. She meant to only be remarking on his clever angle at trying to get her to install a lock, but the comment happened to come right as the Stardust suit removed itself--automatically and mechanically--from Jaccob’s person and folded itself neatly into the shape of a small suitcase on her floor. Jaccob was left standing before her in his undershirt, stocking feet, and tuxedo pants. She wasn’t about to ask him what had become of the rest of his eveningwear. She gaped a little at the technological wonder she’d just witnessed.

  But it was only a moment before the suit had lost its charm and she turned her attention back to the half-dressed superhero standing before her. "Come in," she encouraged, stepping away from the neatly folded robotic suit and farther into her sitting room. "Can I get you anything? I could make you tea, or we could open a bottle of wine--"

  "Scotch?" he interrupted.

  Ruby turned to him and smiled. "A man after my own heart." She gestured for him to have a seat on the sofa as she moved to the side table where she kept the decanter and glasses. "And a good call on the tea, by the way," she added. "I’m rubbish in the kitchen."

  Jaccob laughed out loud at that.

  Ruby looked back at him sheepishly. He probably thought she was kidding. "Pouring a glass of scotch, though, that I can handle."

  "Neat," he told her, before she had the chance to ask him about ice.

  "Splash of water?" she asked, holding up a tiny beaker with a dropper rested against its side. "You’ll find the flavor really opens up with a few drops."

  Jaccob nodded. "I’ll trust your judgment," he answered.

  Ruby quickly poured two glasses of the dark amber liquid from the cut-glass decanter and then carefully deposited three drops of water into each one. She walked the few steps to where Jaccob was standing behind the sofa and handed him a glass. He took a long sniff of the scotch and then a tentative sip. "This is good," he told her. "What is it?"

  Ruby shrugged. "I honestly don’t remember," she admitted, taking a sip from her own glass and gesturing for him to have a seat. "It’s one from the Whisky Society. They’re all catalog numbers with bizarre poetic descriptions. I stopped trying to remember what the names are ages ago. The building manager keeps a log, though. I can ask."

  "It’s not a big deal," Jaccob conceded, taking a seat on the nearest chair. It was a square thing, oddly modern in the original sense of the word. It could have come out of some Bauhaus museum. And Jaccob wore his surprise all over his face when it turned out to be far more comfortable than it looked. He took another sip from his glass and looked up at her.

  "So tell me what tonight was about," she encouraged, walking around the back of the chair. "Anything interesting?" She’d learned pretty quickly that Jaccob appreciated being asked what had gone on in Stardust’s world, and Ruby wasn’t about to let an opportunity for him to regale her pass them by. She was moving to take a seat on the chair across from his when she noticed he suddenly seemed tense--an affectation that hadn’t been present up to this point. She was about to ask him what the trouble was when she felt the left lapel of her dressing gown slide down her arm, exposing her bare shoulder and the top of her lace brassiere. "Is this bothering you?" she asked. "I can go get dressed if you--"

  "No," he interrupted, shaking his head and lowering his gaze to the swirling liquid in his glass. "No. I’m just trying to be a gentleman. I’m trying not to stare."

  Ruby felt the unexpected warmth of a blush rising to her cheeks. She was used to being looked at only when and how she wanted to be looked at. It hadn’t occurred to her when she’d run upstairs to let him in that she was doing so in racy lingerie and a dressing gown--she was just happy to have him drop by.

  And it hadn’t occurred to her, because she hadn’t let herself think too hard about it, that he’d be so shy about seeing her in any state of undress. It was funny, now that she thought about it a little, that wrapped in a dressing gown, wearing a balconette, bikini briefs, a garter belt and stockings, she was at least as covered up as she’d been in her swimsuit when he’d first come to call on her that afternoon on the terrace. Perhaps it was the sheer lace that had him flustered, or maybe it was just the fact that there was an understanding that swimsuits were made to be seen and lingerie, in theory, was not. Either way, he was being awfully demure, and she found it oddly charming.

  But the truth was, now that she was thinking about it, she was a little bit self-conscious. The last woman he’d seen in such a state of undress had undoubtedly been his tall, svelte wife. She could only hope he liked what he was seeing. She hadn’t put on lacy underpinnings tonight with the thought anyone might see them, but she was glad in this moment that she had. It was all she could do to ex
ude confidence and offer to be accommodating.

  Ruby found herself averting her eyes--staring into her own glass as though the scotch inside was suddenly much more interesting than it actually was. "I’ll go change," she said, getting to her feet as she set her glass down a nearby end table. The offer was as much to assuage her own self-consciousness as it was to counter any awkwardness Jaccob might have been feeling. But she would never ever have told him that.

  "No." Jaccob stood as well, his glass set hastily beside hers on the table. "I mean it." But he didn’t manage to say anything more. He was standing now directly in front of her; they were inches apart. He sucked in a tense breath as he regarded her, his jaw slack and his eyes unblinking.

  Ruby let the silence stand for a moment. Looking back at him expectantly, she stayed still and waited for him to decide what came next.

  "I don’t know what I’m doing," he sighed with a self-deprecating shake of his head. "It’s been a long time ... since--" He shrugged his shoulders as his gaze once again left Ruby’s face.

  "Jaccob," she addressed him quietly, reaching out and taking both of his hands. "We’re not in any hurry here. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. We can just sit here, have a drink, and then say goodnight."

  Jaccob squeezed her hands. "But if I want--?" he began to ask, drawing her closer.

  Ruby let go of his hands and ran her splayed fingers over his chest. The contact caused him to shiver, but he didn’t back away.

  "Anything you want," she assured him, leaning in to softly kiss his neck. "Whatever you want. And that includes when we stop." Ruby moved her hands from Jaccob’s chest to his face, stroking his soft beard with her thumbs.

  "You know it’s not you, right?" he asked her, suddenly much more serious than he’d been just a moment ago.

  Ruby nodded. Even though she had known that, it was still good to hear. Maybe he wasn’t quite ready to go to bed with her, but it seemed as though he was at least ready to talk about going to bed with her. It was the least she could do to hear him out.