Black Flame

by Ruby Laska

  “Also, if your iPhone is submerged, the odds of irreparable damage are high.” Jimmy grabbed the phone from the tub and placed it on the counter as far away from the tub as possible. His heart was beating irregularly and he found it hard to keep his eyes off the naked woman in the tub.

  “Don’t you knock?” she demanded. “Hand me that washcloth.”

  Jimmy took a folded pink cloth—Jayne’s, no doubt—from the sink and handed it to Deneen, trying to focus his gaze at the top of her head. But the idea of her warm and wet body under all of those suds was making him feel a little dizzy.

  She scrubbed furiously at her face, rubbing the green goo off.

  “What is that substance?” Jimmy asked, mostly to make conversation and distract himself from his thoughts.

  “It’s a kelp masque, if you must know. Air travel is very hard on the skin.”

  “Ah, yes. Kelp is an excellent source of potassium and iodine. I occasionally eat it.” Jimmy was aware that he was wandering from the topic. Babbling, some might say, but when nervous it was his habit to focus on the scientific, and he had done some research into alternative plant nutrients last year when he was working on a portable dehydrator that could be used in a challenging environment like an oil rig.

  “I wouldn’t eat this,” Deneen huffed. “It costs forty dollars an ounce.” Her skin, cleared of the cosmetic kelp, did look smooth and blemish-free.

  “Ah. I see. Now that your bath is complete, will you be vacating the bathroom soon? I need to take a shower.”

  She didn’t respond for a moment, and Jimmy noticed that her gaze traveled down over his chest and torso…and lower…before resting briefly at a location he was trying to cover casually with the towel. Due to his growing interest in her unclothed state, however, he doubted his disguise remained effective. He grabbed the first thing he saw off the sink and clutched it to his waist, backing toward the door.

  “Well, I can’t very well come out of the bathroom if you take my robe,” Deneen pointed out.

  Jimmy looked down at the fluffy lavender fabric he was holding. He seemed to remember Jayne wearing the robe. Sensible, for Deneen to borrow her sister’s things. And more evidence that Deneen wouldn’t be staying long, since she hadn’t brought her own.

  But he wasn’t sure how to put it down without revealing more of himself than he intended.

  “I, um, I’ll be right back,” he said, bolting from the room. He hastily pulled on his jeans and returned to the bathroom with the robe draped over one arm. Deneen hadn’t moved, but the bubbles were beginning to pop and melt and the layer covering her was growing translucent enough that he could make out the outline of her naked body under the surface.

  “I’ll just leave this here,” he said, setting down the robe.

  “I wish you hadn’t walked in on me,” Deneen said. Was she angry with him? The tone of her voice and her expression suggested that she was.

  Jimmy took a deep breath. “I greatly regret any discomfort I caused you. I understand that you wish to conduct your ablutions alone, as is typical of females, and will knock before entering for the duration of your visit.”

  “My what?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My ablutions. What you said. What on earth are those?”

  “Oh—it is just a term for washing oneself.”

  “Huh. I wish I’d known that a few weeks ago—I could have impressed them at the brow bar. Maybe they wouldn’t have fired me.”

  “I must ask,” Jimmy said, knowing he should leave but finding it difficult, “what is a brow bar, exactly?”

  “Waxing?” Deneen pointed at her eyes, but Jimmy was still mystified. “No? Well, I feel like I’m violating girl code by telling you, but waxing is the preferred method for shaping the brow. Melted wax is applied to unwanted hairs and then when the wax hardens, the wax is removed, taking the hairs with it.”

  “You mean…you rip it out by the roots?” Jimmy winced. Other women had alluded to this practice, but Jimmy had dismissed it as unlikely and certainly potentially painful.

  “Yup.”

  “And your job was to perform this waxing, and you were let go for…negligence?”

  Deneen sighed. She cupped a handful of bubbles and studied them, avoiding his gaze. “I let the wax get too hot. It wasn’t my fault, another employee had left the heater on the wrong setting. And my client was the excitable type—she had a very low tolerance for discomfort. So.”

  “Is she permanently disfigured?” Jimmy asked.

  Deneen laughed, her expression turning unexpectedly sunny. “Hardly. I’ve done it to myself lots of times. It just turns your skin pink for a while. But it was a pretty upscale kind of salon. The owner had zero tolerance for flubs like mine.”

  “I see.” With one last, lingering look at the parts of Deneen that were exposed—long, creamy neck, well-shaped arms and shoulders, knees bobbing in the suds, toenails painted a fiery shade of crimson—Jimmy ducked out of the room.

  #

  When Deneen had toweled off, applied lotion (she had brought her own; she never traveled without her favorite scent), and pulled on the camisole and flannel Tinkerbelle pajama pants that Jayne had given her for her birthday, she crept quietly to her room and shut the door. A moment later she heard Jimmy’s door open and close. She listened to the water running through the pipes as she made up Regina and Chase’s bed with clean sheets she’d found in the linen closet. Then she started unpacking her travel case. By the time she was finished, the shower was turned off. Moments later, the sound of doors opening and closing again alerted her that Jimmy had turned in for the night.

  She breathed a sigh of relief, tugging her sweater back over her head. She had a few more things to do before this night was through, and the house was chilly. She pulled on fuzzy socks she’d found in her sister’s drawer, and gathered up her supplies.

  It was probably just as well that Jimmy had walked in on her with kelp masque all over her face and her hair pulled up. He’d been out to visit some girlfriend, obviously, and just wanted to get to bed, but he’d been fairly gracious about waiting for her to finish in the tub. Deneen had even forgiven him for possibly seeing more of her bubble-covered body than she’d have liked, since he was clearly unmoved by the sight.

  She had wondered about the mysterious girl he’d gone to visit, however. What sort of woman would Jimmy Mason fall for? Deneen imagined a raven-haired temptress in a lab coat, at the controls of an instrument panel, making some sort of earth-changing discovery.

  She smiled to herself, ruefully. Even her imagination was over the top and needlessly embellished—her mother’s words, which came back to haunt Deneen whenever she was short of confidence. The fact that her mother had been describing the prom dress Deneen had made herself didn’t really help; she might just as well have been describing any of the projects Deneen had undertaken.

  But that’s why you’re here, right? The little voice inside her head said. It was apparently time for a pep talk. You’re in North Dakota, and Mom isn’t. This is your big chance to be yourself.

  Well damn, sometimes the little voice had a point. Deneen squared her shoulders and picked up her cake decorating supplies. Maybe she couldn’t save the world, but she might be able to improve this small corner of it. She slipped quietly from the room with a spring in her step, like one of Santa’s elves finishing up a last-minute assignment.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jimmy’s alarm went off at precisely 5:45. The alarm clock on his bedside table synced to the atomic clock in Switzerland, which was comforting to him. Jimmy liked absolutes—things that could be proved, that could not be denied on the basis of emotion or intuition. The master clock keeping time in Switzerland was accurate to within one second per thirty million—that was an incontrovertible truth.

  Unlike, say—Jimmy thought as he knocked gently on the bathroom door, as he had promised to do—his feelings about the current guest of the ranch. Last night his dreams had featured Deneen Burgess doing a
ny number of illogical and confounding things. Oh, he understood the erotic dreams; these were a natural consequence of a healthy sex drive and visual and olfactory stimuli (because Deneen smelled quite pleasant, like a blend of flowers and spices and lemons). But there had a been a dream in which she had been sitting primly on the tailgate of his truck, wearing a sparkling evening gown and reading aloud from his Advanced Physics textbook, a tome he’d carried around all senior year until he’d memorized every formula and corollary. And another in which she was wearing safety goggles and her sister’s bathrobe and working at his workbench, fiddling with the controls of a wax-melting heater. In that dream she’d come after him with a red-hot spatula smeared with wax, a look of intense concentration on her face.

  Perhaps most disturbingly, in the dream Jimmy hadn’t attempted to disarm her of the dangerously hot implement, but had only closed his eyes and waited for the burn.

  He brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face as quickly as he could. He would start the coffee, then wake Deneen; by his calculations, even factoring in her longer-than-average preparation time to apply her cosmetics and arrange her hair, she ought to be ready to go by the time the coffee was prepared and the truck loaded with the gifts and decorations.

  Jimmy was halfway across the kitchen when he spied the object in the middle of the kitchen table, and did a double-take.

  A beautifully decorated cake, iced with frills and scalloped piping and holly leaves and berries. On closer inspection, the leaves were sculpted from frosting and the berries from the red gumdrop candies Mrs. Osterhaus had given Deneen last night.

  Could that really be his cake underneath? The rough size and shape—circular—were right, but all evidence of his cake’s failure, including the swollen muffin top and the burned bits, were gone.

  Tentatively, Jimmy poked a finger into an iced scallop along the bottom edge of the cake, and tasted it. It was delicious: not too sweet, creamy, and faintly spiced with almonds. Well, his roommates were in for a treat tonight.

  A stab of discomfort shot through him at the thought. Zane and Cal, back from their long night out in the winter storm, would encounter not just a luscious Christmas cake but an even more luscious woman who would be staying with them. Cal, of course, would be bringing his girlfriend Roan, but that left Zane, who was single despite a number of false starts with girls he’d met in Conway. Zane worked on the rigs, but he had a law degree and horn-rimmed glasses and pale gray eyes, features which Jayne had explained to Jimmy were very attractive to many women, as they implied hidden depths of creative and intellectual acuity. Jimmy knew that myopia, despite common media portrayals to the contrary, did not correlate to higher than average intelligence, his own nearsightedness notwithstanding, but he couldn’t deny that women were drawn to Zane.

  And in a matter of hours, Zane would be meeting Deneen for the first time. Smelling her intoxicating perfume. Tasting her cake…

  Jimmy started the coffee, banging the filter basket into place with more force than necessary, pouring too much coffee from the bin and getting it on the floor. He stomped into the living room to get the broom he’d left by the front door after sweeping snow from the porch—

  —and stopped. Deneen had left the Christmas tree’s lights plugged in overnight, and Jimmy’s irritation over the wasted electricity was quickly overcome by the beauty of the moment: the tree shimmering in the pre-dawn stillness, the few ornaments she’d left behind winking in the sparkling lights. And below the tree, the light reflected off a pair of gifts wrapped in beautiful silver paper.

  The gifts hadn’t been there the night before—Jimmy was sure of it. He crouched down and lifted one of them. A scalloped tag read, “To Jimmy from Santa,” and a bow made of what looked like packaging twine was knotted around a small pine bough. Tucked into the bow was a single perfect red feather.

  Jimmy thought of Deneen standing in the doorway yesterday, hiding something in her cupped hands. He was somehow sure it had been this feather, a small treasure that others would have overlooked, but had caught her eye. He examined the perfect vane, the downy barbs, the stiff quill, and imagined the delicate redbird that had left behind this memento on Christmas Eve.

  “Are you going to open it?”

  Jimmy turned to see Deneen standing sleepily behind him, covering a yawn with her fingers. She was already dressed, in close-fitting jeans and an even closer fitting red sweater that hugged her curves and gave just a hint of what lay underneath, the swell of her breasts peeping out from a bit of white lace. Jimmy swallowed hard, before taking in her hair, unstyled and falling in messy waves around her face, and her clean-scrubbed face.

  She was beautiful without even a speck of makeup, and Jimmy wanted to tell her so, but she had asked a question that required a response.

  “Uh…” His mind circled, trying to remember what she had asked him before he’d been overwhelmed by the mere sight of her. Then he remembered the package in his hands.

  “I’m sorry to say that I still don’t believe in Santa,” he said gravely.

  Deneen laughed, and plopped down on the sofa, curling her legs underneath her prettily. “That’s okay. You can still open it. Both of them, actually. You must have been a very good boy.”

  Then she winked at him, a gesture that took hold of his insides and scrambled them. At least, that was what it felt like as Jimmy tore the paper from the package, setting the feather carefully on the coffee table. Inside was a handsome leather case, which Jimmy unzipped to reveal a neat row of grooming implements including nail scissors and trimmers.

  “This is very nice,” he said. He held the kit up for inspection in the light of the tree.

  “It was supposed to be for Matthew,” Deneen said apologetically. “I’ll get him something else, though. Quick, open the other one before I change my mind.”

  Jimmy opened the second package more slowly, adding a second red feather to the one on the table. Deneen had given him the gift she had brought for her sister’s fiancé. Did that signal affection, or pity, or…

  Layers of tissue fell away from the object in his hand. It was a small round ceramic frame, fitted with a silky golden ribbon loop, and painted with a design of tiny gingerbread men and lollipops. In the center of the design, the year was painted in curlicue numerals.

  “I make one every year,” Deneen said. “Ever since I was fifteen and I bought my first set of acrylic paints. I’ve got—well, let’s see, I’m twenty-seven so I guess this one makes an even dozen.”

  She was speaking quickly and averting her eyes, classic signs of conversational discomfort, so Jimmy tried to think of a response that would serve to reassure her.

  “It’s very nice.”

  “Oh. Well. Um, thanks.”

  “The gingerbread cookies look very…realistic.”

  “Um, thanks, but they’re—it was—I mean, I should have probably just started over.”

  Instead of reassuring her, his comments seemed to be making it worse. And he was going to have to spend the next four hours in her company, in a situation that was already going to tax Jimmy’s emotional resources.

  “I saw the cake too,” he blurted. “Your work is remarkable. It’s, er, symmetrical now. And tasty.”

  Deneen’s smile wavered. Inexplicably, it looked like she might cry. This combination of happy and sad was among the worst of female expressions, completely beyond Jimmy’s ability to translate.

  “How did you accomplish the icing designs?” he asked politely as he tucked the tiny frame in his shirt pocket.

  “I brought my tools,” she said. “I love decorating cakes. I’ve been doing it since I was in middle school. Mom doesn’t cook much, and…well, I wanted to make something nice to celebrate Jane’s engagement.”

  “Your diligence has paid off. You are very competent.”

  Deneen shrugged. “It’s not hard. Well, except for turning the cake. That’s hard to do when you’ve got your hands full with the frosting bags and decorative tips. But other than th
at, anyone could do it.”

  Deneen had done something very nice for him, and now she was brushing off his attempts to compliment her. There was only one explanation: she had given him the cake and gifts because she felt sorry for him. Despite racking his brain, Jimmy was unable to come up with any other logical explanation for her kindness. And while he appreciated the concern—not to mention the way she looked before she’d put her makeup on, when she was still sweetly sleepy and rumpled—he had had about enough pity to last him for his entire life.

  He had let his feelings get out of hand where this female interloper was concerned, and it was time to nip them in the bud. And there was one very good way to make sure that he didn’t foolishly dwell on a woman who was out of reach and uninterested.

  “Don’t worry,” he said desperately, getting to his feet and tucking the gifts and wrappings under his arm. “Zane will be here tonight. He is single, healthy and unencumbered by prior relationship commitments. I’m sure you’ll enjoy his company.”

  “Oh.” Deneen’s face fell. “Well, that’s great, then. Give me ten minutes and I’ll be ready to go.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The ride to the Family Circle Center had been stilted, to say the least. Jimmy drove with his jaw clenched like he expected to have to do battle at any moment, and Deneen was consumed with embarrassment as well as hunger. After Jimmy had practically come out and said he couldn’t stand being alone with her in the house—he was already trying to set her up with his roommate! It had probably been the frame, Deneen decided. Compared to the intricate work he did in his spare time—Deneen had snooped around the workshop a little yesterday, and while she couldn’t tell what he was creating on his workbench or drafting table or the contraption suspended from the ceiling, it certainly did seem to involve a lot of tiny parts—her painted frame probably looked completely amateurish.

  Deneen wasn’t really even sure why she’d given it to him. The frames weren’t a secret, exactly, but she’d never shown anyone—even her sister—the series of frames that she had made over the years. Someday, she meant to hang them from a tree in her very own home, a home that she hoped to share with a man who would love her, and eventually, children who would adore her. This imaginary husband and children would see her for who she really was, and love her for it, too, in a way that her family couldn’t. Oh, Deneen knew that her family loved her, but they saw her through a lens that would never allow her to shine. They wanted her to be useful—to be important. All of Deneen’s work—from the crafts she made to the parties she planned to the meals she cooked—were fine as hobbies, as her mother often reminded her. But in addition to being objectionably gender-typed, they didn’t constitute a career.