Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Read online

  On the landing where the steps turned, Željko had set two folding chairs, the paper lantern, a bottle of wine, and two glasses.

  I stopped when I saw it, tugging my hand from his—when had I begun holding it in the first place?

  “Ah, ah,” he said. “Taste it before you run away. This is not the wine served downstairs by our hosts. This is just for you.”

  “It’d be wasted on me. Seriously, just pour me the cheap stuff.”

  He caught my hand in both of his. “It is mine to give, and I choose to share it with you. I do not care if you know about wine. I only want to watch you enjoy it.”

  It struck, then, like sparks from flint: a feeling I could not even name. It was in my body, deep in the core of me, and also in my heart. I had felt it before, but not since the accident, and I had almost forgotten it existed.

  I could not name it, but I knew one thing: I wanted more of it.

  I sat down on one of the chairs. Željko leaned past me to open the window; old paint and caulk crackled and broke as he raised it up. I smelled lilac from outside, and the warm wool of his jacket.

  He settled himself, and applied a corkscrew to the wine-bottle. I watched his hands, because I was too shy to look at his face. His hands didn’t look like a hockey player’s hands: all the fingers were slim and straight, unbroken, the knuckles unscarred. He wasn’t particularly tall or broad, either, though his shoulders looked wonderful in his trim coat.

  I watched the pale wine as he poured it into each of the glasses. It looked almost like water in the candlelight.

  “Close your eyes,” said Željko.

  “No way.”

  “Then do not. But focus on your other senses.”

  I heard his chair scrape. Felt a very faint warming of the air around me as his arm extended, holding out the glass to me.

  Smelled something wonderful, like sun on a peach orchard, like moss on limestone, like dew on apple-blossoms just about to fall.

  Felt the cool touch of glass on my lips, and tasted my first sip, which was everything the scent had promised, and more.

  I swallowed, and sputtered. Željko lowered the glass. In the twilight his eyes looked black. He smiled suddenly, turned the glass, placed his lips where mine had just been, and sipped. “Delicious,” he said, and there was that feeling again.

  I might have expected wine to become cloying, like juice, if I had thought about it. But it was not. Every sip was wonderful. I said so to Željko, and he laughed, a low private laugh. He leaned in close to pour for me again, and when my glass was full, he caught a stray drop from the bottle’s mouth on his fingertip, and licked it away.

  I held very still. I knew what the feeling was.

  “I think I’d like to sleep with you,” I said.

  “You think so?” he said, still laughing a little. “I would like that very much, only I do not want you to be uncertain.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “I’m not uncertain,” I said. “Not about sleeping with you. Only I don’t know what I want to do with you after.”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “Nothing you don’t wish. But you must understand, I am not for this.” His gesture seemed to take in and dismiss the wedding ongoing in the other part of the church.

  I lifted my glass and touched it to his, and we both drank.

  And I took off my scarf again, and opened the collar of my dress, deliberately before his eyes.

  The thing about grieving is that it leaches away so much else from the world: not only the lost loved ones, but things the loved ones did not even touch. Grapefruit lost its tartness. The smell of stew cooking in the Crock-Pot lost its homeliness. The music on the radio sounded tinny and rhythmless. The snow even lost its chill.

  My town was studded with places I could not visit. The waterfall where I’d last gone hiking with Piet and Angela. The restaurant where Daddy had taken me for my graduation dinner. The bakery where Marieke and I had met for coffee and muffins most mornings before school. The bleachers behind the school, where Jason and I had kissed in ninth grade, and where, in tenth, he’d confessed to me that he was falling in love with another boy. The road between Van Eyck and Comberton, where, just off the shoulder, there still stood six white wooden crosses and a wreath of yellow artificial roses.

  In the face of grieving like that, I would have sold my soul for a slice of toast with real crispness and melted butter, or a cup of coffee with real richness, or a sun that rose with real light, or a bird singing a real song. But for as long as it lasted, all things were meaningless, cardboard mockeries of themselves. And no one wanted my soul.

  Željko slipped out of his jacket, and tossed it over the windowsill, heedless of the bruised corsage. He loosened his tie, a black one, different somehow from the ones the other groomsmen wore.

  He pointed to my foot, and gestured for me to lift it. He unbuckled the strap at my ankle and eased the shoe off, stroking gentle fingers over the skin where it had chafed.

  “You don’t actually need to seduce me,” I said. “I already said yes.”

  “Seduction is pleasant,” he said, unperturbed. I thought he had a faint accent, one I couldn’t place; I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I thought of it, the way he spoke was more deliberate than the other guys around here.

  “Teach me how to say your name,” I said.

  “Željko,” he said, enunciating, eyes on mine. He reached out for my other foot.

  “Željko,” I said, a bit breathlessly.

  “Very good. Drink your wine.”

  I did, and felt the delicious burst of flavour in my mouth, the freshness of the air against my bared throat, the heat of Željko’s palm covering the arch of my foot.

  Heard, below, my mother’s voice in the vestibule.

  I scrambled to pull my foot away and grab for my shoe.

  Željko’s mouth pouted. “We have just begun.”

  “My mom might be strangely okay with me having a glass of wine with you, but she’ll definitely flip out if she sees anything else,” I hissed. “Come on, help me out!”

  He didn’t. He crossed his arms and sat there silently laughing while I fumbled with my shoe-buckles and my dress-buttons and my scarf. I tossed his jacket at him and glared until he put it on. By the time my mother mounted the stairs, we were sitting properly, across the table from each other, and I was trying not to laugh at the dusting of paint flakes across Željko’s shoulder and chest.

  “There you are,” Mom said. “It’s nearly midnight. We’ve got church in the morning.”

  “Of course, Mom,” I said. Church was her solace since the accident: every week she wept through the hymns while I held her hand, but she said it brought her peace.

  Željko gave her the same charming smile he’d given downstairs. This time Mom looked as if she could see through it, and I was the one who could not help but find it beautiful.

  “Good night, Sofie,” he said to me. “It’s been lovely chatting with you.”

  “Yes, indeed. I hope to see you again. Željko.”

  “You will,” he said, without the smile this time.

  As I turned away to follow Mom down the stairs, I saw him raise my glass, and tilt what was left of my wine into his mouth, as if he was very thirsty.

  Mom drove home. I was sleepy, all of a sudden, as if I was a kid again, head against the window. I wrapped the scarf around my neck against the cool of the night, and blinked slowly at the dark outside, trees and silos and fields and occasionally a house with a single light.

  And fireflies, now and then, flicking in and out along the wind-rows. It seemed like a cloud of them, following us. But maybe that was a dream I was having, as I flicked in and out of sleep.

  I set my shoes side by side on the closet floor. I folded Mom’s scarf and hung it; took off my dress and tossed it in the hamper. I unhooked my bra, and ran my palms over my breasts, which ached, and over the reddened ridges on my shoulders where the bra-straps had cut in. I had come late to my full size, and now I did not
know what to do with myself.

  I lay naked on my back, sheets pushed aside, my nightshirt left on the hook inside the closet door, for once. Spring hadn’t quite turned to summer, so maybe it was the wine, but my skin felt warm and welcomed the breeze from the barely-open window by the bed.

  As I slid into sleep, dreaming open-eyed, I saw fireflies outside again, or maybe stars, swirling slowly. They streamed down, flattened, swarmed through the screenless open inch of my window, fanned out again into a cloud. A cloud man-height, shaped out of bright sparks and the darkness between them.

  I woke fully then, on a gasp.

  “You asked me to come,” he whispered, the sparks dimming until he was only pale skin and dark eyes flashing back starlight. “You wanted this.”

  “I thought you were one of the groomsmen,” I said. “Not some kind of … whatever you are.”

  “Shall I leave? I will, if you ask. What I want from you must come with your full consent.”

  He was very still while I thought about it. Finally I shook my head. “Stay. Just for tonight.”

  “There is a cost,” he said.

  “There’s a cost to everything.” I slid my hands into his hair and tugged his mouth to mine.

  The kiss was like a sudden change in the weather, like a drenching summer storm, making all the hairs along my spine stand up and my eyes water. Željko murmured something against my lips, and I hummed back.

  Part of me—a small part, receding rapidly—was crying out that I should just say no, that this was probably one of the stages of grief, that I had no business sleeping with a guy I’d just met, even if he’d been a regular guy and not something made up of fireflies … and that was all absolutely true and I was still absolutely doing this.

  Then Željko ran his hand from the flat of my shoulder around my arm, over my collarbone, down the weight of my breast. I held my breath at the wonder of it.

  “You are not afraid?” he said.

  I shook my head. “This isn’t my first time. Just my first in a while.”

  I felt his mouth smile against my throat, and then he moved lower.

  It wasn’t my first time, but it made the other times fade like the moon at sunrise. Željko’s fingers parted the curls of hair at my entrance and two of them slipped inside, and at the same time, his teeth pressed very gently at the mound of my breast, so that I tipped my head back and gasped.

  His free hand pressed over my mouth to remind me where we were. I smiled against his fingers, and let my tongue curl around them, and I felt the silent intake of his breath against my flesh.

  He did not rush me. He took me from ready to readier to—oh, I was going to cry if I didn’t—and then he added his mouth, suckling at the most delicious spot, working his fingers within, and I flared up like phosphorus, sudden and bright.

  Even before I put myself back together, Željko was looming over me, skin pale against the darkness, a faint black trail of hair leading down from his chest to his belly to the root of him, and he was going to enter me, and I wanted him so much I had to bite my tongue on a plea.

  I came again around him, with his fingers spearing through my hair, with his mouth on mine.

  He followed me a moment later, and I thought I saw a brightness pass between us, like lightning within clouds.

  I would have asked him about it, but sleep washed up over me while I was still kissing the taste of myself from his lips.

  The morning light looked very golden, and Mom was tapping on my door.

  “Aren’t you up yet?” she said. “Sofie? We don’t want to be late for church.”

  I yawned mightily and sat up on my elbows and realized I really, really needed a shower.

  “Just a few minutes, Mom,” I called back. “Sorry! I guess I slept in.”

  I tossed back the rumpled sheets and heard a tiny patter on the floor. A single firefly. It flicked its wings and righted itself; it looked day-drunk and weak. I laid my hand flat on the floorboards and the firefly crawled up onto my skin. Its light flickered on, tiny against the rising day.

  I held it up close to my face. “Thanks,” I breathed, and the light brightened a little, and the firefly took wing and zipped out through the window into the clear air.

  When I came downstairs, as clean as a sponge-bath in the sink could make me, hair pinned up, dressed in a sober skirt and blouse, I found a slice of buttered toast and a cup of coffee waiting for me. The toast was crisp and hot and dripping with butter. The coffee was cream-rich and honey-sweet. Outside the window, the birds in the lilac trees sang gorgeous songs.

  So this was the world, mine again.

  “You look cheery,” Mom said, a bit sourly, as she came in from watering the garden. She washed and lotioned her hands, and settled her church hat on her head.

  I turned away to hide the private smile on my face, and followed her out to the car.

  I lost the smile a few minutes later. Mom turned onto the main road and the sun came through the window in the weirdly bright way that meant I was on the edge of a migraine.

  I shut my eyes against it. Felt around for the bottle of ibuprofen in my purse and swallowed one. It was coming on fast, though. The faint smell of exhaust nauseated me.

  “Can you please … pull over?”

  “Here?” Mom said, sounding dubious.

  “Yes. Please!”

  I felt the tires crunch on the gravel shoulder. I shouldered my door open and leaned out, retching.

  When I lifted my head and blinked open my streaming eyes, I saw why Mom had not wanted to stop: we were on the Comberton road, right where the accident had happened.

  Twenty feet ahead, I saw the cluster of crosses wreathed in yellow roses. And then I understood what Željko had meant about the cost.

  I tried anyway. Not that day; Mom drove me home and I slept off the headache for a few hours. But the next day, and the next, I drove out on the Comberton road, and had to turn back. I took a roundabout route to the church, and discovered the churchyard was forbidden to me, too. I could not even get close enough to see between the young birches to the six newest gravestones. Katie, Marieke, Angela, Piet, Jason. My father. Lost to me all over again.

  I slumped down behind the wheel of Mom’s car and cried harder than I had since the accident.

  On my return, I saw Mom out back, hanging laundry. I filled a basket with wet things from the machine and went to join her.

  “Mom.” I set down the basket and scooping a handful of clothes-pins, “I don’t think I can stay here.”

  She looked at my face, sighed, and took one of the damp sheets from the basket, shaking it out briskly and flipping it over the line. “If you go, I’ll be all alone.”

  “You’ll have your friends, and euchre, and church.”

  “I was hoping you’d meet someone, and settle near me.”

  I shook my head. I did not tell her that would never happen. She could learn it later, by degrees, and maybe it would not cut her so deep.

  The thought made my eyes well again. But at the same time I could feel the breeze lifting, carrying bewitching pollens over the fields and drying the tears before they fell.

  From our house, the land sloped down toward the lake: fresh spring leaves brightened the treetops, and the fields were greening over, and beyond them, the water was delft blue, all the ice long since melted.

  Across the lake, I could just see the towers of Toronto. I knew there were foods there I had never tasted, musics I had never heard, vivid paintings on the walls of alleys. I might not know happiness yet, I might be grieving my losses for a few years to come, but now I knew pleasure again, and pleasure would carry me through until the return of joy.

  A Spoonful of Salt

  Nicole M. Taylor

  This is not the story that Naomi told when the story men came to collect all of our memories. Instead, she told about her granny and the blue cookie jar. Marco was a dead man and a sore point by then.

  Marco was Naomi’s first and only love from the time she
was fourteen, which might seem young to you. It might have been kinder, though, had she started going with him a bit sooner. They only got three years of hand-holding and walk-taking and four months as man and wife before he passed. Even here, where lives are often mean little things, it didn’t seem fair.

  Marco was a sailor, which is the usual occupation for our men. He crewed on his uncle’s rig and he died there with the rest of them when it went down during a late November squall. Of course, Naomi was hundreds of miles away and had no way of knowing about that when she walked into the kitchen one morning and found her husband sitting at the table.

  Now, Naomi had been without Marco for going on a month and a half and her own daddy was a sailor as well. She was well used to being alone, as all us women are. It can be frightening. The island is small and we know the men, their names and the names of their mommas and sisters. But that didn’t stop the fearing, not altogether. It was a kind of ticking, a working like a machine in the back of your head. Each woman on the island kept a running tally of each sharped-edged, deadly thing in her home. For Naomi, it was the long rifle in the back of the closet, the six wooden-handled knives in the kitchen drawer, even the heavy carriage clock that her daddy’d made her for a wedding present.

  And so when she saw Marco sitting there, she was just standing still, but her mind was zipping away all “how am I going to get to the closet?” or “how am I to open the knife drawer without his hearing?” Because, by all rights, Marco should have been weeks away across the water right at that very moment (right at that very moment, Marco was floating in the cold ocean making dinner for the fish, but of course Naomi didn’t know that).

  But he was just there, Marco. He was just sitting and staring down at his hands like he was noticing them for the first time. He didn’t look particularly dangerous. He looked like her husband, the good boy she’d known her whole life.

  “Marco?” she said, with her hand resting but not moving on the knife drawer. He turned to look at her, but he did it real slow and when he saw her, he didn’t seem to know her at all.

  Naomi pulled out the drawer and it make a little wheely creak. Marco’s face didn’t move at all.