Chapter Fourteen #3
“Fucking bite me again,” Cosima breathed, thumbing Edie’s nipple as firmly as Edie assumed she wanted her teeth.
Well, shit. It was going to be like that—white-hot sparks from Cosima’s slow pinches and incautious kisses feeding into an unending upward spiral of lust that held Edie in a tortured grip of not-quite-enough, winding toward some completely new kind of coming that would definitely kill her.
Both of Cosima’s hands slid around Edie’s ribs and tugged her shirt.
“What do you want?” Edie asked.
Cosima stood, pulling Edie with her. “To keep kissing you, but with warm toes.”
Edie laughed and let herself be towed back inside, where the hush of the dim room amplified the sounds Cosima made in her throat when she kissed her, backing her up against the bed, and then they were sprawled across the wrinkled duvet, Edie half out of her shirt, Cosima so unbelievably hot in a criminal, tiny bra and panties that Edie couldn’t look hard enough.
The pillowy, lavender-scented mattress took her down.
Cosima’s hair brushed against her cheek when she kissed Edie’s jawline, behind her ear, down her neck.
Her firm grip trapped Edie’s wrist above her head as she moved above her, as if Edie would get away, as if Cosima knew second thoughts were the threat.
It was the determined furrow to her eyebrows, the way she kissed Edie like she wanted to acquire this—to learn and master and memorize the slide of her tongue against Edie’s and the way it sped up the rolling movement of her hips—that made Edie’s boundaries dissolve like sparkling dust, blowing away the last of her sensible thoughts and every inhibition.
She slid down the bed, letting Cosima keep hold of her trapped wrist but adjusting and readjusting until the palm of her free hand laid across the top of Cosima’s ass, her fingertips pushing past elastic to splay over firm flesh.
Their kiss got slower and deeper, the thrust of Edie’s tongue keeping time with her hand guiding Cosima’s hips to ride Edie’s thigh.
Cosima’s arms came down, and she framed Edie’s face with her forearms, breathing broken, her cheeks red, and when Edie dragged her heel over the bed to flatten her foot against it and push her thigh harder, Cosima smashed her cheek against Edie’s, the movement of her hips tighter, unambiguous.
“Is this okay?” It wasn’t a whisper, but it wasn’t Cosima’s crystalline, precise voice, either. It was needy. Edie’s free hand snuck down to play along the soft skin of her own inner thigh, helpless not to tease herself.
“Is this how you want it, princess?” Edie’s fingertips had found the wet gusset of her own panties, and just that small bit of contact had made her eyes roll.
“Yeah. Yeah.” Cosima’s cheek pressed harder, her skin burning hot.
Edie moved the hand on Cosima’s hips lower, dipping past the band of her panties.
Finding her soft and wet and pushing up against Edie’s sliding fingers wasted her, ruined her with a fast, hard pulse between her legs, and then Cosima’s rough shout was forced against Edie’s temple.
For the first time, she came while hardly touching herself, came only from how turned on she was, how hard Cosima came and the sounds she was making, and it was good—so good.
But as she started to breathe again she could feel her aching heart, like crushed velvet, and knew this wasn’t only sex.
It wouldn’t have happened if it was only sex. Cosima had already told her that.
Edie brought her arms around Cosima, who was trembling.
God.
She thought of the line from a poem her sister-in-law had painted on a barn board and hung over her mantle.
Don’t be a merchant who won’t risk the ocean.
It had made her wonder if her twenty-one-year-old sister-in-law ran a little deeper than Edie ever guessed, and remembering the words now, she felt equally terrified and exhilarated. Risk the ocean.
Cosima sank away from Edie’s body onto the space beside her on the narrow mattress, and they both moved to their sides to look at each other.
Edie’s heart picked up again, amazed when Cosima’s eyes met hers and neither of them looked away.
Her experience with heedless lust involved a lot of hurry and chagrin in the aftermath.
Cosima’s steady, soft eye contact and relaxed smile were different.
This was different.
Cosima’s hand wiggled up between them, and then her index finger traced along Edie’s forehead. “Cassiopeia,” she said.
“Who is that?” Edie closed her eyes as Cosima traced over her face.
“Queen of Ethiopia. Her daughter was saved from a sea monster, but in this case, the constellation. Your freckles make it, here.” She touched Edie’s forehead again, then her temple. “Orion’s Belt.” Her fingers brushed under her eye. “Ursa Major.”
“Not frog polka dots,” Edie said.
Cosima kissed her nose. Had any woman kissed her nose? Even her mother? “Certainly not.”
Edie lifted a coiled strand off Cosima’s flushed neck. “Your hair’s lighter, curlier, and your eyes are bigger.” Edie touched her fingertips to Cosima’s lips. “And this is not at all the same. Or this.” She cupped Cosima’s square jaw. “You’re entirely you. I think you always have been.”
Cosima sunk the heels of her hands into her eyes.
“You stop. If you start with that kind of thing, I’ll lose my edge.
” She smiled and rolled on her back and turned her head to Edie.
“You know, the only time anyone ever tells me I look like her is when I’m with her.
On my own, I’m just me.” Her stomach gurgled. “Oh, no.”
They’d left the door to the balcony open a crack, and Edie could hear noise from the street—traffic, someone shouting, faraway church bells. The city waking up.
It made her wish for a different life. For real magic that would let her stay in this moment, where they could pull the covers up over them and she could fall back asleep with her head on this woman’s shoulder, breathing in the scent of her, wrapped in her arms.
But she didn’t resent the busy day ahead of them, any more than she could regret what they’d done. For the first time in weeks, Edie found herself looking forward to whatever came next.
“We’re hungry,” she said. “We need to buy a couple of sweatshirts with Joan of Arc on them. The bathroom is stocked with a pharmacy’s worth of toiletries that look better than anything I’ve ever paid for, so we’re set there and only need to shower.
Should we get ready, then take the map to a café to figure out where we might go? ”
“Yes, let’s do that.” Cosima moved to a sitting position, giving Edie aftershocks between her legs. This woman’s beauty was a lot to take in at once. “But I might have already figured it out.”
“Really? When?”
“You fell asleep first.” She gathered her hair in her hands.
“I’m absolutely positive that you fell asleep first.”
“I had a nap in the car that took the edge off. You were snoring almost as soon as your head hit your single, sad pillow.” Cosima had begun sifting her fingertips through her hair, searching out tangles and gently pulling them apart.
“I heard your breathing change!”
Her shoulders dropped, and even in a cross-legged position on the bed, Cosima appeared to gain a few inches in height.
Imperious again, but not intimidating. Not in the least. She tugged at a particularly stubborn tangle.
“I was probably just relaxed, because you one hundred percent fell asleep first, and I got bored. Then I got out the map and my phone.”
With a sigh, Edie sat up, too. “Well, I don’t remember that, so you must be right,” she grumbled.
Cosima leaned over to grab the hotel notepad and pen that was on Edie’s bedside, giving Edie a glorious glimpse down the cup of her bra, which Edie now regretted having failed to remove.
“I’m going to write that down,” she said, tapping the pen against the notepad. “‘Cosima is right.’ I’ll put the date and time, and you can sign it for me.”
“I take it back. You fell asleep first and then got out the map in a fugue state of sleepwalking.”
“Shush.” Cosima flashed her a killing smile, one filigreed eyebrow arched. “I used one of your methods of research.”
“What’s that?”
“A tourist brochure. I’d grabbed one from the front desk when we got the room. And it turns out there’s a one-for-one connection between a location in Rouen and one of Agatha’s illustrations on the map.”
“Tell me.” Edie felt her brain spinning back up to its usual state of hyper-awareness. It made her notice again how good she felt, like Cosima had poured syrupy light over her body.
“The illustration looks like a skull and crossbones, which we had both thought was very treasure-hunting pirate-like. But when I was looking at it more closely, I realized it’s not a human skull. I’m fairly sure it’s a cat’s skull. I took a picture and reverse image searched it.”
“What does a cat skull mean?”
“Right, so, Rouen was hit by the plague hard, twice. The first time, in the thirteen hundreds, at least half the people died. They couldn’t give them all proper burials. They dug a mass grave near the church of Saint Maclou.”
“Grim.”
“Very. Over the years, the area around the pit was built up, but they didn’t disturb the pit itself because the church said those people were going to need their full set of bones in the resurrection. But then, two hundred years later, the plague came back. Time to dig another pit.”
“Bam!” Edie was getting too excited. She had done a fourth-grade project on the Black Plague.
“Again, more than half the population’s dead. They wanted to put the bodies in the same spot, but they couldn’t destroy the old bones, so they dug them up first and put them in an ossuary that circles around the pit in the middle.”
Edie rubbed her hands together. “Here is where I confess that I love stories that explain how something completely out of pocket happened like it’s normal.
Yes, of course, the two plagues killing basically everyone meant the survivors had to make an enormous warehouse to store thousands of bones in. Perfectly regular.”
One of her knees had begun to bounce. Cosima smiled at it. “Unlike a lot of medieval landmarks, this one survived the centuries and even the blitzes of World War II. It’s been archaeologically studied and excavated. There are fascinating examples of medieval carving and statuary.”
“Which sounds amazing, but you were telling me something about a cat skull.”
“So I was. Around the time Agatha was here, a cat mummy was excavated from one of the walls. It would have been a big deal that everyone was talking about.”
“Cat skull, cat mummy!”
“Yes. I think we’re meant to start there, at the A?tre Saint-Maclou.”
Edie pulled up her legs and wrapped her arms around them, needing a way to contain her feelings about an adventure that involved both the Plague and a cat mummy. “I don’t know if I can wait until we track down matching Joan of Arc sweatshirts before we go.”
“I’m not wearing a tourist sweatshirt, but yes. Let’s hurry. I think it will be so interesting.”
She sounded like she meant it, and her eyes were warm. Cosima’s bra strap slid down in time with her grin.
Risk the ocean.
Edie wanted to kiss her again.