They arrive as a brass band finishes its set, trumpets and sax spilling through the club. The place is packed, and yet, when Luc draws her through the crowd, there is a table sitting empty at the front. The best in the house.
They take their seats, and moments later a waiter appears, two martinis balanced on his tray. She thinks of that first dinner they shared in the marquis’s house, centuries ago, the meal ready before she even agreed to have it, and wonders if Luc planned this in advance, or if the world simply bends to meet his wish.
The crowd erupts in cheers as a new performer takes the stage.
A narrow man with a wan face, narrow brows arching beneath a gray fedora.
Luc stares at him with the sharp pride of something owned.
“What’s his name?” she asks.
“Sinatra,” he answers as the band lifts, and the man begins to sing. A crooner’s melody, smooth and sweet, spills into the room. Addie listens, mesmerized, and then men and women begin to rise from their chairs and step out onto the dance floor.
Addie stands, holding out her hand. “Dance with me,” she says.
Luc looks up at her, but doesn’t rise.
“Max would have danced with me,” she says.
She expects him to refuse her, but Luc rises to his feet, and takes her hand, leading her onto the floor.
She expects him to be stiff, unyielding, but Luc moves with the fluid grace of wind rushing through fields of wheat, of storms rolling through the summer skies.
She tries to remember a time they were this close, and can’t.
They have always kept their distance.
Now, the space collapses.
His body wraps around hers like a blanket, like a breeze, like the night itself. But tonight, he does not feel like a thing of shadow and smoke. Tonight, his arms are solid against her skin. His voice slides through her hair.
“Even if everyone you met remembered,” Luc says, “I would still know you best.”
She searches his face. “Do I know you?”
He bows his head over hers. “You are the only one who does.”
Their bodies press together, one shaped to fit the other perfectly.
His shoulder, molded to her cheek.
His hands, molded to her waist.
His voice, molded to the hollow places in her as he says, “I want you.” And then, again, “I have always wanted you.”
Luc looks down at her, those green eyes dark with pleasure, and Addie fights to hold her ground.
“You want me as a prize,” she says. “You want me as a meal, or a glass of wine. Just another thing to be consumed.”
He dips his head, presses his lips to her collarbone. “Is that so wrong?”
She fights back a shiver as he kisses her throat. “Is it such a bad thing…” His mouth trails along her jaw. “… to be savored?” His breath brushes her ear. “To be relished?”
His mouth hovers over hers, and his lips, too, are molded to her own.
She will never be quite sure which happened first—if she kissed him, or he kissed her, who began the gesture, and who rose to meet it. She will only know that there was space between them, and it has vanished. She has thought of kissing Luc before, of course, when he was just a figment of her mind, and then, when he was more. But in all her conjurings, he’d taken her mouth as if it is a prize. After all, that is how he kissed her the night they met, when he sealed the deal with the blood on her lips. That is how she assumed he would always kiss.
But now, he kisses her like someone tasting poison.
Cautious, questing, almost afraid.
And only when she answers, returns the kiss in kind, does he deepen his advance, his teeth skating along her bottom lip, the weight and heat of his body pressing against hers.
He tastes like the air at night, heady with the weight of summer storms. He tastes like the faint traces of far-off woodsmoke, a fire dying in the dark. He tastes like the forest, and somehow, impossibly, like home.
And then darkness reaches up around her, around them, and the Cicada Club vanishes; the low music and the crooner’s melody swallowed up by the pressing void, by rushing wind, and racing hearts, and Addie is falling, forever and a single backward step—and then her feet find the smooth marble floor of a hotel room, and Luc is there, pressing her forward, and she is there, drawing him back against the nearest wall.
His arms lift around her, forming a loose and open cage.
She could break it, if she tried.
She doesn’t try.
He kisses her again, and this time, he is not tasting poison. This time, there is no caution, no pulling back; the kiss is sudden, sharp, and deep, stealing air and thought and leaving only hunger, and for a moment, Addie can feel the yawning dark, feel it opening around her, even though the ground is still there.
She has kissed a lot of people. But none of them will ever kiss like him. The difference doesn’t lie in the technicalities. His mouth is no better shaped to the task. It is just in the way he uses it.
It is the difference between tasting a peach out of season, and that first bite into sun-ripened fruit.
The difference between seeing only in black-and-white, and a life in full-color film.
That first time, it is a kind of fight, neither letting down their guard, each watching for the telltale glint of some hidden blade seeking flesh.
When they finally collide, it is with all the force of bodies kept too long apart.
It is a battle waged on bedsheets.
And in the morning, the whole room shows the signs of their war.
“It’s been so long,” he says, “since I haven’t wanted to leave.”
She looks at the window, the first thin edge of light. “Then don’t.”
“I must,” he says. “I am a thing of darkness.”
She props her head up on one hand. “Will you vanish with the sun?”
“I will simply go where it is dark again.”
Addie rises, goes to the window, and draws the curtains closed, plunging the room back into lightless black.
“There,” she says, feeling her way back to him. “Now it is dark again.”
Luc laughs, a soft, beautiful sound, and pulls her down into the bed.
X
Everywhere, Nowhere
1952–1968
It is only sex.
At least, it starts that way.
He is a thing to be gotten out of her system.
She is a novelty to be enjoyed.
Addie half expects them to burn out in a single night, to waste whatever energy they’ve gathered in their years of spinning.
But two months later, he comes to find her again, steps out of nothing and back into her life, and she thinks about how strange it is, to see him against the reds and golds of autumn, the changing leaves, a charcoal scarf looped loose around his throat.
It is weeks until his next visit.
And then, only days.
So many years of solitary nights, hours of waiting, and hating, and hoping. Now he is there.
Still, Addie makes herself small promises in the space between his visits.
She will not linger in his arms.
She will not fall asleep beside him.
She will not feel anything but his lips on her skin, his hands tangled in hers, the weight of him against her.
Small promises, but ones she does not keep.
It is only sex.
And then it is not.
“Dine with me,” Luc says as winter gives way to spring.
“Dance with me,” he says as a new year begins.
“Be with me,” he says, at last, as one decade slips into the next.
And one night Addie wakes in the dark to the soft pressure of his fingertips drawing patterns on her skin, and she is struck by the look in his eyes. No, not the look. The knowing.