Chapter Six

 

When Lucia returns from the temple, six more complimentary bottles of water are sitting outside her door like a miniature green colonnade.

She finally finishes unpacking, putting everything away neatly in a symbolic attempt to straighten out the metaphysical mess of her desires. Then she orders a martini and prepares her body for it by drinking more water.

When her drink arrives she stands sipping it out on the balcony, alternately watching the sun set and looking down at her left hand where it rests on the railing, intrigued by how far away it seems and by how oddly detached she feels from it.

Richard’s haunting shots, followed by no rational chaser, are affecting her perceptions. She can’t blame the gin, even though it is certainly contributing to her intense thirst.

Like blood exposed to oxygen, the river has gone from the afternoon’s profound blue to a darkly glistening red.

Not only does she still miss Richard, she now also regrets the loss of a young man who never truly existed.

She longs to call Mark and hear him tell her that Elizabeth is crazy but it would only be the phantom of her romanticism on the other end. She is surrounded by ghosts.

It is getting darker and colder by the minute but Lucia stays out on the balcony holding her empty glass.

If she had seen Richard’s body it might have been easier for her to find closure but Julian had reached the hospital first, identified his brother and kept her away from the bloody remains to spare her the shock. Before she knew it her husband had been cremated and handed to her in a black granite urn with his full name, Richard Lee Taylor, sandblasted on one side. She couldn’t bear the sight of it so she had it buried beneath the oak tree in their front yard.

She can’t conceive of any reason Julian would encourage her supernatural fantasies by pretending to be his brother calling from beyond the grave but her reason insists on this explanation for that impossible phone call.

She steps back into the room and turns on a light to pull her black leather jacket out of the closet. She slips it on and walks back outside again.

The horizon is invisible now.

Even though she didn’t eat anything all day she isn’t hungry, just endlessly thirsty. Not even Richard’s death had killed her appetite as completely as his possible resurrection has.

She keeps wondering what Mark did all day and where he is now but pride still won’t let her pick up the phone and call him.

Finally she walks restlessly back into the room. Thinking she might feel better if she forces herself to eat something, she opens the top drawer of the nightstand looking for a menu.

The square wooden space is empty.

She sits on the edge of the bed and then falls languidly back across it, surrendering to gravity.

Covered by a white spread, the king-size mattress feels vast as an arctic wasteland…and the ceiling is breathing. It is bobbing like a block of ice on the bottomless darkness outside, the night sky foaming with stars. Richard’s naked force is out there. She can feel it. She can sense his willpower using the haunting womb of her love for him to try and manifest himself again. The lamp by the bed suddenly goes out, blindfolding her with the night’s soft, velvety darkness.

Her head falls heavily to one side so she can look out at the balcony.

At first she suffers the impression that the full moon is looking in on her, then she realizes it is Richard wearing a luminous white shirt. The challenge in his stare thrusts straight between her heartbeats and runs her through with a joy she wishes would kill her before slipping away again.

Mark’s voice says from behind her, “What the hell?” And like a shining tear caught in her lashes, Richard vanishes again.

“No!” she cries. “No!” She rolls over onto her stomach and plunges off the bed onto her hands and knees like an arthritic cat. She crawls weakly toward the balcony but there is nothing out there anymore so she curls up on the rug, miserably hugging herself.

A small eternity seems to pass before she becomes aware of the strong current of Mark’s arms lifting her up and laying her across the bed.

Awareness floods back into her skull’s painfully tight shell as a bright light blinds her.

A shadow moves soothingly into its path—Mark sitting down beside her. “How do you feel?” he asks gently.

Her throat is a sand-filled shaft she has to dig her voice out of. “Like hell.”

“Do you have any idea who’s drugging you, Lucia?”

She coughs. “What?”

“Who would want to do this to you?”

“Do what?”

“Pretend to be Richard’s ghost.”

The walls twirl nauseatingly around her like a dancer’s skirts as she sits up.

Mark catches her against him. “Are you all right?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You should sleep it off.”

“No,” she takes a tentative breath, “I’m all right! I think.” She pulls away from him. “Can you hand me one of those bottles?”

“Not a chance, you’re not drinking anything else around here. You’re checking out of this hotel.”

“Mark.” She has no intention of abandoning the balcony that has begun to feel like her own private launchpad to another dimension. “I’m not leaving. I just finished unpacking.”

“Lucia, can’t you see that someone is fucking with you in a big way?”

“Mark,” she desperately tries to organize her thoughts, “there’s no way we can possibly know how the human nervous system would react in close proximity to powerful concentrations of electromagnetic energy, which is what so-called ghosts—”

“Let me help you, Lucia, don’t fight me.”

“Mark…Elizabeth thinks you’re after my money.”

He asks quietly, “And you believe her?”

She looks down at her clenched hands. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“She made a pass at me, Lucia, and I turned her down. She resents that and now she’s jealous of you so to save her pride she tells herself I only want you for your money. She’s a bitch but that’s her problem.” He puts a finger beneath her chin and makes her look him in the eye. “I’m angrier with you for believing her,” he adds quietly.

“Oh God, Mark.” She rests her forehead against his chest. “I’ve been in hell all day!” She doesn’t have the strength to mistrust him.

“Lucia, whatever’s going on you’re not alone but you have to trust me. I can’t help you if you won’t trust me.”

She does her best to sound casual, “Did you try calling me this morning?”

“No. Why?” he asks suspiciously.

“Because someone called me. I could barely hear who it was there was so much interference but the voice was clearly a man’s and it sounded…it sounded just like Richard.”

“Really? That’s amazing. What did your dead husband have to say?”

“Not much.”

“I’ll bet. Tell me exactly what he said, Lucia.”

“Can you hear me and don’t be afraid and promise me you won’t, then the connection died.”

“Promise me you won’t… What do you think he meant? Talk to me, Lucia. What do did he want you to promise him you wouldn’t do?”

“I have no idea.”

He gets up abruptly.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere. I’m just taking a look around.”

“Why? What are you looking for?”

“I have no idea,” he echoes. “The haunting of Lucia Taylor,” he intones sarcastically. “I’ll ask you again. Who would have any reason to torment you like this?”

“No one.”

“Right.” He had closed the glass doors and drawn the curtains while she was “asleep” but now he opens them just far enough to slip outside onto the balcony.

Lucia waits anxiously for him to return. She doesn’t want to be alone with all the questions she is trying to avoid. In the morning, when her brain doesn’t feel like a lump of lead, she will attempt to make sense of things. Tonight she is sure of only one thing—she is not checking out of the Etap. A profoundly stubborn part of her believes that really might have been Richard out on her balcony and that she lost consciousness because the proximity of what she can only think of as his “naked force” short-circuited her brain’s synapses.

Moving slowly, to avoid another head-rush, she gets out of bed to use the bathroom.

Mark is on the phone when she returns.

“So there’s no way to trace the calls that come into this room?”

She hears the insect-like buzz of a voice on the other end.

“Fine.” He slams the receiver down.

“Mark?”

“What? Is there something you want to tell me, Lucia?”

She slips off her jacket and tosses its reptilian weight onto a chair. “I’ve told you everything.”

“Well, are you coming with me or not?”

“Can’t you stay here with me, Mark? I mean, what good would it do to run away? I have to find out what’s going on and who’s behind all this.” Or if Richard is real.

He stares suspiciously at the curtains blocking her view of the balcony. “Maybe that would be better,” he says beneath his breath.

Relief propels her toward him. “Yes, it would be.” She sits half beside him and half behind him on the bed. “What are you thinking, Mark?” She dares to rest her hands on his shoulders. He is wearing black jeans and a black mock turtleneck and he looks so good all she wants is for him to take her.

“Is Julian happy with his trust fund, Lucia?” He shrugs her hands off and turns to face her. “Someone’s after your money—it’s just a question of who and all my bets are on your husband’s little brother Julian.”

He might as well be telling her that the world really is flat.

“Look at me, Lucia. Who would inherit your money if you died?”

“Mark, will you come stay with me?”

“I’ll move my things over tomorrow.”

“And you’ll stay tonight?”

“Of course I will but now think. When they were reading Richard’s will was there a clause about your death?”

“Julian gets it all,” she admits.

“And he knew you were coming to Egypt?”

“Yes. He thought it was a good idea.”

“I’ll bet he did.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Let me think.”

“Please don’t.”

“What?”

“I need you, Mark. We can’t do anything about this right now and I’m so cold.”

He slips one hard arm around her and reaches behind them to turn off the light as he pulls her up with him.

She forgot to tell him how that same lamp went out just before Richard appeared and she refrains from doing so now in order to not distract him.

He makes short work of her clothes, peeling them off her and tossing them away with the urgent efficiency of a paramedic trying to get at her wound before it’s too late. Then he shoves her back across the bed.

She slips a hand between her thighs and caresses her clitoris while watching him unbutton his jeans, although the room is so dark she can barely see him. Even when he pulls his shirt off his tanned skin seems only a dim afterglow on her retinas, exciting her because he could be any man, even a total stranger. She doesn’t want to think about who he is because all that really matters is who he isn’t. It’s not Richard there with her yet in her heart it is Richard’s chest she stretches her legs up against, Richard’s shoulders she rests the backs of her ankles on. She is only using Mark—she knows this and she doesn’t care whether it’s right or wrong. She needs him to make her forget and to help her remember—forget her grief and remember the overwhelming pleasure she felt with Richard by experiencing its ghost with another man.

He is not much more than a silhouette but she knows he is holding his growing erection fondly, proud of it, as he kindly allows her slit’s moist lips to savor his thick and tender head for a delicious moment. He makes her desperately hungry for the rest of him before he suddenly asks, “What makes you think I want your cunt, Lucia?”

She can’t answer as he slips a mere teasing inch or so of his cock into her, enjoying her wet, clinging kiss. She waits breathlessly for him to sink into her but he seems intent on making her painfully conscious of the void inside her and pointing out that only he can do something about it. “Oh God,” she gasps finally, “just fuck me, please!”

“Oh I’m going to fuck you all right, princess, don’t you worry about that, but what I’m going to fuck,” he grips her ankles with both hands and flings her legs aside, “is your ass. Turn over!”

Excitement and apprehension seem to roll her over onto her stomach with the sheer force of her reaction to what he plans to do as her heart starts racing. The bed is tall enough that all she has to do is let her legs hang off the edge so he can stand between them. He plants one hand firmly on the small of her back and perversely enough the feel of him pinning her down helps her relax and accept the fact that she has no choice but to take what’s coming to her.

Whenever Richard fucked her ass it hurt a little at first…but it was never this bad! She cries out as Mark’s head, slick with her pussy’s wasted juices, plunges into her impossibly small hole and then slips right back out as her body resists the invasion. She wants to scream when he tries again impatiently but instead she strives to hold on to him, desperate to get past the agony of his initial penetration. Because once he’s completely inside her the excruciating pain will dim to a dull torment that will then miraculously transform into a dark and inexplicable pleasure. Yet it isn’t easy making muscles accustomed only to pushing out unwanted waste remember that they can also draw something desirable into her body.

Mark groans with success, a low-pitched sound that mysteriously relaxes her and enables him to bury the full length of his erection in her bottom. Then, without hesitation, he begins thrusting in and out of her hard and fast. She balls the bedspread up in her fists to brace herself. Her pussy is only vaguely distressed by the fact that he seems to prefer her mouth and her ass, parts of her body not made especially to serve him as its aching wet depths long to. But it doesn’t really matter in light of the overwhelming fulfillment she experiences listening to the sounds he makes, luscious sounds that tell her how much he loves milking himself with her ring’s reluctantly passionate grip. The unnatural penetration turns her on almost more than her body dares to admit, because getting it up the ass defies the whole idea of sex as an evolutionary tool, an arousing enough thought in and of itself without his cock ramming the concept into her. She finds his total selfishness so intensely satisfying that she lifts herself up onto her elbows and, moaning from the breathtaking pleasure, arches her back so she can take his rigid cock even deeper.

“Mm, yes, princess, you love this, don’t you?”

She is beyond words. His driving energy is going to kill her. It just feels too damn good to survive…yet she is thinking of Richard, of all the times she willingly offered her body up on the altar of his selfish pleasure.