The Other Way : Nineteen

Win Some, Lose Some 

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I woke up in Alice’s bed when the sun got too bright to ignore, draped in a gold coverlet with a tattooed girl cuddled up against me. We were both naked, both covered in a dusty sheen of dried up salt, and Edward was nowhere to be seen. I half expected him to be flopped across the foot of the bed, our toes to his stomach but he was nowhere to be seen and I lay there, letting Alice breath into my neck and wondering what the fuck had even happened last night.

I’d let her kiss me thoroughly flushed and panting right in front of him.

Gave into the wicked temptation to just push my tongue into her mouth and go after whatever drug it was she had hidden there in her mouth, but only after I got a taste of Edward’s particular brand. Addiction flared to life on my tongue and I belly flopped face first into a sticky pool of unresolved lust. My skin stinging from the full body contact and when Edward finally pulled away, Alice was staring at my mouth.

The twin bruises blooming on my lip.

She sucked her own lip into her mouth, most likely aware of exactly how it felt and her eyes met mine, solemn and round and full of questions, giving me every opportunity to stop this. Asking for my permission. She was so pretty, and I wanted her badly enough that I was willing to overlook Edward’s voyeurism.

Only after I managed to nod at her did she finally give in.

She took another gulp straight from the bottle and glared at Edward as he pried his fingers from my skin and moved away from me, holding the nearly empty bottle out toward him as he neared. Avoiding his gaze completely when they exchanged.

“You’re explaining this to Dayo,” she said harshly. I had no idea who or what a Dayo was, but Edward seemed to, tipping his head in acknowledgement as they swapped directions fluidly.

Two ships passing in the night.

I kept my eyes firmly on Alice’s sparkling diamonds in order the to keep my head away from the half-naked tattooed boy who was still working industriously on that full-body filigree of mine. She planted her hands on the countertop on either side of my legs, fingers clutching the granite and I ran my hand down her floral arm, daylilies and strawberries under my touch. Snails and butterflies and a rabbit in a straw hat. Ferns and feathers and the towering dandelions. The peacock constellation of seeds across her chest that was mirrored by the literal bird draped down her side. Her other arm was shockingly bare in comparison, pale skin spotted with freckles and I tilted my head to finally decipher the single word tattooed there in the crook of her elbow.

Heaven, the n bleeding down the length of her arm and ending in a messy pool of ink at her wrist that made my stomach roll. I set my fingers over the word to break my gaze.

“Alice . . .”

“Not now,” she breathed, wetting her lips and pressing them gently around my nipple, sucking me between her teeth and I hissed, arching toward her without even meaning to, fingers sinking impossibly into the skin of her arm. I could feel the sharp edges of her teeth and Alice licked solidly along the underside of my breast as I exhaled heavily, trembling from head to toe.

“You always taste so good,” she murmured with her lips brushing my collarbone and I swayed into her when she finally put her mouth to my neck, burning hot and freezing cold. Ice cubes and embers up my neck and across my cheeks. Cauterizing and cooling, scalding and soothing all in one.

Barely tolerable.

I clutched her face in both hands and tried to come capture her mouth the way I’d done in the water, but my head was spinning dizzily along after me like the last left-behind seed off her dandelions and she was having none of that. She planted a hand firmly between my tits and pushed me away, hard enough to set me back on my palms.

Edward groaned behind me.

I’d nearly forgotten about him.

“Will you shut up?” Alice hissed at him and leaned in to kiss me again, her tongue between my teeth and a sigh in the back of her throat. She pushed her hips against the lip of the counter, her hand fluttering down the entire length of my front, skittering down my stomach and whispering into my pubic hair, licking her lips and going glassy-eyed.

“Not that,” Edward growled. I glanced back over my shoulder at him the same time Alice did. He adjusted himself gingerly but didn’t linger, deliberately setting his hand back around the neck of the bottle with his teeth crushed together, staring at us intently. She pulled slowly away from me, fingertips feathering across my hip bones and glared at him.

“I thought I told you to be quiet.”

“Just . . . leave me that. Please.” His voice sounded strained, tempered under thinly veiled restraint. Alice rolled her eyes, still flushed around the edges and wrapped her arms around my waist, twining my hair around her fist and using it to pull my chin back. She licked a fine, slow line up my throat, pressing her bar-belled nipples into mine and sighing into my jaw.

“You’re really going to dictate how this goes?” she asked him.

No response. Dead silence.

Other than the singing my skin was doing under her touch.

I was a minefield of sensation, explosions that burst to life just below the surface, each more intense than the last and none of them within the realm of comprehension. I was so scattered, there was no hope of understanding any of this. There was only her. Her mouth peppering my neck. Barbells brushing my skin. The peacock feathers on her hip skewing under my grip when I held on to ground myself. The way that she smelled like Edward, but spicier. A searing hot chili added to that slow-cooked butter. Her grip on my hair forced my eyes to the ceiling and her mouth was adding lip-shaped petals to all the flowers Edward had burned onto me.

I had no intention to do this, right here. Right now.

But she didn’t ask my opinion.

Instead, she led me up to the crumbling lip of that elusive cliff and allowed me a moment to really appreciate the faraway bottom before giving me a violent shove over the edge. A sharp clap of sound rang out around us, Edward’s palm meeting the granite countertop hard enough to crack the ancient stone the same moment I cratered face first into the earth

---

Alice and I found the sea lion later that day.

We’d begun referring to our mermaid lagoon as Secrets, as much for its location as for all the whispers we’d exchanged there. Not a single day had gone by that we didn’t pay it a visit, the water warmer and the sand softer there than anywhere else on the island.

“Stop.” Alice grabbed me by the strings of my swimsuit, the knot unravelling in her hand, and I came to a halt in the sand, wondering if she was going to start up again before our feet even touched the water. Instead, she pointed over my shoulder and I noticed the new rock that had planted itself in the middle of the beach.

Rough and enormous and breathing.

It was flopped into the sand, looking ungraceful and clumsy out of the water, a bloated body with sadly lacking flippers that seemed better suited for a creature half its size. Its skin was mottled brown and black, covered in algae and barnacles, kelp caught in the whiskers of its beard. The sea lion was covered in scars, surface etched with the sprawling evidence of long ago battles. Judging by the basic principle that scars are often much smaller than their original wound, and the puckered pull of skin at the jagged edges of the marks across its back, this particular lion had seen some pretty serious shit in its life.

One puncture wound was now easily the size of a dinner plate.

We tiptoed back to the edge of the beach and nestled ourselves in the sand up against the rocks. I laid my head in Alice’s lap and let her braid through my hair while I fingered the feathers tumbling down her leg, watching the steady rise and fall of the sea lion’s breathing. A breeze skipped across the water that sent a spray across the sea lion’s back, the creature jerking awake within a fraction of a second. It eyed its surroundings menacingly, grunting and huffing and generally looking like the most terrifying creature to have ever existed until it decided that there was no immediate threat. It flopped back onto its side and was asleep as quickly as it had woken, a near-smile on its puppyish face.

A fearsome predator, taken out of context.

“Did you ever see a lion over there?” I asked, eyes on the ocean version of the cat I could see stalking through the Savannah. Alice dropped the whisper-thin braid she’d just finished and it fell across my throat, already starting to unravel at the end.

“A couple of times. Mostly in the dark.”

Ugh, terrifying.

“Never up close?” I asked, trying to forget about the infrared nature programs shot in the dead of night, nothing but murky moving shadows and glowing green orbs floating above a fresh kill. The only indication of the monsters cloaked in midnight.

“Well, Afua, but I don’t think he counts. Edward would probably disagree.”

“What’s an Afua?”

Alice laughed out loud, starting a new braid. “There was a village we stayed at for a nearly a year in Ethiopia . . . they had adopted a lion who was abandoned as a cub. It became a group effort, the whole community raised him right there in their houses. He wandered the one little street with the dogs, let all the kids crawl all over him, guarded the goats at night. The villagers named him Afua, thought he was good luck.”

“Was he?”

“He never ate anyone.” She shrugged, making it sound like that was the only condition that had to be met if you were to live as a lion amongst men.

“The lion who thought he was a lamb,” I mused.

“Wild animals can be domesticated. Sometimes even nature has to take a backseat to love.” Alice chuckled and I couldn’t help that I thought of Edward, feral and fascinating and probably part lion. Right on cue, she grabbed the fluttering tail end of my thought and ran with it. “He seemed particularly fond of Edward, slept in front of his door. They have the same hair, so he probably thought they were brothers.”

“He does have hair like a lion,” I giggled.

“Yank on it. He loves that shit.” She tugged the end of the long braid she’d just finished, my scalp tingling and I blushed, sure that she could see it bleeding across my neck. My lip was still so sore that it almost hurt to talk and I found myself tonguing the spot more than I should. I tried to distract her from Edward, knowing full well that I was helpless to resist. This was the first time either of them had pinpointed an exact location for me, only offering vague indications up until now, so I clung desperately to that.

“Ethiopia, huh?”

“I think that’s where I’m going to start from, when I go back. I’d like to snuggle with that lion again.” Her fingers skittered across my scalp, plucking another lock of hair from the mess on my head.

“When?” I must have sounded doubtful because Alice huffed, almost like she had expected this from me.

“I’m going. I don’t care what Edward says.”

“What if he doesn’t want to?” I was instantly terrified for her, remembering Edward’s fear over the guns and all the shit that Alice had gone through. The diseases and the death and the losing battle against time and circumstance. The lions that roamed the desert at night and the plants that could kill you if you took too much of them.

Her tattoos made her look a whole lot stronger than I was starting to suspect she actually was.

“Then he doesn’t go,” she shrugged, trying to sound nonchalant but her voice wavered, fingers absently pleating my hair.

“I think you should talk to him about it.”

“You don’t think I’ve tried? He’s stubborn as fuck when he wants to be and he’s made up his mind.”

I furrowed my eyebrows and stared at the sea lion, its back rising and falling in a steady, comforting rhythm that seemed to be the only constant right now. I knew I had no right to try to talk her out of it, but I couldn’t help my trepidation. I was hesitant to bring up Jubilee, but she was the entire reason Alice was here with me right now. The reason she wasn’t on a different continent, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to let her go just yet. She gave me the first legitimate orgasm I’d had in well over six years last night and I was feeling rather attached.

“He said it took you four days to get out of bed.”

She huffed again, fingers still braiding. “He would know. He was in it the whole time.”

I blinked in confusion. “I thought it was only once?”

“It took me four days to get out of bed, right?” She mimed me, each word cynical and crystal clear.

Right.

“You could set up in the city, start your own practice?” I tried again, weak, but I was running out of options, unable to do anything but conjure up images of her tangled up in bed with Edward. For four days.  

“I’m going to waste here,” she spat, reeking of frustration and discontent. “They need me over there.”

I bit the insides of my lips together, in case I slipped and told her that they weren’t the only ones. Edward’s fascination made more and more sense after every fleeting moment I spent with her. I was starting to see the faint glimpse of potential heartache that pooled at the bottom of the vast cliff I was working myself back to the top of.

I really hoped it was deep enough to cushion my fall.

---

Edward was lying on my beach when I got home.

I watched him from the relative safety of the deck for a while, letting him remain unaware of my arrival for as long as possible. I changed out of my swimsuit, putting on a simple cream colored dress with a pretty trim of pale pink lace around the hem brushing at my thighs. My hair was a cloudy disaster, twice its normal size and strung through with countless braids, courtesy of Alice. There was going to be no taming it so I didn’t even bother. I eventually swallowed down my nerves and made my way out onto the deck and down to the beach. He seemed to know I was coming because he hitched up onto his elbows in the sand, glancing over his shoulder at me before pulling himself gracefully to his feet.

“Where’s Jasper?” I stepped up right in front of him, trying to ignore the fact that his smell made my head spin just a badly as it did under the effects of the ocean. Rich as butter with a salty sting after I swallowed.

“He’s gone.” Edward’s jaw tightened as though he had much more to say, but was keeping himself from sharing it.

“Was he here?”

“Yes.”

Great. I wondered what that interaction had been like. “What did you say to him?” I asked, assuming the worst and Edward scowled at me.

“What makes you think that I’m the only one who had something to say?”

“Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“No,” he shook his head. “I’d really like an encore of your performance from last night.”

“Alice isn’t here.” I rolled my eyes and my words in a healthy coat of sarcasm. He looked as though he was gripping something hard between his teeth, grimacing at me,  voice stained with thunder.

“I don’t give a damn about her right now.”

His eyes sparked stormy grey, my lip still throbbing from his kiss last night, and I launched myself out to sea. Fled into the water and floundered away from him, headed for the little boat that was named for the art of lying. I almost drown twice on the way out of pure confused lust. Got seawater up my nose like a dose straight to the brain and pulled myself clumsily onto the boat with my head rocking in time to the incoming tide. Edward wasn’t far behind. He emerged from the water, pulling himself up into the boat cursing and breathing hard. Tattoos speckled with crystalline drops of seawater and his teeth set into his lip.

“Why are you always so angry with me?” He pressed his brows together and growled, a dripping wet, riot-haired boy who spent an entire year with a lion sleeping at his doorway and four days in bed with Alice.

“Because I don’t understand you!” I basically screamed at him, my skin half numb and my head still fucked up on lavender and his smell. “Why would you want me over her?”

“Are we really talking about Alice again?” He shook his head at me, sending droplets of water splattering across the seats and sounding as though he couldn’t quite believe it.

“She said you spent four days in bed with her,” I spat, voice trembling.

“She should learn to keep her mouth shut. It’s not like we spent those entire four days fucking each other,” he snapped back at me, angry and foul tongued.

“Are you in love with her?” Judging from the way he watched her prance around naked except for all her ink last night, I was pretty certain of it. Taking into account his near constant focus, one that bordered right up on enamored awe, his answer was just a formality.

He caught his breath in his throat and spoke with his jaw tightened, eyes wide. “In a way.”

“She doesn’t feel the same?”

“She doesn’t want me,” he shrugged, trying to look unmoved but failing. “She wants someone she can’t have.”

“You can’t be talking about me,” I shook my head, fully aware that he didn’t answer my question about his feelings, only justified her actions.

“Of course not,” he hissed. “Those Kissi Pennies might as well be her promise ring.”

“She told me an Elder gave them to her.” I cocked an eyebrow and Edward snorted, his own eyebrows arching. He spoke slowly, as though he was explaining something complex to a four year old.

“Out there, you can become an Elder at fifteen. It’s about half of their life expectancy, so it makes sense. Alice’s Elder is Ekundayo, otherwise known as Dayo, who became chief at ripe old age of seventeen.”

It was the name she’d thrown at him last night, coated in a thick layer of sticky malice.

“They’re in love?” I stuttered. She did not tell me that. I thought about the way Alice kissed those pennies the first time I spotted them, reverential and heartbroken under an entirely new light.

Edward nodded, chewing on his lip rings. “But he’s promised to someone else.”

“Like an arranged marriage?”

More nodding. “And Jubilee was his only surviving heir. His lineage will end unless he has a child and those are hard to keep alive out there in the desert.”

Christ, this just kept getting more and more tangled.

“She thinks you’re holding it against her,” I whispered. She actually didn’t, yet, only had suspicions, but I wanted to see his reaction for myself.

His eyes tightened shrewdly, cryptic as the damn sphinx. “She let it get in the way.”

“Let what get in the way?”

“Love,” he spat as if it tasted bad. “She should have stepped back. She was in it too deep, too many people to disappoint if she failed and she did. I tried to stop her but she’s stubborn as fuck.”

“Funny, she’s said the same thing about you.”

Edward rolled his eyes. “We’re more alike than either of us care to admit.”

“Tell me what her arm means. The word, and the pool of . . .” I tried to be demanding but trailed off uncertainly, not willing to admit at what I suspected it actually meant. Edward was quiet for a long time before he spoke, searching my face intently and chewing on his lip rings as though it was helping him decide what to tell me.

“It’s part of a drawing,” he said slowly. “Jubilee’s little friend gave it to Alice just before we were leaving.”

“But why? It’s so sad.” I sighed, heart feeling achy and sore from my vicarious brush up against Alice’s reality. I couldn’t understand how she could live with such a constant reminder. Edward made a sound low in his chest and huffed out a mouthful of self-explanatory philosophy.

“Yeah, well . . . Sometimes our tattoos become our scars.”

I thought of the sea lion napping at Secrets this morning, covered in the physical manifestation of his war to survive. Of Alice and Edward coated in something of the same. Flagrant indications to strangers of the battles they’d fought.

Win some.

Lose some.

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