A Flicker to a Flame (Mosley Coven)

Five

FIVE

CATO

Might save a lost soul

G randma Sarah was a healer.

In the months before she died, I spent almost every day with her. But those weren’t restful days, they were days full of work. Days when Grandma Sarah taught me everything she knew about the herbs in her garden and how to prepare her home for death. I remember massaging her misshapen arthritic hands at the end of the day, listening to her tell me which plants could lay fallow in winter and which I’d need to bring inside, memorizing her instructions like I was in school. I’d thought she was training me to be a healer so I could take her place once she passed. It was only in the days just before her death that I realized what had been going on. Grandma Sarah had been a healer, but I was something else.

The last lesson she taught me was that every death has a unique smell. Grandma Sarah’s had been sage and dried tea leaves. Xavier’s death smells like the first rain of summer and butter on fresh biscuits.

* * *

XAVIER

“D o I know you?”

I don’t. I know this. Not because I have a photographic memory or anything even remotely interesting, but because I feel one hundred percent certain I would remember Cato. My life has been dull shades of gray. I would remember bright yellow like sunflowers. I don’t know why, but that’s the color I see when I look at him.

“Not yet,” he says, casually shrugging his shoulders. “And who ever really knows anyone anyway?”

“I—” Honestly, I don’t know how to respond to that question except to nod and take another sip of my drink. Truth can be just as bitter as cheap liquor.

Ten years ago, my mother kissed me on the forehead and walked out the front door. I thought she was going to work, but I haven’t seen her since. Three years ago, I came home to find my best friend naked in my bed and my boyfriend hiding in the closet. They both said it wasn’t what I thought. What was it? I’ll never know. What I do know is that one day, I had people, and the next day, I was all alone again.

“You…you really think that?” I ask in a trembling voice. I lick the taste of liquor from my lips. Too much vodka. Too much pain.

Cato shrugs again. “I do, especially…” His voice trails off, but he turns his head left and takes in the bar.

I don’t want to look away. His skin is made up of the deepest brown, his long lashes curl tight against his eyelids, and light from the hanging lamps bounces off the highest points of his cheeks. There isn’t a single blemish or imperfection anywhere. I’ve never seen a more beautiful man. The urge to reach out and brush my fingers over his velvet skin makes my stomach rumble from a hunger I know all too well.

When his attention shifts back to me, there’s a little grin on his face, but it’s his eyes that get me — intense where his mouth is playful, deep brown pools in shocking bright whites.

He licks his lips before speaking. “I think knowing ourselves is hard enough as it is, but knowing someone else? Opening ourselves up to knowing someone else and letting them know us is hard work. It takes more strength than we expect.”

It’s not the liquor that makes me drop my gaze to my lap and turn away with a nervous laugh, it’s shame and hurt. So much hurt.

I shift toward the bar. Our knees bump together. “You sound like you spend all your time with your head in the clouds.” I laugh at the sentence to lessen the sting of self-recrimination.

He shifts with me, a small move that mimics my own. “That’s one way to describe me,” he whispers. “But you disagree?”

I reach for my glass, but I don’t lift it. I hold that glass in the palm of my hand like a lifeline. “No,” I say in a rough voice. “Sounds about right to me.”

“Ah,” Cato breathes. “I see.”

I lift my eyes to the mirror behind the bar and catch his profile in reflection. He’s looking at me on this side of the mirror. My skin is hot, but I can’t bear to look at him head-on — proving his point, I guess.

He leans close. I swallow a sudden lump in my throat.

“It’s never too late,” he whispers, soft breath ghosting over my skin.

“For what?” I ask, even though most of my attention is focused on the sliver of light between our heads. Wishing it would disappear.

“All our lives, we’re the only constant,” he whispers. “And it’s never too late to get to know ourselves. To love ourselves.” He trips over those last three words, but they still hit me square in the chest.

I shake off that feeling, refusing to let it sink in. “I wish I knew less about myself,” I admit in a reedy whisper. “Maybe it would have made life a little easier.” With that, I tip the glass to my mouth, liquor splashing on my lips.

Vodka does nothing to calm my nerves, especially not with Cato’s full attention on me. Especially not when his warm hand envelops the back of mine. He steadies my shaking hand and we set the glass back on the bar together. I’ve never been a man of too many words, but for the first time in a long while, I’m speechless. All I can do in this moment is look at our hands together, the way my skin blends effortlessly into his, and wish life would have been less cruel to me before tonight.

A wish I know will fall on closed ears just like all the others.

“This is our best bourbon.”

I jump in my seat at the once-familiar sound of the bartender’s voice, but Cato seems unfazed. He turns to the bartender, startling him again with the force of his smile — his presence. He stills and blinks a few dozen times rapidly before finally placing the glass in front of Cato with a hand somehow shakier than mine.

“Thank you, my dear,” Cato says in a voice too gentle for this world.

“Do you need anything else?” the other man asks eagerly. So eagerly, I squint through the darkness to make sure this is really the man who’s been side-eyeing me for the last four rounds.

Cato pauses half a second too long, long enough to make me turn back to him. He’s shaking his head elegantly slowly. “I’m lovely. Thank you again.”

He turns toward me with a smile and I blurt out the thing that’s been nagging in the back of my mind ever since the moment I saw him. “You don’t belong here.”

I hadn’t realized the jukebox was even playing until a song ends just as that sentence leaves my mouth. In the half a second of would-be silence as one record makes room for another, the low melody of Cato’s laughter fills the room.

I hate being laughed at. When I was a too-tall, too-skinny kid with glasses, laughter was my constant companion. It made skin that should have been soft and supple thick and brittle. It made me flinch at other people’s joy. Laughter became a weapon and it can still sting like a fresh wound.

Still, I can’t look away from him.

Cato leans close. Our shoulders touch. “You might be right about that,” he says and winks. “Takes one stranger to recognize another.”

Men have whispered to me before, but never like this. Never with a hungry gleam in their eyes softened by gentle words. Never carefully touching me in degrees. Never pushing.

No, I’ve never met a man like Cato before.

He turns to reach for his drink and I miss his touch immediately. But the pleasure of watching him raise the scratched glass to his mouth, of his thick lips caressing the rim, then his bright pink tongue swiping across his mouth in a sensual glide, is more than enough to make up for the loss.

The jukebox blares back to life, making me jump in my seat. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I turn away from the bar. What I remember as a sedate dive now looks like a party in the making, people stacking chairs out of the way of couples grinding and shaking against one another to the tune of a lively beat. “When did all this start?” I rasp.

Cato chuckles softly. “You tell me. I just got here.”

I stare at the bar, not recognizing anything or anyone. I try not to go out every night, but when I do, it’s usually to the same few bars in the Castro. This place, however, doesn’t look like any of my regular haunts. The ones where I know I’m safe and don’t have to stay long. No, sorry, I mean the ones where I thought I was safe. Safety is nothing more than an illusion.

I take another sip of my drink to steady my nerves. It burns going down this time, but that might not be the liquor. “Where am I?” I whisper against the rim of my glass.

Cato shifts toward me again, placing one foot on the back of my stool. It takes all the energy I have not to look down between his legs.

He smirks like he knows what I’m thinking. God, I hope not.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

Cato’s question makes the dread I’ve been trying for hours to wash away with cheap booze come back in a strong wave. The last thing I remember is a cold, sterile room in the busy clinic, words ringing in my ears. You knew it was bad when they took you somewhere private. I knew it was bad before the doctor opened his mouth.

“I was in The City,” I say around the lump in my throat. “I’d just got off work and then… I was here.”

“Hmmm. That’s intriguing. Did you walk here?” Cato asks the question carefully as he shifts in his seat. One of his knees brushes my hip. Sadness can’t quite dull the delicious thrill that moves through my body from that touch.

It takes me a few seconds to register his question. I shake my head and pat my pants pockets until I feel my car keys in the left one where they always are. “I don’t think so.”

“That’s good. Did you talk to anyone?”

“Huh?” I turn toward him, our eyes locking for the first time.

His smile is overwhelming. “After you left work, did you talk to anyone? Did someone tell you about this place? We’re sorta out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“I…don’t know, actually.” I look around again for signs that this is a bar I’ve been to before or even the one I remember from a few moments ago, but I can hardly think. Maybe it’s the alcohol. My eyes shift quickly back to Cato. No, for the first time since I got here, my mind is clear and focused. On him.

“I just wanted to escape,” I say, choking back that last syllable. “I remember thinking…praying…begging God or anyone listening to give me a way out. That’s the last thing I remember.”

Pain blooms in my chest and I press my lips shut, certain that if I open them, a sob or vomit will spill out.

Cato’s hand settles carefully on my forearm. His touch is heavy and hot. He squeezes my arm reassuringly. “Looks like you got your wish.”

When I open my eyes, a few tears leak out and spill over my cheeks before pooling at the corners of my mouth. Salty and warm.

Sacred.