Beckett
January 12th
The winter morning sun slanted gold across our desk as we finalized the playground panel. In it, Kira and Ryder were sparing the life of her latest target. Zelda decided to add some humor and leave the guy wrapped up in swing set chains for the police to find. I took the humor in that as a good sign.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You just did,” Zelda said.
“Let me rephrase: can I ask you a question without you getting pissed at me?”
“Impossible to know.” She narrowed her eyes through her glasses. “Why? Are you about to say something stupid only a guy would say?”
“Probably.”
She laughed. “You’re so goddamn cute, you could get away with it. Go ahead.”
“Why is Kira’s haircut so severe?” I tapped my finger on our heroine’s razor-edged black bob. “It looks like she could cut glass with her bangs.”
“Because it’s badass. She has zero vanity. She doesn’t need hair to hide behind and she definitely doesn’t need it to get in the way while she’s fighting the bad guys.” She frowned. “You don’t like it?”
I reached over and let a lock of Zelda’s long silky hair slip through my fingers. “I like your hair better.”
“Yes, but I’m not Kira, as we’ve established.”
“Yes, we have.”
“She’s definitely not a proxy of me.”
“Of course not.”
“And Ryder is definitely not a love interest.”
“Definitely not.” I leaned over and kissed her.
I fucking loved that I could do that. That I could touch her, and kiss her, and sleep tangled in her. We donated the air mattress to Goodwill and now Zelda slept in my arms every night. Together, we staved off the cold—usually by creating our own heat that carried through till morning.
Zelda’s mouth turned sweet, warm and wet, her tongue sliding along mine. I felt a pleasant pull in my groin as the kiss threatened to turn into sex, which happened frequently. But her phone rang from the corner of the desk. She frowned at the number on the screen.
“Don’t recognize this one.” She hit the green button. “Hello?” After a second she said slowly. “Oh, hi Iris.”
I had no idea who Iris was. I went back to work, half-listening as Zelda explained some of the new concepts she’d been working into Mother, May I? The addition of Ryder, and Mother’s conflicted struggle to reconcile her need for vengeance with her need for peace.
I bent my head and lettered the playground panel, carefully, as this was to be the final product. With a few pen strokes, a word appeared. For the first time, when one of her pervs asked, “Mother, may I live?” Kira answered, Yes. I smiled to myself and set the pen down just as Zelda clutched my arm, her eyes wide.
“A week from now?”
Her fingernails dug into my arm through my sweatshirt, hard enough to make me wince. She had a fiercely strong grip for having such small hands.
“It’s not finished,” she said into the phone. “It doesn’t have an ending yet.” Another pause then, “Okay. Okay. No, that sounds good. We’ll see you then. Thank you. Thank you, so much.”
She hung up the phone and stared at me. “Do you know who that was?”
“That was Iris,” I said. “We’ll see her in a week from now.”
Zelda swatted my arm. “That was Iris from Blackstar Publishing. We’ll see her in a week from now, along with two other editors and the acquisitions manager.”
My eyes widened. “No shit?”
“Iris is the assistant who told me to make revisions and try again. She’s been talking up the project to them ever since my first pitch back in November. She’s got them excited about seeing revisions. Or maybe they’re just hungry for fresh blood.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “This could be it, baby. Your big break.”
“Our big break,” she said. “Mother, May I? is ours now. Holy shit, look at me.” She showed me her trembling hands. I took one and kissed it. Then kissed her.
“We need to celebrate.”
“We can’t celebrate,” she said. “We have too much work to do. We don’t have an ending.”
“A non-celebratory celebration, then. I’m taking you out.”
“Are you?” Her green eyes lit up. “You know we haven’t actually been on a real date.”
“That gets fixed today.”
“Where are you taking me? Someplace warm I hope.”
Good question.
I actually hadn’t the first clue where to take her. While Zelda showered, I jumped on my laptop and Googled “warm,” “romantic,” and “New York in winter.” I prayed for something remotely acceptable that didn’t involve me taking out a small loan. The first search result blew my mind, and I started to doubt the existence of coincidences.
Zelda and I bundled up in our winter gear and took Fulton Street subway to Manhattan, then the C line to the Upper West Side. Central Park was frosted white, the trees bearded in snow under a heavy gray sky. We walked a few blocks in the early afternoon cold to 79th Street. Zelda eyed the hulking building in front us, its majestic pillars flanking a huge arched entrance.
“The American Museum of Natural History,” she said.
“Not a fan?”
“No, no,” she said. “I just…wasn’t expecting a museum for our first date.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, swallowing laughter. “You’re going to love this. They have an exhibit going on right now: ancient Mayan dirt samples. I’ve been dying to check it out.”
“Dirt samples.”
I widened my eyes. “Uh, yeah. This dirt is hundreds of years old. All different shades of brown and everything.”
She stared at me a moment more, then punched me in the arm. “You’re so full of shit.”
“Some of them probably have shit too,” I said, as we climbed the steps. “Ancient shit dropped from ancient cows.”
She rolled her eyes and let me lead her by the hand through the museum. I stopped outside a gallery and watched her eyes soften as she read the sign over the exhibit hall.
“The Butterfly Conservatory,” she said, a small smile dancing over her lips.
“We’ll have to visit the dirt some other time,” I said, pulling her in.
We took off our jackets, scarves, and hats, and hung them on hooks. Then we stepped inside a tropical paradise.
“Oh my God,” Zelda said. “It has to be eighty degrees in here.”
We’d stepped through a portal, out of New York and into the Amazon. We walked among bright green ferns, broad-leafed plants, and trees dripping with colorful blooms.
And everywhere, butterflies.
The air was thick with them. Butterflies of every color, different sizes and shapes. They flitted from leaf to leaf, crammed and jostling around flowers or the little trays of sugar water hanging from tree branches.
“Hold still,” Zelda said, tapping my shoulder. “Don’t move, just turn your head.”
I looked and a butterfly rested two inches from my chin, the brilliant blue of its wings rimmed in black. It opened and closed its wings, then took off to disappear into the greenery.
“Better than dirt?” I asked.
Zelda watched a monarch butterfly land on her wrist. “Best date ever,” she said.
I bent to kiss her, and her mouth was sweet and warm. I kissed her there in the rain forest instead of surrounded by the winter cement of New York, and I felt as if I was free to go anywhere.
I can love her anywhere…
We stayed nearly an hour, then grabbed dinner at The Smith. We sat at a little wooden table, industrial lights glinting warmly off white subway tile. Zelda ate salmon and heirloom rice and I had marinated shrimp. Afterward I took her to a museum that was more her speed: (le) poisson rouge, in Midtown.
“Now this is what I’m talking about,” she said, clutching my arm and craning up to plant a kiss on my cheek. “You did good, Copeland.”
(le) poisson rouge was an eclectic multimedia museum and cocktail bar. We sipped gin and tonics in a dark room filled with electric lights and pounding techno music, then headed into the exhibit.
The current show was called “Juxtapose.” The gallery was lined with huge black-and-white photographs of the city’s homeless, caught sitting or sleeping or panhandling in front of garish advertising. The people were in black and white, while the ads were rendered in full Technicolor.
One photo revealed a bone-weary-looking mother holding a screaming child on her lap as she waited for the bus. Behind her, on the bus stop wall, was an impossibly fit female athlete leaping over a hurdle. On another, a blind man sold pencils out of a coffee mug, while behind him an advertisement exhorted users to upgrade their smart phone for the latest design.
“This is incredible,” Zelda said, having to shout over the sounds from overhead speakers. Different commercials blared on one side. Crying children and people asking for spare change from the other.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” she said, as we left the exhibit. “How there’s so much disparity in the world. So much that’s beautiful and so much that’s heartbreaking living side-by-side.”
I touched her cheek. “Then there are those who take something ugly and cold and small, and make it beautiful.” I bent close to her ear. “Do you remember what I told you on Christmas night?”
“I told you I would,” she said. “You said the apartment felt like home because I made it that way. With lights, and the plant and the rug.”
“That’s what I said. But I was wrong.”
“You were?”
“Yeah, baby, I was. You didn’t make it home, Zelda. You are my home. Where you are is home.”
I heard her breath catch, and her eyes fluttered like the wings of a butterfly. “You are turning me into the world’s biggest sap, Copeland. Either that or you’re just trying to get me into the sack.”
“The second one.” I said automatically. “Did it work?”
She grinned and stood on tiptoe to whisper hotly in my ear. “Hell, yes.”
The subway ride took a hundred hours. Then it was a hundred miles more before we were finally at our front door. I could barely get the key in the lock. The door slammed behind us, and then I had Zelda in my arms.
I pressed her hard against the wall and then lifted her up to better kiss her. I couldn’t get enough of kissing her. She tasted sweet and spicy, this fiery woman with a heart miles deep.
Zelda wrapped her legs around my waist and arms around my neck and kissed me back, sexy little sounds of want escaping her in between each lick and bite of our mouths.
I carried her and set her down beside the bed, releasing her long enough to strip off my jacket and shirt. I kicked off my boots, while Zelda took of her soft black sweater. Her hair settled around the pale skin of her shoulders and over her bra-clad breasts like silk.
“Fuck, Zelda,” I growled. I tore off her skirt and knelt to put my mouth over her panties.
“Beckett, oh my God…Wait.” Her hands pulled at my shoulders. “No, I need you. I need you now…”
I stripped off her panties and lifted her again, carried her on my knees over the mattress so I could press her against the headboard. Her legs went around me again, drawing me inside. One smooth push and I sank into her tight heat.
“Jesus, Zel. You feel so good.”
She locked her legs tight around my waist. “This,” she breathed. “Nothing else. I only want this.”
My body began to move in concert with hers. I gripped the headboard as I drove into her, kissing her in short, desperate touches until she bit down on my neck and screamed her orgasm into my skin.
The little bite of pain shot down my spine and ignited the pleasure that had been building. I came harder than I’d had in my life, giving her everything, shuddering with my release. I sank onto my knees, and held her there, still inside her, my hands sliding up the sweaty silk of her back to tangle in her hair.
This, I thought, my thoughts echoing hers.
Her. Her and no one else, ever again.