Breathless - Jennifer Niven Page 0,52

weightless. And then I slide my hands under his shirt, up his back, across the fine, taut muscles, and gently, so gently, run my nails up and down his skin. He’s not the only one in control here. I can feel him bend into me, and then I let him go.

He smiles down at me. I smile up at him.

“Still two hundred and fifty percent sure, Captain?” His voice is husky.

“Let’s make it three hundred.”

I walk off toward the NO TRESPASSING sign, pretending I’m not a little dizzy, a little breathless. I walk up the steps and then he passes me, leading us around the side of what used to be the house. He aims the camera at the ruins and takes a couple of shots. He studies the screen. Takes another shot. Studies the screen again. I catch up with him but I can’t help feeling as if I’m intruding on something—a dialogue between him and the camera.

I pretend to look around, but I’m really looking at him. He’s so different from Wyatt. He looks like he was born in the outdoors, maybe on the beach, wherever the sun is brightest. But, more than that, he’s direct, honest, and completely himself. My lips are burning, wanting more.

“We can get in there,” he says, hand shading his eyes. Before I can ask, Get in where? he’s picking his way through the overgrown grass to a set of stone steps that lead down into the ground. At the bottom is a crooked door that swings right open, and now we’re in the basement of Rosecroft, whole and standing, cooler than outside and lit only by the light coming through these narrow windows up at ground level.

I follow him, doing my best to see in the dark, trying to pick my way through this pitch-black maze, while he leads the way, bare feet and all, not caring what he steps on.

He says, “So, since you’re a Blackwood, I thought you might appreciate seeing the ancestral palace.”

“I’m not a Blackwood. This”—I wave my hands all around me—“isn’t me. I live in Mary Grove, Ohio, farm and factory town. My dad works at the college and my mom writes books and I babysit to earn enough money to buy lip balm.”

“Well, then consider it a crumbling memorial to dysfunctional family.”

“That’s more relatable.”

And he tells me how the only Blackwood son, Samuel Jr., oldest child of the great railroad magnate, moved with his wife, Tillie, from the family home in Virginia to the house his father built him, Rosecroft. How they had two daughters, my great-grandmother and Claudine. How Tillie was a midwife who delivered most of the babies on the island. How she got pregnant again, but there was a flu epidemic, and she became bedridden and lost the baby.

Tillie, I think. That was her name. Tillie Blackwood. I imagine her traveling this island delivering babies, and my image of Tillie Blackwood—just like my original image of her daughter—shifts a little. No more fainting couch and smelling salts, but someone with backbone.

There is something low-ceilinged and muffled about the acoustics down here that give his voice an end-of-the-world quality. “One morning, not long after, she shot herself through the heart in her bedroom closet.”

“Where did she get the gun?”

“It belonged to her husband. He felt so guilty over not being there when she died that he buried her in the front yard so he could see her grave from the house.”

Miah stops walking and we’re in what must be the middle of the basement, no windows, no light except what’s coming from his flashlight, but I can see that we are surrounded by relics of a life, spanning the decades. A steamer trunk, a rocking chair, an old umbrella, slats of wood, a stack of bricks, a lopsided hat rack. There’s a story for each one, probably long forgotten, and suddenly I want to know everything. Whose trunk was this, and how far did it travel? Who carried this umbrella? Who sat in this rocking chair? My mind is racing, cluttered with images and scenes.

“They say one night he dug up her grave and cut off a braid of her hair and then reburied her. Supposedly he carried the braid with him the rest of his life.” In the dim light, he studies me. “Obviously she had more hair than you do, Captain.” Miah reaches out and fingers the ends of it, and like that, I forget about Tillie and Claudine.

Kiss me

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