Flashes of lightning spread through the open window of the lighthouse and touched particles dancing in the room. The rest of the space was drenched in cool dim. It made the lighthouse feel old-timey, like a filter had stamped this moment.
From the fireplace in the living area, the crackling of the flames drifted into the bathroom, where I was soaking in a clawfoot tub. The water was surprisingly warm and instantly eased the chattering of my teeth.
After eating, Stone sat in the bathroom with me, propped on a wooden chair next to two vanilla colas. He was drawing in his sketchpad, eyes locked and flicking up and over the golden coil at me every few seconds with a flex in his jaw. Each time, strands of snow curled over his forehead and tangled with his long black lashes. Though he was quiet, he professed his all on paper, his wrist moving gracefully despite being attached to an indignant hand. All emotion was not in his heart but at his fingertips.
A smile stretched my lips, and, unable to stand it, I leaned forward and rested my chin on my crossed arms, looking up at him. “Oh, the stern face.”
Stone gave me a side eye, the corner of his mouth lifting. “You are distracting me.”
“What are you drawing? Let me see.”
He only considered for a second, gazing down at me with woeful black eyes. He was vulnerable. Like I’d cut him open days ago, and neither of us had stitched him closed. Then he closed the sketchpad and handed it to me, wanting me to see, wanting to share it with me.
I opened the sketchpad to discover a crushed black lily tucked into the spine.
He kept one, my heart sang.
I plucked it from between the pages and swept it across my lips as I read the script at the top of the page. “She’ll sting you one day, oh, ever so gently, so you hardly ever feel it. ‘Till you fall dead.” Then under it, in fine penmanship, it read Jacob Grimm. I looked at him again.
Stone cleared his throat. “As you suggested, I watched a film on the projector. Those words were in Queen Bee, but I remembered them first written by Jacob Grimm.”
“Did this passage remind you of me?” I asked from soft lips.
He leaned back, stretching out his legs, looking down at me from behind hooded eyes, silent, a knowing look. One that required no words. I looked back at the sketchpad and flipped through the pages.
Stone had drawn a collection of eyes, delicate mouths, and profiles in a way that someone in love would. Then I landed on the last picture. This was of me in the bathtub at this very moment.
“You were drawing me,” I said, feeling a blush creep across my cheeks as I looked at the girl in the drawing. It was the first time I could look at myself and not see evil. I didn’t know what that meant to him, but it meant a lot to me. “It’s good. It’s really good. Who taught you how to draw like this?”
“Art has no master.”
I felt his eyes on me as I traced a dry finger around the curve of my sketched face, across my collarbone, and the crescent of my breast.
His style was also grieving, longing, and passion. His art provoked the heart, as one would be affected by music, a novel, or a scene in a movie. It was beautifully devastating.
I looked up at him. “I don’t know a damn thing about love, but this screams you’ve once known what it felt like.”
Stone was staring down at me, chewing on the end of his thick drawing pencil. “The only ones who know a damn thing about love, I believe, are the artists. And only during occasions they’ve completely lost themselves in their work. So, if I’ve ever felt love, I would have later mistaken it for obsession. And if I ever feel love, I’m afraid I won’t know until it’s too late.”
Sadness crept inside me.
Sadness for both of us.
“Sounds like a slow death.”
“We can survive a lifetime without love, as long as it doesn’t touch us.”
“Seems like an impossible task. What happens if it does?”
A beautiful smile ripped across his face.
“Then, my darling, we become mad fools.”
I closed the book, handed it to him, and sank back into the tub, wanting to say something. That maybe … I was the mad fool for wanting this thing called love.
Though attentive to my every moment, Stone’s audacious eyes followed me, as they always did. They observed me, bold and brazen, in such a way, it seemed, that he was either afraid I’d fade away or suffocate him.
But then those smoldering fucking eyes raked down my face and breasts, and the air in the room thickened.
The shared space was no longer light and playful but thick and intense.
Torturous seconds passed, and he laid his pencil and sketchpad on the counter behind him. With his eyes never leaving mine, he rolled his sleeve to the elbow, leaned in, and supported one hand on the tub’s rim behind my head.
Mouths inches apart, a gloved hand trailed across the inside of my leg, from my ankle bone to my knee, and I sucked in a breath.
“Stone,” I shuddered.
“Hm?” he hummed upon exhaling, his nose tracing my jawline. But I couldn’t speak. Amused, he cupped the back of my knee and lifted my leg out of the water, guiding it to hang from the edge of the tub. Bathwater slid down my sole and dripped from my heel.
“Stone,” a whisper, my head falling back on his hand.
Stone’s mouth floated up the length of my neck and behind my ear. My body shuddered under the warm leather when it came down on my thigh again, and I imagined what it would feel like without the glove again. With his bare hand touching me. Skin to skin. The things I’d see.
“Why do you wear gloves?” I asked in almost a plea.
“If I removed them, I’d see all your secrets,” he said. “Who touched you last, who you touched last, how you felt in those moments, the most poignant memories stamped into your skin. It’s all too intruding.”
This explained the memory I had seen of us. “Would I be able to see too?”
Stone shook his head. “That’s not how it works.”
He has no idea, I thought. And I wondered what it would be like to let him touch me, to let him in that deeply, and how would he think of me then? Would Stone change his mind about us, and would all of this end?
I took his hand into mine, unsure of where my bravery had come from. I pulled the glove from each finger one by one, my heart pounding, before tossing it to the side.
Stone froze with a defiant look in his eyes as if he would bolt from the bathroom or strangle me for putting him in such a position.
“Wasn’t that what we agreed upon?” I asked him, looking at the scar slashed across his palm from when he took the knife from me in the cave. “I give myself to you, as you give yourself to me.”
I brought his fingertips to my lips and kissed them.
Stone’s eyes closed briefly, and I watched his stoic expression melt as I released his hand, letting it fall between my breasts. Stone’s chair screeched when he almost fell forward into me.
“Why don’t you lose the chair and come closer?” I suggested.
“Have you not been listening?” His wandering palm was surprisingly warm when it smoothed down my throat to my collarbone. “I don’t get on my knees for anyone. Not even you.”
His words were like moonshine, sweet on his tongue and burned going down. But his touch distracted the sting, and I did my best to remain still as his warm fingertips brushed the soft side of my breast.
Stone no longer felt as if he’d been born from snowfall. Each day he was getting warmer, like the cells in his body were colliding with mine. Blood thrashing, the soil of his soul disheveled and yanked to the surface by my undoing. Perhaps all this time it was me who was slowly bringing him back to life.
My eyes found his. “What do you see when you touch me?”
“Us,” he said with relief. “I see us.”
I smiled. “Have you ever touched anyone without gloves?”
“Do I seem like the kind of monster who has ever touched a woman at all before you?” he asked with a gentle, grounded voice that always made my heart leap. His scarred palm smoothed down my heaving stomach, a warm buzz darting in my lower belly like embers. Then his fingernails scraped the crease inside my thigh where my panty line would be, should I be wearing any. “What about you, Circe? Who is touching you after you leave this island?”
I dropped my head to the side with a hardly-there smile. “See for yourself,” I challenged. “If your hand is talented as you say, you’ll be able to see the truth.” Though there was still a tightness in my throat at the thought of this backfiring and him pulling away altogether.
He watched my face, eyes setting off a dubious flare as he grabbed the back of my thigh, kneading it in a slow massage. I could tell he was nervous about what he’d find, considering whether to move forward.
Then his hand moved to my other leg. I let it fall to the side when he smoothed his palm down my inner thigh. His fingertips grazed my pussy, and I sucked in a breath.
“I’m the one you think of when you touch yourself.” His tone was not playful but drunk off this moment and held weight. He leaned closer, brushing his knuckles across my clit as he kissed my lips softly.
“It’s only fair that I confess that you’ve done something to me no one has ever done,” he whispered. “You make me feel wanted.”
I lightly stroked my mouth across his. “If I’m honest, I wish we could have more than six hours a day together. Or stop time from passing and trap it inside a glass bottle.”
“Time is not something we catch but something we create.” His fingertips trembled when they brushed my clit again.
A sigh escaped me.
My following words came out shredded. “Like one of your drawings?”
“Yes,” he said, looking deep into my eyes. “Like one of my drawings.”
My fingers curled around the edges of the tub when a warm murmur crawled along my veins, my blood pumping hot. “Go slow, just like this,” I struggled to get out. “As if we have all the time in the world.”
And the small bathroom surrounded by fogged glass and a curved wall became inescapable. Stone traced me, sending ripples of pleasure throughout my entire body.
With his fingers, he drew along my pubic bone and through my every crease, touching every inch as if he were creating memories, erasing the old, storing away the new. And when his fingers gently parted my pussy lips, he traced along the inner slick edge. My body was an exposed nerve, and another sigh fell from my lips. Equal parts misery and bliss.
As much as my eyes wanted to roll back in my head from the slow-building pleasure, his gaze was deeply woven with mine, an uncompromising demand to keep them on him.
He drew heavy circles against my opening. Deep, ardent strokes.
A moan left me, and the sensations were almost too much to bear. He rested his forehead against mine, wanting to be a part of it, feel every sigh hit his mouth, witness every sinking blink, every shake of my lips.
I wanted more, grinding against his fingers until he slipped one inside me.
My expression broke, and Stone’s mouth fell open. “If only you could see yourself.” He swallowed, pushing his finger in to the knuckle, holding my head in the palm of his other hand, my spine arching as he stroked my inner walls. “My darling, you’ve made an absolute fool of me.”
I dissolved into the bathwater, grinding against him as his thumb stroked my clit.
He slid another finger inside, dragging them in slowly, then out. Each drawing made the room fuzzy, like static sizzling both around and inside us. It was almost impossible to keep my eyes open, so they latched onto his eyes as I was going under.
With our foreheads connected, Stone’s lashes splayed across his cheekbones like ink on paper as he peered down the length of my withering body.
He wet his parted lips. “You should know,” black eyes flicked up to mine, “the need to forsake the sun and fuck you this very second is insufferable.”
My palm slapped the edge of the tub, and water slipped over my peaked nipples as he slowly pumped into me, grazing his mouth teasingly across my cheek. Vibrations built up inside me when his long fingers curled, the smooth pads applying pressure inside, the pad of his thumb scraping my clit.
My leg started to shake, the pleasure threatening to skin me raw. When I tried to slip my leg back into the water to clench my thighs, Stone trapped it between his knees, keeping me at his mercy.
I looked to him, panic taking me as an orgasm made a vicious climb.
I looked to him, a scream to free me because the pleasure was so fierce I was afraid the climax would simply rip me apart.
He looked up. Our eyes connected.
A miserable look stole his features.
That was when he pressed his cheek to mine, and his whisper was a soothing balm in my ear. “I need to tell you something.” I felt his lips graze the shell, and his hand slowed, suspending me. “Are you listening?”
I nodded, my cells on the verge of bursting.
“What if I told you that in the beginning, we were lifetimes apart?” His breath sailed across my cheek when he exhaled. Like the question held weight. In both the words and the seriousness behind them, it held weight. And he was letting it go.
I didn’t understand, so I tried to turn my head to search his face, but he wouldn’t let me. He kept his cheek pressed to mine so I couldn’t look him in the eyes, and he continuously dragged his fingers in and out of me at a dangerously slow pace.
“Listen,” he rasped with a voice on the edge of breaking. “What if I told you that centuries were supposed to separate us, that time was designed to stand in our way? What if I told you that every second together is measured by the impossible because the chance of you and me was never supposed to happen?” He paused. He breathed in. He breathed out. “We were never supposed to find each other, but we did. You found me, and then you saw me, and it seems you’ve somehow made these two words entirely different.” I blinked, feeling a riptide splash beneath my lashes. “We were never supposed to happen, but here we are, nevertheless, at the hands of the unknown, against all odds, my darling siren. Because I believe something more rebellious had other plans for us.” His lips brushed the shell of my ear. A whisper. A secret. “Perhaps the stars themselves.”
He returned his eyes to me, his gaze swimming. “What if I told you that?”
The pad of his thumb pushed up against my clit and licked it, stealing me. As if he didn’t want me to answer. As if he didn’t want to know.
My leg started to shake, and I bit my lip to stifle a cry, but it was no use.
There was a tremor of my lips just as my orgasm erupted.
I wouldn’t have noticed if my mouth wasn’t just barely touching his.
My thighs tried to clench together from the feeling of being turned inside out. But Stone kept my leg between his knees, trapping it there as his thumb gently brushed my clit, his curled fingers leisurely stroking my orgasm.
Awe struck his features. Hooded eyes studied my face. Like what was happening to me was the most arresting thing he’d ever seen.
I found him more attractive at that moment. Carved jaw, sullen chin, lips too sensitive for a man. His features were hard, steadfast, but once the eternal trace of mourning broke through, what I thought to be, the unshakeable mask drawn onto his face, I felt him in the deepest parts of me.
Muscles tense, my body jerked in the palms of his eyes at the peak of the climax. Then my head fell back, the cool air rushing up my chest.
Stone was absolutely aroused, breathing hard, his brows slanted, teasing my orgasm as it died away. But before it left me completely, he withdrew his coated fingers and swiped my climax onto my tongue.
And, as he promised, I tasted myself.
I tasted myself.
Winter and copper. Earth and wild musk.
Stone grabbed my throat, sweeping his tongue into my mouth, and his moan quivered through me. He kissed me slowly, passionately. And I melted.
I melted.
At some point, he lifted me out of the tub and pulled me into his lap.
I straddled him, soaking his clothes and burrowing myself into his chest.
My nipples were hard and pierced his thin shirt with every heaving breath. The cold slipping into the bathroom wrapped around us, and my body trembled in the wake of it all. “Stone?”
“Hm?” he hummed, his mouth dragging up the length of my neck, ten fingertips slowly grazing the sides of my breasts. When my head fell back, he kissed my throat. Gentle, gentle. A warm breath on every exhale as he slid his fingers down my sides and back up again. “What is it, Circe?”
And when he said this name, I closed my eyes to keep guilt from hitting my heart. If I told him my true name after all this time, how would he believe anything else?
I lowered my chin to look him in the eyes.
“I would believe you,” I said to him. “If you told me that we were supposed to live centuries apart, I would believe you.”
A dark gaze darted between my eyes as his hands paused.
That was when Stone leaned in.
And he whispered another secret in my ear.
His lips moved against my cheek, telling me that he was not of this year but from 1864.
This quiet bomb had my heart racing, raising every hair on my body.
His confession didn’t stop. It went on in a whispered mess. A voice that shook, dispersed sentences, and broken breaths. Yet, he still spoke with unyielding truths, from the night his mother poisoned him, through a century of repeating death at the bottom of the sea, then waking up with me in the cave.
As he spoke, he believed in what he said with everything he had.
And for that, I believed him, too.
I kept my eyes outside the window as he held me, whispering his secrets, the snow slicing and slashing and slanting from the wind. There was snow both in my mind and falling around me. How were we possible?
When he pulled away, his face was like a marble Renaissance statue staring back at me, waiting for the truth to settle, for my heart to calm.
Then, we stayed just like that, with his fingers sliding down my spine as we lost ourselves in each other.
Stone
Circe stayed.
I never told her about the men I saw but instead replaced all memories on her skin with ones of us, confident she was mine now. I knew the truth about how she felt. Her heart didn’t beat the same with them as it did with me.
She undressed for me that night, laid upon the bed, sultry eyes and a wicked smile. But when I undressed, the grimace on her face ripped my heart out. She still couldn’t look past my cock, so she tried not to look at it at all.
How could I blame her when I could hardly look at myself?
“Stone,” she whispered, the fire glowing on her skin, a call I couldn’t resist.
I slipped back into my trousers and lay beside her. She was perfect, and we were quiet as I inhaled her, obsessed with all her details.
The way she smelled, the way she looked, the way she tasted.
I had time, hours, an opportunity, the entire night to fuck her, but I couldn’t.
But I could please her forever and found pleasure in doing so.
Afterward, she read another chapter of Alec & Circe until we fell asleep, two semicolons curled before a fire, the feel of heat pumping at our backs.
In the early morning darkness, I awoke on my stomach to the sound of cruel winds whistling, a muffled knocking, and the cold feel of neglect.
Not neglect entirely, but the feeling of being forgotten.
“Circe?” I pulled myself onto my elbow and wiped the corners of my eyes.
In front of the window, Circe stood with her back to me, softly crying.
She was wearing my shirt, blonde hair tumbling over one shoulder, leaving me tempted to trace the length of her neck.
I got to my feet and tread carefully, unsure of where the knocking was coming from. As I stepped closer, I realized she was writing a word into the fogged glass.
“Circe?” I said again.
With a stop of her finger against the window, her head slowly turned in my direction. She looked straight through me, not even recognizing me. Green eyes glassy and looking past me.
It was as though she didn’t even see me standing there.
And there was never a fear so deep as the thought of being erased altogether. Never was there a terror so cruel as being forgotten by her. My chest felt like an angry tribe had stomped on it—ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
The knocking continued in the background, sounding a lifetime away. A beating heart. I sucked in a breath to gather myself. “Circe, what are you doing?”
Her bottom lip and chin trembled, but she didn’t say anything. She turned to the window again, facing the night and dragging her pointer finger along the fogged glass.
At that moment, I knew she had to have been sleepwalking.
Was this the first time? Had she done this before?
I reached out to turn her around, to guide her to lay back down, but a heart-fisting scream belted from her throat once my fingers touched her shoulders—one that could snap a soul in half.
Her hands shot forward like lead balls from a pistol, ripping apart my chest with her claws. The last thing I wanted to do was cause her any harm, but if she were anyone else, I could have easily cracked the bones in her wrists right then.
Her arms swung at my head, and I snatched them up and wrestled them under mine, holding her close to my burning chest.
Circe thrashed inside my arms, and when she popped her head up, it knocked against my chin, slamming my teeth together.
Blood pooled in my mouth, but I refused to let her go.
If I did, there was a chance she could harm herself.
I turned my head to the side, digging it into her shoulder so she couldn’t throw her head back. I dragged her away from the window and guided her into the bed, cradling her between my bent legs.
“Circe,” I called out to her in a soothing whisper, but she only cried, tears soaking her cheeks, hair sticking to her skin. And these cries weren’t soft or subtle but piercing and spilling with anguish. It was a cry that could break hearts. The fierce grief of losing a lover. Cutthroat mourning. The harshness of it all.
I rocked her, using my teeth to peel the glove from my hand, then smoothed her hair off her forehead before laying my palm against it. It was the only thing I could think of to do.
She was feverish beneath my palm, but at my touch, she stopped fighting me. All that was left were her cries as she melted between my legs.
I rested her head against my shoulder and stroked her chest, flicking through her memories until one surfaced: little feet slapping wet sand on a shore, head turning, a giggle escaping; a woman chasing her with a smile and adoring eyes, laughing, sunlight bathing my skin.
I squeezed my eyes shut. This had to be her and her mother. I didn’t know if I was strong enough to keep going, the memory too sensitive for a man who’d been betrayed by one.
Alas, I couldn’t help myself, and my palm sank between her breasts just as I’m scooped up and swung around; I’m hugged, I’m loved, I’m adored; “My sunshine,” she sings. “I got you.”
And it ripped open my chest, feeling how it should have felt to be loved by a mother. Control yourself, don’t react, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, I repeated with my chest burning, sadness crowning.
Despite all efforts, I turned my head, and a burst of emotion broke out of me, tears pooling in my eyes.
I threw my head back and swiped a palm down my face.
As much as I wanted to let go of the memory, I couldn’t. It was warm here, and I didn’t know why I was torturing myself like this. Even though the memory wasn’t mine, the way this woman looked at me made me believe, even for a moment, that I was treasured, too. And I finally knew what it should have felt like to be accepted by a mother.
Circe’s next breath came out caught up and broken.
She was still crying but could finally breathe.
Not the same crying as before but lighter tears.
Ones from bliss rather than misery.
My heart pounded. Could she see the memory too?
It had never been possible before, and I should’ve known better than to hold on to hope. To think something I’d been cursed with could be helpful and ease her pain was foolish in the least.
It’s not possible, I reminded myself. But when her mother ran into the ocean with us in her arms, a small smile tore across Circe’s lips, and it felt like my heart burst through my bones.
The words “My god” escaped me as I dropped my head into the curve of her neck.
She can see it. It’s possible.
I kissed her cheek and felt her salty tears slip down my lips.
“It’s going to be all right,” I said, hearing childlike laughter swirling around us as we splashed in the shallow. “We got you.”
The muffled knocking sound continued, and I glanced behind me at the window where Circe had stood.
Wistoragic was written several times into the fogged glass.
Two very different scripts.
As though it were written by two very different people.