I did nothing to disturb the silence of the house, moving quietly through the dining room and kitchen, knowing Ben was here, somewhere, sleeping. I couldn’t help but try to scent out another woman’s presence, even if it were just a whiff of perfume long gone stale as weeks, and hopefully months, had rolled by. There was none. Just Ben, and the verdant scent from the small jungle of houseplants shooting leafy shadows at me in the dim half-light. A relieved sigh escaped me as I slipped into the living room. Halfway through, however, I stopped.
Ben, it seemed, had been doing a little reminiscing. By the gray light filtering in through a large picture window, I saw an empty bottle of Corona sitting on the coffee table, and an empty glass beside it, which still smelled of yeast and—if I inhaled deeply enough—Ben’s mouth. Next to these lay an open photo album, and I skirted the table to the other side and tilted my head, leaning in for a closer look.
There were twelve pictures in all, both sides of the open album filled. They’d been taken at different times and places, with different cameras, including the one Ben had given me for my fourteenth birthday, the one that had begun my passion for photography. The first photo taken with that camera lay on the page in front of me, a frozen moment that captured the girl I had once been.
“I knew you’d be here,” I whispered to her.
Of the others, only one drew my full attention, and I slipped it from its sleeve, hands trembling slightly, and made my way over to the window for better light. This had been taken with the same camera, though the subject was three women instead of one. Three Archers.
Olivia was barely a teen, captured with a blinding smile, the baby fat still high on her smooth cheeks, though the woman she would soon become could already be seen peering out from behind shining eyes. I was next to Olivia, and my image was such a stark contrast to the mirrored one I’d faced earlier that night that I immediately turned my attention to the third woman, staring up at me through the glow of the streetlight.
Zoe Archer was an amalgamation of Olivia and I. Dimples that flashed, Olivia’s; a watchful expression, mine. A wide and easy smile. Olivia’s. An attentiveness bordering on paranoia. Mine. Her red hair was all her own, though, and sunlight flashed golden in the strands, while the freckles dotting her nose made her look impish. Despite, I thought, the flint in her eyes.
I raised the photo across from me, trying to study it objectively. By the following spring the same picture would capture entirely different women. There would be Olivia’s determined innocence, a force so strong it would even outshine her brazen beauty. My physical power would be burgeoning, a strength born of total weakness.
And my mother? Zoe Archer wouldn’t be in the picture at all, I thought wryly. She had left before winter even swept its chill fingers over the valley.
“I have so many questions for you,” I murmured, running my finger along Zoe’s jawline. “Wherever you are.”
I considered that for a moment. My mother was alive, well, and someone knew her whereabouts. Yet she’d never bothered contacting Olivia or me, and that sat in my stomach like a ball of acid. I let the photo drop, let the memories drop away as well, and went into the bedroom to find Ben.
One object stood out more than any other in Ben’s bedroom: the bed itself, a king-sized monster with a padded leather headboard in deep mahogany, and a chocolate-colored duvet that made the whole thing appear layered in inky clouds. In it, during this, the deepest hour of night, was the man I loved. I stole up to his bedside and peered down at his face, wondering how best to wake him. After all, he was a cop, and by all evidence, used to sleeping alone. The last thing either one of us needed was for me to be looming over him when he awoke.
So I knelt by Ben’s side, breathing in the thick scent of a deeply sleeping man, and reached out to touch him. But I stopped as I caught sight of my fingers, pale in the thin light cast from the bedroom window, and I couldn’t help remembering what else they’d touched that night. A scimitar. A dead man’s body. Olivia.
I gasped at the last thought, jerked my hand away and stood in one swift motion. Ben didn’t even stir.
Like you don’t even exist.
I couldn’t wake him, not the way I was now. The last thing I wanted was to soil anything or anyone else with my touch, with what I’d become, and as I backed away, I wondered if I’d ever be clean again. My skin itched with the question. If I could have removed it, taken it from my body and bones in that moment, I would have. Instead, I settled for a shower.
For the longest time I stood under the spray, eyes closed, just letting the water scald and sting my skin. It pounded the thoughts from my head, drummed the echoes of Olivia’s screams from my ears, and washed away the filth that couldn’t be seen or scented but was seeping into my soul even now. I shook my head and refused to think about it. My muscles relaxed, my skin grew red, almost raw, and still I remained beneath the steady stream of wet heat, not wanting to move. Not ever again.
I thought I’d be too wired to relax completely, too aware of Ben’s presence in the next room, and of dawn’s steady approach, but I’d underestimated how exhausted I truly was. Somehow I managed to doze off still standing, leaning against the tiles like a beached bass waiting for another tide to come in.
I awoke to arms snaking carefully around my naked waist and a soft sigh catching in my ear. Goose bumps prickled down my neck and breasts and back, and I didn’t have to inhale to know it was Ben.
“Jo-Jo,” he said, feathering kisses along my earlobe, hands rising to cup my breasts as he moved in closer behind me. I tensed, realizing in some ultra-alert corner of my brain that I shouldn’t be doing this. I couldn’t. Not tonight, of all nights.
“Wait,” I said, half turning to him, hardly daring to meet his eyes. “We can’t.”
Ben smiled kindly, mistaking my reaction for plain-vanilla reticence, and why not? He had no idea what kind of night I’d had. He knew only that a handful of hours ago we were climbing into each other’s skin, and that now I had accepted the invitation into his home and then climbed into his shower.
“‘If we could decide who we loved, it would be much simpler, but much less magical.’”
That hit me. Not only had he just admitted he still loved me, but because he did it in the way we had when we were young, hiding behind the mask of a quotation, using someone else’s words to bolster our own softly blooming emotions.
“Who said that?” I asked, slicking my hair back with one hand as I looked up at him.
“The dudes who created South Park.”
A laugh burst out of me, strangled but strong, and I bent my head to his chest, shaking as my smile slipped into tears. For a long time Ben just held me, letting the water sluice along my shoulders and back, his hands still, chin resting on my head. He was giving me time, letting me know it’d kill him to back off now but he’d do it if that’s what I wanted.
My decision, at last, came out in a single smooth watery movement. I lifted my lips to Ben’s and released the weight of my own pain, just let it wash down the drain along with every other thought in my mind.
The soap had cleansed me, the water warmed me, but it was only with Ben’s touch that the nerve endings beneath my skin began to skirt back to life. He ran his hands down my arms, gripped my waist, then skimmed them gently along my hips. All the while he kissed me, a soft exploring pressure against my mouth that tasted like musky sunshine and was the most solid thing I’d ever known. Passion rolled through me, quaking through my core at first, then causing my limbs to curl tightly around him. The selfish and greedy part of me that still wanted to live, to thrive, even after all I’d seen and done that night, reached out to Ben, opening to him, and overrode the numbness threatening to encase my soul.
We switched places, nearly slipped, and used each other’s flesh to right ourselves again. Ben was as voracious as I was, and we laughed when we met with teeth instead of tongues, bit instead of kissed, and when we bruised instead of brushed the flesh we’d waited a decade to touch again.