Kiss The Flame: A Desire Exchange Novella (1001 Dark Nights)

  Laney.

  Her hands shake as she tears open the envelope, as she unfolds the piece of heavy sketch paper inside of it. The breath goes out of her when she finds herself staring down at the amazingly detailed pencil sketch of—me. That’s me. That’s me holding a rose in one hand while more rose petals shower down all sides of me. Roses for the Rose Scholarship. Oh, my God. He drew me.

  The card seems to waver suddenly. She’s blinking back tears.

  She can’t remember the last time anyone has been this thoughtful, this kind. She’s never thought of herself as a victim of abuse. But what do you call an entire lifetime of having your own intelligence, your own competence used against you, an entire lifetime of everyone from your parents to your friends thinking they don’t really have to show up for you because you do such a good job of showing up for yourself?

  Sometimes you don’t know you’ve got a shell around your heart until it cracks.

  Get it together, Laney. Get it—

  “Laney…are you all right?” Michael asks.

  A sane and reasonable answer is right on the tip of her tongue.

  And then she snorts.

  Her hand flies to her nose to prevent a messy disaster, but there’s no hiding the tears now. And Michael’s expression goes from slightly wounded—maybe he thought she was about to laugh at all his beautiful gestures—to outright concern.

  “Wow,” Michael mutters. “I better cancel the violinist.”

  “Michael…”

  “I know. I said I was just going to buy you a drink and I kinda—”

  “Michael, I can’t. This is …”

  “This is what?”

  “You’re my teacher,” she whispers.

  Even in the candlelight, she can see his cheeks reddening. The last thing she wanted to do was embarrass him, and God knows the last thing she wanted to do was cry.

  “Has nobody ever done anything nice for you, Laney?”

  She goes rigid, feels herself reaching for the same kind of smart comeback she’d use if Cat hit her with the same accusatory question.

  “This isn’t just nice,” she says.

  “Good,” he says, staring into her eyes, “because I didn’t do it just to be nice.”

  The lust in his tone brings a flush of heat to the sides of her neck, to the spot between her shoulder blades that always gets tingly when he looks at her, to the insides of her thighs. It paints gooseflesh down her arms. And by the time she’s done savoring this light suggestion of his desire for her, her tears have dried and her throat feels clear again.

  “The card was too much,” he says quickly. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” she responds. “Please. Don’t be sorry.”

  “No. Maybe I should have drawn something else. Something that had meaning, but wasn’t…you know, you. It’s just… Well, when I got home this afternoon, I was trying to remember the artists you liked so I could use something from one of their works. But I kept remembering the way you looked when we said good-bye and I—”

  “You drew it this afternoon?” she asks, dumbfounded, waving the card in the air next to her. She knew he was a scholar, but she didn’t know he was also an artist himself.

  “Yeah, I know. Too much.”

  “It’s not too much,” she says, taking care to fold up the card, return it to its envelope and slide it into her purse. It’s the least she can do after treating it like a handkerchief.

  “Is it a little too much?” he asks.

  He makes a small space between the thumb and index finger on his right hand, and that’s when she can see from his cocked eyebrow and the slight dimple in his chin, that he’s being a little sarcastic. He doesn’t regret a thing he’s done, despite how they’ve done her in. The balloons, the champagne, the card; he wouldn’t take any of them back for an instant.

  “It isn’t too much,” she says.

  “I know,” he says quietly.

  “But it’s dangerous.”

  “Dangerous,” he says, as if it’s the first time he’s heard the word.

  “That thing I said earlier. About you being my teacher. That’s still true.”

  “I know,” he says. “And I like that you keep pointing that out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it means you want me as much as I want you,” he says.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “People don’t point out barriers unless they want to overcome them.”

  “Yeah, and that can be a dangerous thing,” she counters.

  “If it’s not done right, maybe.”

  “Anyway we do it might be dangerous, Michael.”

  “What kind of man do you think I am?” he asks with a mischievous smile, far more mischievous than any he’s given her, or anyone, for that matter, in class.

  “I don’t know. Yet.”

  “Well, that’s why we’re here, then,” he says. “This is why dates were invented. Even if they start off kinda weird.”

  “So this is a date?” she asks.

  “Please tell me you didn’t think otherwise.”

  She laughs against her will, and he bites his bottom lip gently at the sound of it, his eyes brightening and the angel’s press under his nose becoming more pronounced as he suppressed a grin.

  “Okay,” she says. “It’s a date.”

  “Good. How else would I get to hear you say the word dangerous over and over again like it’s a dessert you’ve been craving all day?”

  “You didn’t really hire a violinist, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Good, you know, ’cause all of this is…good enough. It’s way good enough.”

  “I hired a mariachi band for later. You know, to walk us down Bourbon Street.”

  As she barks with laughter, she feels her hand start a quick trip toward her blushing neck. She wills it to her lap, closes her left hand over it.

  “Brass bands are so overdone, you know?” he says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  He hasn’t opened the champagne bottle yet. She’s not about to ask him too, not after her mini-breakdown. But she could really use a glass or two or three or four.

  Just then, the handsome waiter appears and rattles off a bunch of specials she doesn’t hear because she’s too busy watching Michael watch the waiter with an intense set to his jaw. It’s like he’s using the waiter’s arrival to catch his breath after the tension and awkwardness of the last few minutes. And just this slight evidence of emotional strain on his face calms her slightly. But only slightly.

  Despite his handsomeness, and despite his heartwarming gifts and the effort—and cash—he put into them, she can’t stop seeing him as a luxury she can’t afford. And she fears that no matter what he says, no matter what he does, nothing will stop the march of anxiety and doubt across her mind.

  Maybe it never stops, she thinks suddenly, in a voice so clear it seems almost divine. Maybe the doubts and the fears never go away. Maybe you just take the risk anyway and see what happens because what happens might be wonderful. And maybe the risk is easier to take once he embraces you, once his breath is against your neck.

  She’s gotten so lost in thought she’s startled to find them alone again.

  “Hear anything you like?” he asks.

  “To be honest, I wasn’t really paying attention.”

  “Me neither.”

  “What? Seriously? You looked like you were hanging on his every word.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You had me fooled.”

  “Good, I guess. I mean, I didn’t ask you here to fool you. But hey, if we ever play poker.”

  Don’t make a joke about strip poker. Please don’t make a creepy joke about strip poker.

  After a few minutes of Michael not making a joke about strip poker, Laney finally becomes convinced he’s not going to make a joke about strip poker.

  “Strip poker!” Michael barks.

  When she realizes he read her mind throughout their long silence,
she rocks forward, hands to her mouth, to keep her laughter from seizing control of her entire body.

  Michael is undeterred; he makes ooga-boogah motions with both hands in the air in front of him. “Stripping…nudity reference…first date…awwwwwkward,” he continues like he’s narrating the trailer for a 1950’s horror film.

  “Stop,” she begs in-between gasps.

  “Awkwaaaaard,” he adds one last time, in a softer version of his full-throated Vincent Price impersonation. He punctuates it with two fluttery hand motions, then he sits back in his chair, bright-eyed and beaming because his joke hit home.

  It takes her a while to get her breath back. She’s run such a gamut of emotions in such a short time, she feels exhausted to the point of near delirium. She wishes she could bottle this moment, this easy, if a little breathless, smile they’re sharing now. At the very least, she wants to fix it in place and keep the rest of the date somewhere in its vicinity. God knows, they’ve already wandered far from the evening she’d scripted for them both before she arrived; polite flirting followed by a gentle give-and-take of not-too-personal personal details, all of it building up to the reveal, on both of their parts, of some sort of personal trauma in their respective pasts. (This final act, she had hoped, would be accompanied by copious amounts of booze.)

  But he’s sidelined her by giving her something she didn’t realize had been taken from her, some celebration of the fact she landed an impossible-to-get scholarship. As a result, she’s made known the depth of her attraction to him against her will. Now that he’s read her mind as well—strip poker!—and made her laugh until she thought she was going to pass out, what choice do they have left except for total candor, total honesty?

  “We could always wait,” Laney says.

  “For what? I wasn’t exactly planning to throw you across the table right here if that’s what you—”

  “Until the end of the semester. Until you weren’t my teacher anymore.”

  “So you want to call it a night and try this again in a couple months?” he asks with a wry smile.

  “Well, not right now I don’t want to call it a night. I mean, I’m kinda hungry.”

  “Oh, well, good. ’Cause we’re at a restaurant.”

  “I can see that. A restaurant with balloons.”

  “I brought those balloons. The best the restaurant could do was a candle in a piece of bread pudding. That would never do.”

  “Let’s see the night through. If that’s okay.”

  “This night can end however you want it to, Laney Foley.”

  “Thank you, Michael Brouchard.”

  “In fact, I’ll even let you take that champagne bottle home with you if you’d like. That way you won’t be unfairly influenced by a spirit you can’t contain. Get it. Spirit. ’Cause it’s alcohol?”

  “The strip poker thing was funnier.”

  “Yeah, well, they can’t all be winners.”

  “You’re a winner. That’s all that counts.”

  He cocks his head to one side, lifts his glass to toast her. He doesn’t milk every compliment she gives him for all it’s worth, doesn’t press her to elaborate or clarify, and she likes that. So many of the men in her life, including her father, have demanded constant validation from her while pretending never to need it, and sometimes the contradiction makes her head spin. But not with Michael. Not so far, at least.

  “I thought about it, you know,” Michael says quietly.

  “Thought about what?” she asks, startled by the sudden seriousness of his tone.

  “Waiting until the semester was over.”

  “Why didn’t you?” she asks.

  “I tried waiting once. It didn’t go so well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Michael grips his water glass, brings it to his mouth and takes a thirsty gulp. His eyes have left hers for the first time since the waiter arrived. She can’t tell if the memory he’s about to impart wounds him to this day, or if he’s simply embarrassed by what he’s about to reveal.

  “I met her my junior year at LSU. She had a boyfriend and I didn’t want to do anything to screw up anybody’s relationship, so I kept my mouth shut. Then they had some kind of fight or falling out. I couldn’t really tell and I thought if I asked too many questions, it would make it obvious that I was into her. So I kept my mouth shut and just tired to be a good guy friend and all that. And little by little, I managed to find out she and the guy had separated. He was going off to med school in Houston and she didn’t want to leave Louisiana. Anyway, the point is it took me weeks to get all the info because I was all about flying below the radar. Playing it super-safe. I didn’t want it getting back to her that I was asking around just in case she and the boyfriend were still serious. Finally I worked up the nerve to ask her out, but a couple weeks turned out to be too long.”

  “She got back together with the guy?”

  “No,” he answers, staring down into his water glass, working his jaw slightly as if a piece of gum were stuck to the back of his teeth. “She was listening to her iPod and she stepped off the curb before the light changed and a truck hit her. She died instantly.”

  “Oh my God,” Laney says. It’s more of a sharp exhalation than a statement.

  “So that’s why when a woman walks into my life who has everything you do, I don’t wait.”

  Or you tell her this story, which sounds too good to be true. Or just bad enough that it’s too bad to be—

  —shut up, Laney. He’s looking you in the eye, for Christ’s sake. Liars don’t look people straight in the eye.

  “What was her name?”

  “Brooke.”

  Yeah—and her last name, Nicholas Sparks?

  —Shut up, Laney!

  “I’m so sorry, Michael.”

  “Listen, I didn’t tell the story to get a Purple Heart. Honestly, was she the love of my life? I have no idea. But that’s the point. I have no idea because I never stepped up to bat. I wasted too much time waiting for the moment to be perfect. I don’t want to make the same mistake with you, Laney.”

  The waiter arrives. Laney isn’t remotely ready to order, but she pops open the menu and pretends to study its contents. She can’t think of a better way to hide her suspicion the story Michael just shared with her isn’t true.

  Or maybe only half-true, which would be just as lame.

  “Ready?” Michael asks.

  “I’ll be ready by the time you’ve ordered,” she mutters.

  She’s not, but she orders anyway. Something not too expensive, something that won’t leave her bloated and sleepy.

  Once the waiter departs, she bends forward, as if she’s about to take Michael into confidence. “Bathroom,” she whispers, and then gestures to her face, which she assumes is still tear-splotched.

  He smiles and nods.

  It’s a single bathroom, thank God, and when she throws the lock, her first deep breath in hours fills her lungs. Relief, that’s what she’s feeling, relief that she might be about to catch Michael in a lie, that she might be on the verge of freeing herself from this whole reckless mess.

  If she were able to afford a smartphone of her own, she wouldn’t have to stoop to calling Cat. But she can’t afford one, so calling Cat it is.

  Here goes, she thinks.

  Cat answers. “What are you doing?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Answering questions with questions. Not a good sign.”

  “I need your help,” Laney says.

  “Don’t tell me he’s being weird. Ugh. Is he being weird? I can meet you out front. I’m at CC’s.”

  “Wait, seriously? You’re a few blocks away?”

  “Yeah,” Cat answers.

  “What happened to not picking me up if I didn’t go home with him?”

  “I was joking. You really think I’d leave you down here without a car?”

  “That’s actually really sweet.”

  As sweet as expensive champagne, balloons and a custom-made
hand-drawn card. But she hadn’t done the best at accepting those gifts either.

  “Laney, why are you calling?”

  “Do you have wifi?”

  “Uhm, yeah. How do you think I’m passing the time?”

  “Google something for me.”

  “Okay. I’m ready,” Cat says, without bothering to ask for an explanation.

  “Brooke. LSU. Truck. Accident. Killed Instantly.”

  “What kind of date is this?” Cat asks.

  “You’re looking for news articles or an obituary from about two or three years ago.”

  “Oh my God. You’re fact-checking your date! Seriously? You’re having me fact-check your date?”

  “If I had a smart phone, I’d do it myself. Now start Googling.”

  Silence falls on the other end, followed by the click of laptop keys, followed by a few grunts here and there as Cat scans the search results.

  “Here it is,” Cat finally says. “A news story from three years ago.” She quickly skims through the story, “Baton Rouge Police have announced that alcohol did not play a factor in the accident that killed a Louisiana State University junior three days ago. Twenty-one-year-old art history major Brooke Daniels was struck and killed by a cold storage truck at three in the afternoon while walking home from class. The driver did not flee the scene and has been cooperating with authorities since the accident. The announcement from Baton Rouge P.D. seems to confirm witness reports that Daniels was listening to music on her iPod and appeared distracted when she stepped into the intersection before the light changed… Do I have to keep reading?”

  “No,” Laney says. “He was telling the truth.”

  “So you were fact-checking him? Honestly. Laney, no one’s going to be able to fall in love with this guy for you. Go back to the table!”

  Cat hangs up.

  Now that it’s gone, she’s embarrassed by the sense of relief that filled her when she thought Michael might turn out to be a liar. Would it really have been a comfort to know he was just like a dozen other scam artists and players she’d managed to expose before things got serious?