Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (3 page)

She unclipped the garters, one snap at a time, her hair falling over one shoulder, black ribbon against the white lace of her brassiere. She rolled the stockings down with slow deliberation, making an art of it. He stubbed his cigarette out, stood, and walked across the room. He stopped only inches away, drinking in her scent, feeling her heat, not touching.

She shivered.

“Cold?” he asked softly.

“No, I can feel your eyes on me,” she drew a shaky breath, “touch me, Casey.”

He rested his hands on her shoulders, hooked his thumbs under the straps of her bra and slid them slowly down her arms.

“All those men lookin’ at ye tonight,” he said and ran his lips feather-light down the side of her neck, “an’ I know what they’re thinkin’, that they’re imaginin’ ye like this, an’ still they don’t know the half of it. I sit there,” he ran his hands down over her collarbone, across the pale skin of her chest, “an’ I think ‘if ye knew the truth of her, boy, ye’d go mad. Ye wouldn’t be able to breathe or sleep proper again, if ye knew what it was to touch her so,” his hands came around and under, spreading across her belly, his voice like rough silk in her ear as she leaned back into his chest, “ye’d be addicted for life, ye’d be like a man drugged, never able to get enough.” She moaned softly as his hands, rough with calluses, slid up to cup her breasts.

“And what about the women looking at you?” She asked, reaching behind her to unfasten the button on his trousers.

“What women?” His tongue flicked the edge of her ear. “I didn’t see any other women there tonight.”

“Well they saw you. Women always look at you.”

“Do they?” he asked, hands slipping inside the rim of her little white panties and pushing them down until they fell to the floor and she stepped daintily out of them.

“Oh do they? They look at you like alcoholics look at whiskey.”

“An’ what do ye think when they look at me?” he put an arm under her knees and swung her up, depositing her on the bed.

“I think...” she undid the zip on his pants, watched them fall to the floor and then pulled him over onto the bed. “I think—don’t even imagine it, sister, ‘cause he’s mine, every inch mine and you couldn’t handle him anyhow.”

“Do ye, then?” Casey murmured, tongue making butterfly kisses on her navel and then proceeding down until she gave a sharp cry, crumpling the sheets in her fists and arching up to meet his questing mouth. She tangled her fingers in his hair, gave it a gentle tug, pulling him up, guiding him urgently between her legs.

“Patience, Jewel,” he said, easing in slowly, gasping at the tight, fevered fit, raising her hips for deeper penetration, their bodies already moving in an undulating rhythm that threatened to push them both over the edge in short order.

“Mmmnn,” Casey said in not-convincing protest, ceasing his movement altogether, “I plan to take it slow. It’s just you an’ I, darlin’, an’ the night is long.” He thrust with slow deliberation and she cried out, arching off the sheets, head turned to the side, hair drifting across her face. He loved this moment best of all, when she was all soft and hot beneath him, crying his name like she was in pain and only he could bring her release. He thrust again deep into her and she arched tightly to him, giving a soft, shattered sob, arms flung out to the sides. He collapsed against her, face buried in her neck as she wrapped her arms around him, all sweet, living, burning cells.

The night was never quite long enough however, Casey thought some time later. The hands on the clock at their bedside read four o’clock. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, bowing his head and rubbing his face with his hands.

“Do you have to go?” Pamela’s arm wrapped around him from behind, hand stroking the soft skin of his belly.

He picked her hand up, kissed the back of it firmly and laid it down on the sheet. He glanced back at her. “Ye know I do.”

“It’s barbaric the hours he makes you keep,” she said grumpily, sitting up and pushing her hair away from her face.

“He keeps them himself an’ longer many nights.”

“What sort of business is done at four in the morning?”

“Ye know I don’t question Love about his business.”

She sighed, twisting her wedding ring about her finger. “Maybe we ought to question it, Casey.”

“An’ both be out of work?” he asked lightly, pulling his shirt on and buttoning it up by feel.

“I left a letter on the table for you yesterday,” she said, changing tack. He could hear the sheets rustle softly as she laid back.

“I saw it,” he said shortly.

“Damn it, Casey, how can you be so stubborn? He’s your brother.”

“I know who he is,” Casey said, rolling up his cuffs, “an’ the last time I saw him he told me to stay the hell out of his life. I’ve done my best to honor his request.”

“And now he wants to patch things up. Why won’t you at least read his letters?”

“Because they’re addressed to you, not me. I take that as a fairly broad hint.”

“It’s only because he knows you’d throw his letters away unread.”

Casey sighed. This topic was not new to the two of them and it was an issue they could never see eye to eye upon.

“How is he, then?” he asked, tucking his shirt into his pants and reaching for his cigarettes.

“Good, though he’d be better if you’d at least give some signal that you know he’s alive.” She paused, and he sensed there was something she wanted to say to him but hesitated to do so.

“Ye’d best out with it or it’ll go straight to yer spleen. At least that’s what my daddy used to tell us.”

“It’s just that—well what with Siobhan and Desmond coming for Christmas I thought it would be nice if Pat and Sylvie could come as well.”

He was silent for a long moment, digesting this shocking suggestion.

“I suppose ye can ask,” he said gruffly, “but I doubt the boy will accept yer invite.”

“He already has,” she said quietly.

Casey sighed and turned around to look at his wife. Her eyes slid swiftly away from his gaze.

“An’ may I enquire what bold little tale ye told him to get him to agree to come?”

“It wasn’t,” she said with slow reluctance, “entirely a tale.”

“Oh.” He quirked his eyebrows questioningly, “half fable an’ half truth, was it then?”

“I only told him what I know to be true,” she said defensively, drawing the sheet up over her breasts. Casey tugged it back down firmly.

“Ye once told me it was harder to lie when yer naked, darlin’, so now that yer naked,” he cast an appreciative eye along her length, “tell me what it is exactly that ye’ve told my brother?”

She tugged vainly at the sheet, which he held tight in his fist.

“Only that you were sorry and that you missed him.”

“Forgive me if I can’t see where the nugget of truth is buried in yer little story,” he said, voice rich with sarcasm.

“You do miss him,” she said softly, “I know you do. I’ve lived with you every day for over a year now, Casey, I know what the silences say as well as the words.”

“Alright,” he admitted, “I do miss the little bugger but I’ll not say as I’m sorry. What I said to him still holds true, he’s stirrin’ up a cauldron of snakes with that organization of his, an’ what I said was said out of concern for his safety, for his damned life, truth be told. But he’s too stubborn to see truth even when it comes armed with a bullet.”

She reached up and stroked his face softly, her eyes searching his own. “He’s like his brother that way, aye?”

He caught her hand in his own, pressing the knuckles hard against his lips. “Can ye not allow a man his illusions every now an’ again, darlin’?”

“Not when it’s this important. He’s your family, Casey, and I want family around this Christmas,” she said firmly, eyes suddenly dark and opaque, like heavy green glass.

“Is this about the babe, then?” he asked, voice subdued, hand stilled against hers.

“No,” she said too quickly and then, with her free hand, dashed away a quicksilver glitter of tears, “maybe, I don’t know. We’d have our baby soon, you know, if I hadn’t lost her.”

“Aye,” he lowered himself onto the bed beside her, stroking her hair back from her forehead in a soothing motion, “I know. She’d be a bitty wee thing, but she’d come in a rush like most Riordans. But darlin’, it wasn’t yer fault. Ye know what the doctor said.”

“Oh yes,” she said in a gritty voice, “I know what the doctor said. I also know they say the same damn words to every woman who loses a baby, it’s just nature taking care of things, there’ll be more babies—but it doesn’t matter, it’s all just words and I wanted that baby. It was just a bit of blood and bone to him, but Casey, it was our
child
, someone we created out of love, and I wanted
that
particular person.”

He put his lips against her forehead, felt the pulse of her blood in the veins under the fine skin, and closed his eyes against the sting of tears. It still took him unawares, this flood of sudden emotion for someone he’d never known, never would know. Someone who’d had a steady, thrumming heartbeat, rapid like the whir of a hummingbird’s wings. Someone who, though unseen, had been felt by his hands, turning and fluttering under the small mound of his wife’s belly. Son or daughter, it hadn’t mattered to him, only that it was their child.

The thought of that night was like a knife cutting a valley through his heart. He’d been away, working late as usual, when Love himself had come out to the warehouse where Casey was supervising the unloading of a shipment from the Caribbean.

He’d known something was wrong at once, Love would never have shown his face at the warehouse otherwise. He liked to keep a safe distance from the grittier aspects of his business. The gritty aspects were Casey’s job.

The baby had already been removed to the morgue by the time he’d arrived at the hospital, Pamela sedated, drifting in and out of drug-induced sleep. But she’d felt his presence, half-opened her eyes and whispered, “Sorry, so sorry, Casey.” And then as he’d leaned down to comfort her, she’d said, “Make them give me my baby, they won’t let me see our baby.”

And so he’d gone to the nurses and asked to see the baby, and been told politely that it wasn’t policy to allow the mothers to see the baby when the child was dead. It was better for the mother, they’d continued, if the child remained a stranger.

In a voice that seemed to emerge from someone else’s throat, he’d told them in no uncertain terms that he would see his child, and see it now. And the nurse, quite obviously frightened by something in the dark, grief-stricken face in front of her, had acquiesced, calling a doctor up to speak with him. When it became clear that the doctor would be unable to dissuade him from his purpose, the baby was brought to Casey on a cold steel cart, covered by a sheet reeking of disinfectant.

He’d held the tiny, otherworldly, pearl-pale body that would have been his daughter and thought he’d die from the pain of it. Then he’d wrapped her carefully in the coarse cloth, placing the translucent, frond-like fingers against the impossibly fragile chest. She was covered in a soft golden down, her tiny ears no bigger than the pad of his thumb—delicate, wee pointed ears like an elf. Her eyelids were milky blue and sealed perfectly against a world she would never see. He’d taken her then to her mother, saying in a rough voice, when the nurses protested, that a mother had a right more than any did to say goodbye to a child she’d carried in her own body.

He’d gone in the hospital room, closed the door behind him and locked it. And due to the interference, in low and charming tones outside the door, of Love Hagerty, it had stayed locked all night. He later learned that Love had made a substantial donation to the hospital in order to buy them a little privacy.

Eight hours they’d had, the three of them. Eight hours with the baby tucked carefully between the two of them on the narrow hospital bed.

Somewhere in the wee hours Pamela had said, “I’d like to name her Deirdre.”

“It’s my mother’s name,” he’d responded in surprise.

“I know,” she’d answered quietly and bent to kiss the terribly still form between them. “Do you object?”

“No,” he said, and so the tiny, translucent girl with the ears of an elf had become Deirdre. Deirdre of the Sorrows, how tragically fitting, he’d thought.

Eight hours, the minutes unfolding like the petals of a flower which has only a night to bloom. Eight hours to say hello and goodbye and all the things in between which need a lifetime to be said.

With dawn’s light, he’d unlocked the door and watched as people in stiff, starched uniforms took his child from her mother’s arms. Watched with a clarity that was painful, edged in a sharp, hard light that seared his eyes; and yet still could not comprehend that he was not to be anyone’s father, and yet would be a father for all the rest of his days.

Beside him the clock’s hands pointed halfway between the four and the five. Beneath his lips Pamela’s forehead had cooled, her breathing even and deep. She was asleep, tear trails soft silver lines radiating out into her hairline, where small puffs of blue-black curls had absorbed and hidden her grief. He gave a small prayer of thanksgiving that she was well again, that she had begun, as impossible as it had once seemed, to laugh again, to respond to outside influences. Then he got to his feet, exhaustion deep in every cell and trod, barefoot, toward the kitchen.

The kitchen faced east towards the water and beaches that seemed unimaginable from this vantage point. The room was filled with a soft, ashy light, the silver coffee pot glowing hazily on the counter by the sink. Casey lifted his hands to rub them over his face and was caught short by the scent of Pamela’s skin on his palms. He closed his eyes to breathe more deeply and wasn’t surprised by the thickening of his throat this time. He’d gone soft of late he supposed, when something as small as the smell of a woman’s heat on his hand could cause such a rush of gratitude and wonderment. But then, this was not just any woman, this was his wife, and he loved her with a primal ferocity that shocked him at times.

Faith found him in such small moments. He had wondered at first why it came at all to someone who had never found it in easy supply, and then had thought that perhaps it was the convenience of it, for he’d more to lose now than ever before.