The Secret Language of Stones

Chapter 20

When I got inside, I locked the door to my room, undressed, and slipped a nightgown over my bare skin. From my jewelry case in the armoire, I withdrew the locket I’d first made for Madame Alouette and stared into its depths at the green river of peridot and the lock of Jean Luc’s hair.

I hadn’t wanted to wear it to dinner with Grigori. I’d hoped that without it on, I’d feel more connected to the living than the dead. But it hadn’t worked.

When I slipped it over my head, the orb came to rest between my breasts. Almost instantly, the gold warmed against my skin. I clasped it.

What was wrong with me? Grigori, a living breathing man near my age and not at the front. That alone made him a catch that anyone would envy. And yet when he’d kissed me, I hadn’t responded. His warm lips hadn’t moved me the way the ghost’s spectral touch had.

The hopelessness of the situation settled upon me like a shroud. How had I allowed myself to fall in love with a phantom? Certainly, there was no future in it-I almost laughed out loud. The man I was fantasizing about, who I was communicating with, was a lingering echo of the past.

My mother had left me with a grimoire and a list of spells. She’d guaranteed I could control the portal if I studied. And yet I hadn’t opened the book. She’d warned me the longer I dwelled in this netherworld, the harder it would be to break the ties.

She’d spoken the spell I needed to use. Make of the blood…

No, I didn’t even want to think the words for fear they’d do their job. I’d rather be lonely with my ghost. Crying for the stolen dream I could imagine as mine if the war had not intervened.

I fell asleep holding the golden orb.

I woke to a dark room and a warm breeze. The rise in temperature confused me. My nightgown suddenly constricted me. I pulled it over my head, dropping it on the floor. Now naked between the sheets, I felt wanton. I fingered the orb resting between my breasts, even warmer than the air.

I’d been dreaming of Jean Luc. I was sure of it. He’d been kissing me. Not the way Grigori had, not tentatively, not asking permission, but rather with a desperation as if he needed my kisses to keep him alive.

A cruel dream since he wasn’t alive and I couldn’t do anything to bring him back.

But you weren’t dreaming the kisses, the wind whispered.

“How long have you been here?”

I don’t know. Time isn’t real for me. But I loved watching you sleep.

I worried he’d seen Grigori kiss me.

“Were you here when I got home?”

I arrived when you put on the memento mori. I haven’t figured out how to get here without that pathway.

So he hadn’t seen the scene at the door.

“As long as you are here now.” I smiled.

I am.

His ethereal warmth stroked me, from my feet, up my legs, between my legs, around my hips, around my waist, up my back and then my neck and then, when I turned, around each breast.

“I want you to kiss me.” How brazen I was, asking for the embrace.

His lips lowered onto mine again as he kissed me, and I kissed him back, certain I was with a man, not a specter. Jean Luc brushed the hair off my face and kissed my forehead and then my eyelids.

Don’t open your eyes. If you keep them closed, you’ll be able to see me better.

“How are you doing this?”

You must stop asking. I don’t know. I only know that I want to be with you and that everything that’s happened seems less terrible when I am. All the guilt I feel is still there, but it’s as if your very presence is a forgiveness.

The war. There it was again. “You weren’t at fault.”

I might have prevented it.

“Other than by seeing the future? How?”

If I’d been smarter, I would have realized we’d been exposed for too long. That we should have sought shelter sooner.

I stayed quiet. What could I say about the actions he’d taken in battle? I didn’t understand how warfare worked; I could offer nothing but platitudes.

No, you offer me so much more. Solace, for one.

“Wait, I wasn’t talking out loud. You just read my mind.”

So I did. I’m sorry.

“That’s all right. But you said you wouldn’t.”

I won’t. But what’s bothering you? I can tell something is.

“So many things. For one, my great-grandmother thinks I’d be better off not listening to my mother and not developing my talents.”

What does she mean?

“My mother is a witch who developed her abilities here in Paris against my great-grandmother’s wishes. And I’ve inherited some of those same powers but haven’t developed them. They’re the reason I can communicate with you.”

I don’t want you to stop communicating with me.

“Neither do I.”

And I don’t want to stop kissing you.

I smiled.

You’re even lovelier when you smile.

“I don’t want you to stop kissing me either.”

His hands cupped my face as he kissed me. Not the gentle kiss of someone waking me up but a hungry and urgent pressure. The warmth against my lips.

I wanted more of it, more of Jean Luc. A man not of flesh and blood but of incandescence that suffused me.

He continued arousing me, and as he did, I became the gold that I worked with in the workshop and he the fire that heated me. His mouth was the blue-hot flame that moved up and down my arms and legs and torso and breasts and warmed my flesh, making it hotter and hotter. Melting me. Turning me into another form. I became a circlet of gold, reshaped, with a space for a gem. He would be my ruby, my jewel, in my center.

I writhed.

His warmth flooded the space between my legs; I squeezed them closed, tight, held him there. Released my grip for a fraction of a second and then held him there again. The most exquisite heat tickled me behind my ears, then down my neck, in the crook of my shoulder. Unable to remain still, I twisted and turned in delight. Feeling more. And more. And then felt tickling between my legs, and inside of me, and I couldn’t move fast enough or spread my legs far enough apart or press them tight enough together. I heard my name then, a whisper that moved inside of me as if his mouth were up against my cleft, and somehow the sound traveled up into my womb.

Opaline, Opaline, Opaline.

At once a plea and a promise. Too wrapped up in the sensations that his warmth created, I could only moan in response, not even sure I managed to repeat his name.

Reaching out, grasping for shoulders, for arms, I tried to enclose him, but my hands found no hold. For all its pleasure, this one-sided lovemaking frustrated me. I could not embrace, only be embraced.

“I need to touch you,” I whispered.

You are touching me, Opaline. You don’t feel me, but I feel you. Lie back, let me give this to you. It’s so much more than I could hope for.

He became the jeweler then, his kisses little flames licking my body, heating every inch of skin, twisting and turning me to his will, sending shocks coursing down my arms and legs. Bending me into his design.

On fire, my skin must have turned from pale to rose by now. Inside, the temperature of my blood must have risen to the melting point. He was kissing me and entering me and filling me up with rare, deep purple-red rubies, blood-red, pulsing with their own life, and my thighs spread wide for him and my back arched for him and I opened for him in a way I never could have imagined.

Jean Luc rocked me and caressed me and teased me with his heat, and for long, long minutes I just allowed him to give me all of this blue-hot orange pleasure as I pooled beneath him. Melting gold. Molten metal. Dripping with pleasure, stretching with delight and desire.

It certainly was never like this when I was with my young lover, stealing our time away from his shop at the Carlton, hiding on the beach at night, pretending at love. Never like this with Grigori in his halfhearted efforts to pleasure me.

This desperate lovemaking between two people who could not be together, who should be able to be together, who were defying science and logic to lock together in an embrace, exploded inside.

Opaline, Opaline, Opaline.

Jean Luc moaned my name as he left kisses on my lips, my breasts, inside my thighs, that surely were branding my skin the way we imprinted our jewelry with our maker’s mark. The backs of my knees and my ankles. And surely inside my body because waves of fire throbbed inside me. I had no choice but to give myself up to the heat. It was worth it to feel this burning passion, even if it meant I would be scarred for life.