Page 86 of Old Flames

Her heart rate, her breath, even her thoughts all slowed and steadied. She was in the right place with the right person, and they were doing the right thing. It all felt right. “Will you take me with you on your hero’s journey?” Jules asked. “I may need an adventure after this.”

His face softened. “I came to Key West for you.”

“No, you didn’t!” she balked, instinctively pushing back.

“Yes, I did,” he said. “I had no qualms turning Daphne down. Then I saw the list of attendees. You were at the top of that list.”

“Leo, why didn’t you say?”

“First, you looked at me as if I wasn’t there, then as if I didn’t matter to you. Do you think I was going to tell you that I followed you to the southernmost point of the continental United States to get to know you better? How well do you think that would have gone down?”

“Not well,” she agreed. “It’s just . . . I didn’t see it.”

“See what?”

“A way to make it work.”

What she meant was, she didn’t think she could experience happiness, peace, contentment, and pleasure all at once in her lifetime, that she’d have to choose one or the other and only in sample sizes, not the full buffet that life offered to others and so often deprived her. Leo was everything that she could have dreamed of, but her dreams often morphed into nightmares. She wouldn’t have allowed herself to believe that he wanted her with the same ferocity, the same single-minded obsessiveness as she’d wanted him, feelings so intense she had to suppress and keep trapped in the attic of her mind.

“If you put into this a fraction of the effort you put into pushing me away, we’d be together forever,” he said.

“Forever? Is that what you want?”

His jaw tightened. “Haven’t I told you? I won’t settle for less.”

Jules couldn’t believe it. She’d told him everything, and still he looked at her as if she were the girl of his dreams. How was that even possible?

She went to him in a swirl of sudsy water. She owed him an explanation. “I have trust issues,” she said. “Not because people have let me down. I never let anyone get that close. But I don’t trust the world to treat me kindly. And I’m so sorry, because you’ve only ever been kind.”

Leo cupped her face as he often did, as if she were a prize jewel found among rubble and ash. “I can be better than kind,” he whispered into her ear. “I can be good to you.”

Jules kissed him with unabashed desperation. Leo took her by the waist and drew her close, his erection hard against her inner thigh. She guided him inside of her, pleasure shooting straight through to her heart. They moved together, wet skin against wet skin, drawing slow, deliberate, ever-expanding rings of sensation. Outside the bathroom window, night closed in on them. It seemed to Jules that they were alone in the world. Once again, the dam cracked embarrassingly quickly, and pleasure flowed through her shaking body. She collapsed in his arms and wept. This time, there was no rationalizing it. He’d cracked her open. All he had to do was collect the broken pieces. Anything he found he could keep.

Interstitial

3:00 a.m.: Jules slept, her face turned to the window, veiled in moonlight.

3:00 a.m.: Leo walked along the garden’s edge, skirting darkness. It was as if each star had extinguished one by one, the moon nowhere in sight. It didn’t bother him. Darkness was at his core, expressed only through his fiction. July had revealed her true nature tonight, and he had no reason to hide his, not if it could help her. He dug out the lighter in his pocket, flicked it, and the flame leaped to life. He studied the shadows and watched for movement between the trees. He listened. He waited.

“Whatever you are,” he said, his tone even, “you better leave her the fuck alone.”

30

The end.

All stories, however long and arduous, however epic the tale, barreled toward those two little words. A good ending justified any means. A bad one disqualified the whole endeavor. What to make of a story that had no end?

A young woman discovers the portal of time and strikes a deal at the threshold. It is 1910, and a wizard grants her the ability to travel through the decades of the century up to year 2000. For a woman born into poverty with few prospects outside of backbreaking work, marriage, and child-rearing, she readily accepts, leaving it all behind, betting everything on the promises of the future.

July had invented a variation of that story as a girl, while home alone after school. In the hour or so before her mother returned with dinner, her loneliness vanished once reunited with the dolls, plush toys, unicorns, and dragons that made up her imaginary world. She revisited these characters as a graduate student and found them as familiar as old friends. She scrapped her original master’s thesis and crafted a new one, centering Azealia and her magical companions, adding elements of race and women’s rights to the narrative. She later sold the manuscript at auction. However, in her childhood imagination, the story did not end. Every day, she picked it up where she’d left off, every day a new adventure. However, now she had no choice but to end it, and she had to do it in such a way to satisfy the ambitions of the professional writer she was today, but also the dreams of the child who had first crafted the world.

“How does it end?” Leo asked.

“You don’t want me to spoil it, do you?”

“Why do you think I’m sleeping with the author if not to get insider information?”

It was early morning. They lay in bed, face-to-face, his hand flat between her thighs. They talked in hushed voices, each sentence punctuated with long kisses.