Chapter XXI #2
The air between them shifted. Her heart had resumed its place in her chest, but now it was racing, terrified by her own brazenness.
Elías pressed his palm against hers again. She had been watching their hands; now, she looked up at him, tilting her chin to do so. His eyes were so dark she could barely distinguish pupil from iris.
“Tell me to stop.”
She felt the rasp of his voice more than heard it. He had shifted closer to her; if she wanted to, if she were bold enough, she could lift herself onto her toes and place her cheek against his. Feel the roughness of his stubble. Compare it to his voice.
“But I don’t want you to,” she whispered.
His breathing hitched. He did not stop pressing against her hand. He was woodsmoke and the bite of mesquite and the warmth of skin. He inclined his head; hair that had been tucked behind his ear fell forward and tickled her cheek.
“Tell me to stop.”
The throb of her pulse in her ears, the warmth that coursed from their joined hands through her body, the flutter of anticipation of more that perched on her lips, ready to take flight—it was all sinful. She wanted to sink her teeth into it. To know what it tasted like. To know how it gave.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered.
His eyes fell to her mouth. Dark lashes, lowered and bashful. A grown man, bashful before her? A ripple of something like victory; it vanished in a swift, desperate pang as his lips brushed hers. A kiss, yes, but one that was almost timid in its softness. Chaste.
She stood on the edge of a precipice. She could step back, or she could leap forward.
She caught his kiss between her teeth and returned it stripped of chastity.
And this was what sin tasted like: lips that were soft, a mouth that gave with an unutterable tenderness.
It was walls melting away. It was a blazing road tearing through her toward an unknown horizon, hot and white as the center of a star.
It was their hands breaking apart to explore the profane geographies of bodies: his to her waist, to her back, her breath catching as he pulled her close and held her fast. It was his chest against hers, the hardness of his back muscles under her palms. His calloused hands running up her body and leaving burning embers in their wake, brushing against the soft flesh of her neck, cradling her jaw as if she were delicate glass.
She wanted to be held as if she were delicate, she wanted to be broken.
Through headiness thicker than wine, she thought: I want you to shatter me .
“Don’t stop,” she begged.
What a feeling it was, to want , to crave, to bend toward someone’s touch, so desperate for it that it was exquisite, that it felt akin to pain.
To be bruised by a reverent mouth, to gasp when teeth found the soft fruit of lips and bit, to drink his moan as if it were the one oath binding her to this world.
To scarcely breathe, for what was the work of breathing when mouths could do this ?
“Alba,” he prayed, for it was a prayer, anguished in its desire. If—
The creak of the door opening.
The spell shattered with a gasp, with a clumsy shuffle of feet, with the swirl of skirts and the abrupt placement of bodies on opposite sides of the table. With thundering hearts. With faces swiftly rearranged into studied curiosity—not at each other but facing the door.
María Victoriana stood crowned by afternoon sun, a single brow raised. Even the set of her weight, balanced to hold the basket of food before her, had a sardonic cast to it.
“Didn’t expect to see you here, senorita,” she said, the words lengthening into a drawl. “I hope I am not interrupting.”
Their chorus of no, not at all, come in could not have been more stilted.
Alba fought against her heaving chest, fought the urge to lower her burning face and hide it in her hands, fought the urge to cringe at the false ring of their voices.
She wished she could vanish into the ground, not because she was ashamed of what she had done—for she knew without a doubt that she would do it again, if given the chance, a thousand times—but at the fact that they had been discovered.
Her heart raced out of time with itself, fighting and failing to find its footing even as Elías had smoothly resumed studying the circle with charcoal in one hand and the book in the other.
She could barely arrange her thoughts into sentences.
He might hide his feelings well, but she would wager that despite his coolness, despite the undisturbed calm in his face, the book was open to the wrong page.
“Thank you, María Victoriana,” he said. Affecting an unperturbed air, he turned the page of the book. “I appreciate not having to go to the house.”
His hand trembled.
“I wouldn’t want to deal with them either,” María Victoriana said. “Did you know that Heraclio…”
Her voice trailed off as she stepped into the workshop and her eyes fell on the circle that Elías stood over.
She set the basket on the table with a decisive thump. Steam and the aroma of warm tortillas rose from within.
“That,” she declared, “looks rash.”
“Rash?” Alba repeated.
Elías flipped a page of the book, eyelashes lowered as he scanned for something. Turned another. He had been on the wrong page.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.
“Black magic. Are you insane?” María Victoriana said, gesturing at the marks on the floor.
“That priest is ready to put people to death for drawing lines of mercury around the town and putting candles in a cave. You’re the one who said you weren’t supposed to do anything rash when you’re infatuated with someone. ”
A dark flush rose to Elías’s cheeks. “I didn’t mean—”
“Why don’t you throw yourself off a cliff to save them all the trouble of killing you?” María Victoriana snapped, a sudden wet brightness flashing in her eyes.
Her voice had lurched high and ragged, propelled by a surge of emotion that took Alba aback. Perhaps Elías thought his kin were all strangers, but here, he might be wrong. María Victoriana cared for him.
“This is me trying to not get killed, believe it or not,” Elías shot back, but his words chased the girl’s turned back. “Wait—”
She had spun on her heel and fled the workshop. The scattered cluck of chickens from beyond the adobe walls announced that she had run in the direction of the house.
Silence hung heavy in the workshop. What had burned between Alba and Elías was now rudely doused with a cold, metallic hiss.
Elías chewed his lip again. He, too, was still breathing hard. “I really hope she doesn’t tell anyone that we are in here alone,” he muttered.
Somehow, this had slipped down the list of Alba’s concerns.
Yes, it was inappropriate that they were in here unaccompanied—and discovered in such a position—but María Victoriana was right.
Of all the crimes that had occurred in this room, the presence of the dark glyphs on the ground was undeniably the worst.
“And what if she tells someone about that?” she said, pointing at the ground.
“I think she fears Bartolomé too much,” he said. “I get the sense that they all do, with this idolatry business.”
Alba leaned forward and rested her forehead on the table before her.
Her racing heart was beginning to slow. But with the panic of being discovered draining away, she felt as if the marrow had been sucked from her bones.
Before she had entered the workshop, she was a husk, dry and wilting; kissing Elías had set her aflame, and now she was an extinguished candle.
A single curl of smoke rising and dissipating.
“I don’t want this to be real,” she said into the table.
“Neither do I,” Elías said softly. “Well,” he amended, “not all of it.”
She lifted her head. There was color in his cheeks again; he was focused on the book very studiously.
He meant her. He meant them .
Alas. How desperately she wished that they had not been interrupted.
But perhaps it was for the best—María Victoriana said the glyphs on the floor were rash, but what of their behavior?
If Elías was right, and Alba was possessed by something that had attacked him with a knife…
the truth was, she did not know the laws of when she would be taken over.
For all they knew, the distraction of each other might be a perfect opportunity for it to emerge.
To seize her and put Elías in harm’s way.
She took in a shaking, unsteady breath.
She yearned to retreat in time, to step back into his arms. But cruel Time had shoved them out of that moment, lustrous and perfect in its headiness, and locked the gates behind them. She could only move forward.
“If this possession is real,” she began, and then hesitated, choosing her words carefully, “do you think it will be difficult to eradicate? Do you think it has…deep roots?”
A moment of silence as Elías considered this.
“I fucking hope not,” he said at last.
To someone raised in a gilded cage as she had been, his profanity should have been shocking. From him, it had always been bracing. Now, it was a shock of cold water. A harsh reminder of the severity of the situation.
“Only one way to find out,” he added.
He inhaled and exhaled swift and hard, as if steadying himself. He gestured at the circle.
Alba swallowed. There was only forward.
She stepped into it.