“Why were you afraid for me,” you persist, “and not for Ryan?”
Ryan. Navigating my past will always be treacherous. “I didn’t love him,” I tell you, breathless.
Your brow arches. “Obviously. Later, you’ll tell me why that relates. Right now, I want to know where the man who sent you flowers fits into our timeline? Before I met you or since you’ve been Ivy?”
I study you while my thoughts spin. You’re menacing at the moment. There is nothing soft or comfortable or infatuated about you. The danger perversely excites me.
I gather myself for the moment I’ve dreaded. “Did you ever look for your father?”
You scowl, displeased by what you perceive to be a change in topic. “It’s your turn to answer questions.”
“What happened to your father pertains.”
You withdraw from me to turn onto your back, your erection gleaming wetly as it curves proudly toward your navel. I push the hem of my dress down and roll to my side, facing you. Nothing cools amorousness like thinking of your parents.
You speak up at the ceiling. “We found his name and passport information on a flight manifest to South America around the time he disappeared.”
I prop my head in my hand to look down at you. The sun is setting. The gloaming has swathed the room in a lush blend of warm color and cool darkness. Your gorgeous face is half-lit and half bathed in shadow. I embrace the dusk and the cover it affords me.
“Cartagena, wasn’t it?” I ask. “You didn’t send someone down to Colombia to look for him?”
As I did moments ago, you stiffen abruptly, and your head whips toward me. A heat I can feel begins to radiate from your skin. “How do you know where he went?”
I leave the bed and move to the window. The Sound has a dark sheen, like a lake of oil. I’m cold now, separated from your body heat and intimately wet. The darkening sky silhouettes me, and that will affect you, which might give me an advantage. I’m well aware that despite how recently we’ve made love, we haven’t been this emotionally distant from each other since we arrived at the beach house.
I raise my voice, so you’ll have no trouble hearing, but keep the tone purposely casual. The information is dreadful enough on its own without dramatizing it. “I was there when my mother met with a man to remove her name from a flight manifest to Colombia. She’d been designated a no-show but wanted her name deleted, and her traveling companion changed from a no-show to a passenger who’d boarded. I remember thinking Cartagena is such an interesting sounding word, that combination of hard and soft. You know how I love words. And Paul Tierney – that name stuck. I don’t even remember what alias my mother used at the time, but your father’s name never left me.”
You’ve since abandoned your father and stepfather’s surnames and adopted one of your choosing: Black. Then you gave it to me. You’re creating a legacy with no taint from the past, but the past follows. We can never really be free of it.
There is the sound of the mattress shifting behind me. “Our parents knew each other?”
The house is still and expectant, holding the evening and our love intertwined like a captured breath.
“She paid the man in cash,” I press on. “It was a huge stack of bills. I couldn’t stop staring at it, sitting like a green brick on the table between us. We’d been poor for so long. It was shocking that she’d have that much cash, let alone give it away. I remember her hand shaking when she set the money down, but that was her only tell.”
I pause, digging in my mind for more of the memory, but it’s like a projection against roiling fog. There are only fragments of images and impressions. I can’t even be sure I haven’t embellished the recollection to fill in gaps. It was so long ago, and I was a child more devoted to my mother than to anyone else.
You’re quiet. Savvy enough to know you can’t pull the past from me and are unable to doubt me. It’s a terrible gift to be seen so completely, to know that you’re aware of the darkness that shrouds me like a lover. Perhaps you even embrace it. Maybe that’s the only way we work – if I’m the tarnished side of Lily’s gilded coin. Similar enough to preserve the fantasy but different enough to keep her memory inviolate.
Although she wasn’t so lily-white after all, was she?
You rise from the bed. There’s enough light emanating from the skylight in the bathroom to outline your tall, powerful frame in the window’s reflection. We’re two shadows, appearing as if we’re standing beside one another while, in actuality, the entire room and a lifetime of secrets separate us.
“She’d packed her bags the week before.” The pad of my thumb worries the band of my ring. “Since she didn’t pack mine or tell me to do it, I knew she was going without me. It wasn’t unusual for her to leave me alone. When I was old enough to turn the television on and use the microwave, she’d sometimes be gone all night. When I started middle school, she started staying away longer. She’d give me some money, leave food in the refrigerator and tell me to go to school every day so the attendance office wouldn’t call about me when she wasn’t there to answer. Thinking about it now, I don’t know if she meant to return from the trip to Colombia. You know how much your father embezzled. She might have thought her ship had finally come in. Certainly, your dad had to know he couldn’t come home without facing jail time.”
Movement on the beach draws my gaze downward. I find my neighbor, Ben’s grandson Robert, staring up at me from the shoreline. I don’t move, knowing I’m just a dark shape in the shadows. I remember his assertion that he’s seen me here over the past six years. An overwhelming sense of déjà vu swamps me, and I sway with sudden dizziness.
I sense your move toward me more than hear it and thrust out my hand to stay you. “No, I’m fine. Let me finish.”
I couldn’t stand it if you touched me now. I’m trapped in the space between the child I was and the woman I am now, not quite one or the other, which leaves me unbearably and frighteningly vulnerable.
“You think they were lovers.” You’ve moved closer.
“Love had nothing to do with it, at least not for my mother. She was incapable of loving anyone. I think she saw your father as a bank balance, and your father saw an irresistible woman. Men stumbled over themselves for her, Kane. She could drive a man beyond his limits with so little effort.”
“I believe it.”
I watch as Robert turns away and continues down the beach. “You can’t imagine what she was like.”
You embrace me from behind, nuzzling your temple against mine. “Can’t I?”
“I’m a pale imitation.”
“You’re radiant when I touch you. Your eyes glow when you look at me.”
You said I was safe with you. Your patience in waiting for the answer to your question is irrefutable proof. Outlining how our lives began to intersect feels like peeling off layers of my flesh. I feel a phantom kiss of air across my skin, which is nearly enough stimulus to drive me mad.
Your words are a whisper of warmth. “If she was incapable of love, she could never be as beautiful as you are.”
Your acceptance is the emotional security I was taught not to believe in. In a distant corner of my mind, I can hear my mother mocking my hopeless sentimentality, my unquenchable yearning for you. Her laughter’s musicality echoes through me. In my mind’s eye, I see that heartless glint in irises as brightly green as my own, the look that says everything is unfolding the way she’d predicted it would. She foresaw everything and had her hand in everything. No one escaped her. Nothing surprised her, especially me.
Despite her merciless tutelage, love caught me unawares. It bears your face and speaks with your voice. I feel it as your skin brushing against mine. You’ve undone me. Another lesson learned. And every life lesson I’ve survived has only brought me closer to becoming the very epitome of my mother.
“There are a million answers I want from you.” You lean your head against mine. “What happened to my father wasn’t one of them.”
The feel of your bare chest against my exposed back thaws the chill that has sunk into my bones. Every word burns my throat like acid as I speak it. “Your father had a weakness, but my mother may have been the only woman able to exploit it. And it’s possible your father had a change of heart. Maybe he realized on the way to the airport that he didn’t want to leave you and the life he’d built, but my mother was too close to getting her hands on his money to let him back out. Something went wrong, Kane, and neither of them boarded that plane. She came home with the money, and no one’s seen your father since.”
The band of your arms tightens. “Are you trying to make me feel better because maybe he didn’t have the option of coming back? That doesn’t change the choices he made to leave his wife and child in the first place, to destroy his life’s work, to rob and bankrupt his business partner, and ruin the livelihoods of his employees … All for a woman incapable of loving him but capable of killing him?”
Everything about you – your posture, tone and words – betrays a festering resentment and fury. Your disgust burns like a blaze inside you, heating your body even more.
I settle against you, my spine curving to meld with the hardness of your chest, my arms wrapping over yours. I turn my cheek toward your heart, offering what comfort I can. “That doesn’t mean he deserved to die.”
“I’m not saying that.” You rest your chin on the crown of my head. “I know how it feels to need a woman more than air, but he’ll never have my sympathy, and I’ll never forgive him. I’m at your mercy because you love me. If you didn’t, it wouldn’t matter how much I loved you, I wouldn’t ruin my life or anyone else’s for you.”
“I’m sorry, Kane.”
“Don’t apologize for him.”
“I’m apologizing for not telling you sooner. You should’ve known that I believe my mother killed your father. I had no right to keep my suspicions from you, and I did it because I’m selfish. Because I was afraid that history might destroy our future.”
Your chest expands on a deep breath. “That history is why you tracked me down and “scouted” me.”
“You call me your fate. Your destiny. But it didn’t start with us – it started with them.”
“My father’s actions brought you to me, Setareh. How could I wish things had happened differently when our marriage is the result?”
“It’s okay if you do.”
“I don’t.” You urge me around to face you. “I won’t.”
Tilting my head back, I look up at your breathtakingly handsome face. The two halves of myself – the woman my mother raised me to be and the woman who loves you to death – war with each other. “I’m not going to make excuses for my mother, but you must know a little of who she was to understand the rest.
“She despised men. She believed you’re all inherently weak, easily led by your dicks and unreliable. She’d say all that with a laugh like she wasn’t deathly serious, but I realized later how severely damaged she was. I don’t think killing your father was premeditated, but I think she enjoyed it enough to develop a taste for wet work. He was the first, but he was by no means the last.”
My confession hangs in the air between us, heavy and chilling. Your pupils expand, and your tanned skin blanches. Your entire body grows taut, like the string of a bow. Your fingers flex in the flesh of my hip.
I hold you as tightly; my fingers splayed over the hardness of your back as if I’m keeping you close, which of course I can’t. “One of her marks ran a business that was a front for organized crime, so the money she took from him actually belonged to a gangster named Val Laska. It was probably all too easy for Val to track the money to my mother. People who meet her tend to remember her well. But once he did, he fell for her, just like every other man, and she found her king. Val complemented her, made her even more deadly.”
I picture them together in my mind. They had respect for each other, recognition of their true selves, and fear. The combination was a deadly aphrodisiac blended just for them.
And if we’re being honest, are we any different?
“Her marks were always good family men before Val,” I go on. “That was part of her game, seeing if a guy who had it all could still be greedy and selfish enough to want more. If they resisted her, she let them live. If they didn’t, they died. But Val didn’t need to be lured into hell – he ruled it. Human trafficking. Underage prostitution. Murder for hire. Torture was a pastime.”
“He sounds like a catch.” Wrath laces your sarcasm. “How did it affect you?”
“It didn’t really. My mother moved in with him, left me where I was and life for me went on as it always had, just with less of her in it. She gave me money, clothes, food and kept paying the rent on the apartment. I took care of myself, which I’d always done anyway. It wasn’t until I got older and started looking like her that she took an interest in me.”
I think I’m speaking and comporting myself with detachment, but something gives me away. Your eyes have softened with pity. I don’t know why I kept talking. I could’ve shrugged the question off and told you I’d obviously turned out fine. I only meant to bring you full circle to an explanation of the flower delivery. But I didn’t shut up, and if I taper off now, you’ll imagine things you shouldn’t.
Maybe I secretly wanted to tell you more.
Lifting my chin, I finish what I started. “Around the time I hit puberty, she stopped viewing me as a separate individual. It was like she thought of me as her clone, a new and improved model who would live her perfect life without the mistakes.”
My eyes sting with tears. “I loved her, Kane. I will always love her, despite what she did to you, your family, and so many others. At first, I loved her as any child loves their mother, even though she wasn’t fit to care for anything, let alone a small human being. Later, as an adult, I realized how valuable her lessons were, and I was grateful to her for teaching them. She made me strong. She taught me about people, about men. I’ve never been naïve or gullible. I’ve never been in vulnerable situations with predators.”
“You don’t have to be ashamed for how you feel about your mother,” you tell me.
“She told me I could have anything I wanted in this world, so I never set limits on what I could accomplish. Live as you please, she told me. Don’t let the world stop you. I still hear her voice whenever I’m faced with a decision, telling me what I should do, and her direction – whatever it is – is always empowering.”
You hold my gaze in the deepening darkness. “You’re not like her, Lily.”
“The best parts of me are. So are the worst.”
“Well, I love every bit of you.” Your hand strokes down the curve of my spine, soothing, when it’s you who should be comforted. “I’ll say it as often as you need to hear it: Nothing can change how I feel about you. You empower people, too. It’s your gift.”
I take a deep breath, then let it go. My pliant body sinks into your embrace.
“So,” you begin, “our friend Val … Big guy, tall, bald and has a thing for flashy cars?”
Apprehension grips me. “Yes, that’s Val.”
“He sent the flowers – personally.” You tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “Does he want you? The money? Both?”
“No. He wants you – dead.”
Your entire body stiffens.
“You have to understand the way they think, Kane. On the surface, I appeared to achieve everything my mother wanted for me. I was independent, men were entertainment, and I was accountable to no one. Then I fell in love with you, and everything changed. You were the catalyst, so you have to go. And while my mother didn’t have the first clue about love, she knew that killing you would be the final stage of my development. I would be truly ruthless then.” Closing my eyes, I let my forehead rest against your chest. “If something ever happened to you, I would become the thing she always hoped I would be – her.”
Your lips press hard to the crown of my head. “Nothing’s going to happen to me.”
“Val will follow my mother’s wishes. That’s the message of the flowers: he’s gunning for you. Because if he lets me have you, he fails her, and he won’t fail.”
Shifting a little, I gauge whether you’ll let me pull away. Your grip tightens, holding me in place.
“Don’t regret falling in love with me, Setareh. I’d rather have five minutes with you than fifty years with someone else.”
Furious, I push you away. “Damn it, Kane. You have to put yourself first! You have to love yourself first. Don’t just accept this. You should be furious that my selfishness has put you in mortal danger.”
You look at me with an arched brow. “Cut the shit. I’m not in the mood.”
My temper flares. “I’m just a moving target, something you’re perpetually trying to earn because you don’t think you deserve love. Thanks to your parents, you don’t believe it’s possible for someone to love you, not really. Who are you if you’re not the man trying to deserve Lily?”
You throw up one hand and turn away. “Don’t start with the fucking psychobabble.”
But I can’t stop. You’re not reacting the way I need you to. Where’s the disgust? The anger? The fear? Where’s the rage? “We’re codependent. Everything about us reinforces negative behaviors in the other, don’t you see?”
“Is this when you give me a summary of one of your psych classes?”
“You think earning my love will complete you, but it’s become an obsession that undermines you.”
“Okay, fine. You want to fight?” You pivot to face me. “You’re on. I’m pissed enough about those fucking flowers.” You grab me by the arms and give me a firm shake. “Every person on this planet is a little nuts. You’ve never been happier than when you’re with me. I would never have become the man I am without you. Who gives a shit if your disorder does something with my disorder and reinforces whatever-the-fuck? It’s not crazy if it works.”
Night has descended like a shroud. The house is still and quiet, a dark sentinel protecting us from the world outside. You’re a shadow, your eyes glittering stars.
“Stop,” you say gruffly, releasing my arms to cup my face in both hands. “Stop that now.”
I don’t realize I’m crying until you brush the tears away with your thumbs. You press soft, gentle kisses all over my face, murmuring loving words and words of understanding I don’t deserve or even want. I hold you by the wrists, soaking up your torrential love like scorched earth because you’re right; we work. We make each other happy. But this isn’t what I wanted for you. In that perfect world we fantasized about days ago, we’d never hurt anyone, especially not each other.
In the deceptively coaxing murmur of a lover, you ask, “How much of what you’ve told me is the truth? A rough percentage will suffice.”
I push at your chest, but it’s like pushing a brick wall. “How can you ask me that?”
Wry amusement curves your lips. “You lie like you breathe – without thinking twice.”
That’s not true; I think about it a great deal. Piqued, I taunt you. “Maybe everything I’ve told you is a lie.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s truth in there somewhere.” Your thumb strokes over my cheekbone. Your gaze is on my mouth, the part of me that voices deceit. But the look in your eyes is still hotly sexual.
We must have been irredeemable people in our past lives. There must be some reason karma should see fit to lock us together in a boundless love that comes at a dreadful cost to so many.
“How can you love me if you don’t trust me?” I challenge.
Your smile turns indulgent. “I trust you implicitly. That doesn’t mean I don’t know you’ve rarely told me the truth. What was your mother’s last alias?”
“Stephanie. Steph Laska. And before you ask – no, I don’t know if Val is a nickname or a diminutive.”
“And your name? Is it Lily? Ivy? Violet? Rose? None of the above?”
I blink. My ability to think has come to a screeching halt. The silence becomes deafening. Whose skeletons have you managed to unearth?
Ah, my love, I’ve corrupted you. Have you become my match? Should I grieve or rejoice?
“It doesn’t matter,” you assure me, holding your lips to my forehead for a long moment, your hands rubbing up and down my bare arms to warm them.
Wild, joyous hope riots inside me. You’re still looking at me with such furious love. Somehow, for some reason, you love me – the far from perfect woman I genuinely am.
“How did your mother die?” Your voice is pitched to soothe and lull. “Did Val kill her?”
Would it matter if I lied? Who would it harm if I did?
“Setareh … Tell me how your mother died.”
“It wasn’t Val.” I sigh. “It was me. I killed her.”