PINNED BENEATH MYA Lenore’s thighs, Luke rolled from side to side as if he couldn’t lift her into the air and toss her onto the mattress like a sack of soil. She liked him just where he was, caught by choice beneath her. Mya released his arms, only to guide his hands up her bare abdomen so he could cup her breasts. His callused hands roamed the planes of her hips and ribs and collarbone before stopping at her chin. In his husky mountain accent, Luke said, “I never knew a woman like you.”
“Tsk, tsk,” Mya said like a preschool teacher, and locked his arms down beside him, then eyed the yellow silk scarves on her bedside table and walked two fingers over to snag them.
“You’re bad,” Luke said. Mya tied his wrists to one of the brass poles of her headboard and proceeded down from there.
Luke moaned and then said, “Get to it now.”
“Patience,” she said, and tickled his etched abdomen with her fingernails, dirt still visible beneath them. What she found appealing about a twenty-six-year-old at times also troubled Mya. Luke’s youthful eagerness highlighted their ten-year age difference when she hadn’t had enough rest, like today.
Luke pulled his wrists free and the scarves dropped to the floor. Mya let her long blond hair create a tent around his pelvis, and he stroked it at the roots. The flowers she’d gathered on her walk and inserted in her hair fell onto the bed. The sweet scent still lingered, but the limp and browning petals no longer looked like a white pinwheel. Luke spread Mya’s hair all over his torso and said, “It’s so fucking long and beautiful.”
Mya said, “A family gift.”
Luke pinched her nipple and said, “Don’t bring up your mama. It’s not a good time.”
“True,” she said, and rubbed her hand along his inner thigh where his thick, curly hair tapered.
Luke placed one arm behind his head so he could see her better, his biceps curved like a mountain slope. He said, “Your sunshine hair makes me crazy.” He ran his fingers through it, and Mya continued to stroke his thigh and rested her cheek on his abdomen. Luke placed his hand at the back of her head and gently nudged it forward, and she gathered him in her mouth and let all her anxious thoughts drain away like water on a drought-blighted plot of earth.
Ten minutes later he shouted out, “Holy mother of good God!” Then he rolled over on the red poppy-print quilt and Mya slapped his pale behind before he got up to go to the bathroom.
Mya left the bedroom and went to the kitchen, where she poured a glass of water mixed with fine sea salt. Luke was still in the bathroom when she returned. What was he doing in there? Mya spread her body out on the hardwood floor and placed the glass of salt water between her feet. She stared at the exposed wooden beams on the ceiling and then called out to Luke, “I dyed my hair black one summer and it turned split-pea green for three months.”
After a delay he finally answered, “That was dumb.”
“It was,” she said. “Lucia had such dark hair and I wanted mine like that.” Her little sister had hair as smooth as an onyx stone, and it smelled of summer rain no matter how often she used shampoo. Hair like Great-Grandmother Serena’s, a point their mother never failed to brag about, like Lucia’s earning straight A’s. So much of a normal life had always come easily to Lucia, but in all other ways she had nothing in common with Great-Grandmother. Lucia might have had her hair, but she had no gift for scent or visions.
Luke said, “She’s still in New York?”
Mya said, “Married, acting, that’s all I know,” and she stood up and moved her operation to the bed. She stretched her long legs out on the lavender-scented sheets, balanced the glass of salt water on the bed, and clasped a pillow to her stomach. She stared at the room as a whole—the black rocking chair in the corner beneath an old net that held her stuffed animals, her clothes in a stinking pile desperate to be washed and hung on the line—and then she spotted a stray hair from Luke’s head.
She caught it with her fingernails, lifted it up like the metal claw in the toy-vending machine at the grocery store, and secured it in her side-table drawer. A single strand of hair, dried chamomile flowers, seven drops of geranium oil, and a black ribbon secured with a safety pin always did the trick. Sometimes only this spell could break the irrational and impulsive bond of sex that so many people mistook for love.
Luke sauntered back into the room completely nude except for one stray flower pressed on his pelvis and stopped at the foot of the bed. He reached out for the glass, and Mya lunged for it and said, “It’s salty.” She moved the glass to her bedside table.
“What weird thing are you up to?” Luke said.
Mya tucked her knees to her chest and said, “My foot chakra’s messed up.”
“Your what?” he said, and he gathered his jean overalls and white undershirt.
“I made a mistake,” Mya said.
He looked down at her like she was speaking French. “That got something to do with why we went out molly mooching so damn early?” he said.
She nodded.
Luke hooked his overalls and put his hands in his pockets. “Anything else?”
“That’s all,” Mya said.
He looked like he might protest but then gave her that sweet side smile. Luke bent down, kissed her on the neck, and tried to pull her closer for round two, but she said, “Can’t. Don’t you have fields to plow?”
“Ten,” he said, and laced his work boots. When he stood back up he grimaced and grabbed his right shoulder.
“Your daddy’s working you too hard,” Mya said. She turned Luke around and massaged his smooth shoulders, then moved her hands down over his chest muscles.
He dropped his head down and groaned as she worked out his knots.
“When’s your mom get back?” he said.
“Tomorrow,” she said. She led him through the pale green linen curtains on the doorway. He reached for her hand as if to hold it, but Mya rubbed her hip instead. Not that close, she wanted to tell him. They entered the reading room—Mya’s laundry spilled out from the bedroom and landed in this communal living space. Her mother had grown accustomed to it, and she didn’t say anything about Mya’s messes anymore. Not that tidiness came naturally to her mother. Mya couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen the coffee table free of her office overflow.
Luke moved through the clutter without comment. Six months ago Mya had visited Luke’s family farm to contract a year’s worth of grass-fed beef. She’d expected to talk to his daddy, but he wasn’t home. Luke had been restoring the barn’s roof and came down the ladder to speak to her. He was shirtless and smooth and sweating and suspicious of why a Lenore woman had come to visit. Mya knew as soon as his boots landed on the earth that she had to have him. She asked him to deliver each week’s portion in person, and on his first stop she asked him to stay for lunch. When Luke first entered the cabin, she wondered what he’d say about her messiness, if he might judge her for having bras and underwear strewn about, but all he said was “How long’s it been since a man lived here?” And it had never occurred to Mya that a man’s presence in the house might shape the array of items she left out. She told him, “Not since my granddaddy died when we were girls.” That was the only time Luke mentioned the chaos. They could afford a maid, but her mother didn’t like having strangers in the house.
Now they moved through the reading room, with every wall encased in books about perfumery, art, botany—so many books only her mother read. Mya’s vegetable stock continued to simmer in the kitchen, filling the house with the earthy smells of onion, carrot, celery, and potatoes. She opened the red front door, where a dried bunch of eucalyptus and rosemary branches hung upside down on a hook. A family of wrens nested there, and each time Mya opened the door, one or more of the family members flew inside. Luke dodged them. They stepped onto the porch together and Mya said, “I’ll make food for us tonight.”
“Or we could go out,” Luke said.
“That’s not us, remember? I like us here,” Mya said, and this had always been her response because she always felt the same way: she didn’t like going to town unless it was for business. But he hated this answer. “You know I’m too old for you,” she said, and she brought his mouth to her own and kissed him.
Luke patted Mya on the hip and said, “You’re going on a date with me sometime, Mya Lenore. I mean it; I don’t know when and I don’t know where, but I want to take you out and buy you a drink and some food, and I don’t give a damn who sees us.” Then he crossed the threshold of the ivy-covered front porch; there was so much of it that the porch fans had been choked by the vines years ago. Long strands hung like a beaded curtain on all sides of the porch, and no one could see past the flora that led to their house. Not that anyone was around, not with a thousand and seventy-seven acres of buffer and the Blue Ridge Mountains just above like a fortress. He jogged down the slate front steps and walked to his Toyota pickup truck.
“There’s always hoping,” Mya called after him. Before he closed the driver’s-side door she added, “Text me, if you’re coming tonight,” and he said, “Okay,” and waved good-bye to her. Mya leaned against the wooden support beam on the porch and pulled her long hair over her bare breasts to shield them. Luke drove down the driveway with a thick cloud of Virginia red dust trailing behind his truck. Mya bent down and searched for buttercup flowers dotting the summer grass, and she wished she could rest there. But she couldn’t, no matter how much her body insisted.
If she was going to fix her mistake, then Mya needed this time alone in her workshop with the musk pod she and Luke had collected at the waterfalls. Zoe’s poor decision to cross industries jeopardized the business, but Mya had no intention of letting anything happen to Lenore Incorporated. The family business was Mya’s only future. Without some convincing, her mother would never allow Mya to alter Great-Grandmother Serena’s perfume formula to solve this problem, but the formula had to be changed, just this once, for this very special case. Willow would have no choice once she returned from her meeting with Zoe in L.A. Willow wasn’t well, no matter how much she tried to cover it up. Mya respected her mother’s privacy, but for the sake of the business, Willow needed to pass her title over to Mya soon, and then Mya could deal with the consequences alone.
Mya went back inside and turned to close the front door. Luke’s cloud of dust dissipated, and in the green field that sloped down into a valley full of hay barrels, a thousand or more cobalt-blue dragonflies hovered like a standing army. With her blond hair rolling down to the small of her back, Mya pushed the door open again and ran down the steps, across the dirt driveway, and into the middle of the field. Lucia’s dragonflies were amassed in a greater number than Mya had ever seen, and they parted as she approached. Mya grew nervous, and she looked up into heavy cumulus clouds, like giant peaks of meringue. In the center of a large billowing cloud, she saw her sister’s face, so similar to Mya’s with the high cheekbones and tiny chin and wide-set eyes. But it was most certainly Lucia.
Just as quickly as the image had arrived, the cloud broke in half, with the summer sun piercing through to Mya. She closed her eyes to feel the heat on her entire body. Why had the dragonflies returned? Lucia didn’t have a place here anymore; there was no way she’d come home, not now, not after so many years away. But the dragonflies surrounded Mya until she felt cocooned, and Mya swatted at them and screamed, “Back off!” They spun all around her like a dust storm, and then they lifted upward and escaped into the surrounding trees.
Mya’s stomach cramped. The dragonflies always favored Lucia. They had acted as an entourage for her during their games in the forest. They had guided Lucia to find Mya’s hiding spots. The older Lucia had become, the less and less she had talked to Mya and their mother. If she wasn’t with her boyfriend Ben, then Lucia was planning for the day she’d leave for New York City. The dragonflies had become the only way to know that Lucia was nearby. They hadn’t congregated like this since she’d left. Mya had stayed in Quartz Hollow with her mother and devoted all these years to ensure she’d be the next president of Lenore Incorporated. She looked to the sky with its unmoving clouds and said, “Do not come home.”