Under A Million Stars by Mindy Haig
“Do anything you like, Baby, my whole body is yours.”
And knowing she was going to use me to please herself made the ride back to my place interminably long.
We didn’t even indulge in the pretense of romance with a glass of wine. No. The minute the door was closed behind us Aziz was eagerly pushing the shirt from my shoulders. Her mouth was pressed to my collarbone as her hands worked at my jeans and she pushed me toward the bedroom. She pulled one of my ties from the tie rack and blindfolded me as she slid on top of me on the bed. All of my senses went into over drive. I could smell her, taste her, feel her like she was part of me. She took her pleasure slowly, but the sound had me trembling as her pitch rose and her hips ground in to me, driving me deep into her. My release, my satisfaction was so overwhelming that I thought I might still be shaking when the morning came.
But she lay in the bed beside me as the endorphins took hold and made my limbs heavy.
“What do you?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
“No. But you answer all my questions with that question. I just want to know something.”
“What I do is not entirely different from what you do . I sell a product. I have very high dollar clientele. I have to be the pretty face and the practiced voice. I play the game just as you do and I am very good at that game because I am a girl from the Bayou. I can read a man just as easily as if his thoughts were written on his face. I can know what he wants before he even knows he wants it. But the job is not my life. On my time, I do as I please.”
“What’s your real name?”
“You ask too many questions William,” she said as she stroked my cheek and used whatever the magic was that she had to make me sleep.
And in the morning she was gone.
8.
Twenty-two days.
Twenty-two days it went on. Aziz would call and I would drop everything.
Everything.
I didn’t think about this thing we had being love. It was definitely lust. It was absolutely an obsession. Just As I had completely given myself to the job, I gave myself to her. She was all I thought about, all I wanted and I wanted her every moment. But it was more than just sex, well for me it was more. There was a closeness, a tenderness in those moments when just our hands met or she ran her fingers through my hair, that I longed for, that I needed. I don’t know if she needed that, she never answered my questions and I never pushed because I didn’t want to push her away.
I’d even begun to like to hear her call me William.
I asked her to accompany me to the big holiday soiree my company was hosting. I know she wanted to turn me down, the words were right there on her perfect lips, but whatever she saw upon my face at the moment she would have said no changed her mind. And I was thankful and stupidly optimistic that she was also beginning to think of what we had as something like a relationship.
I don’t know what my brain was thinking really. I had never been in or wanted to be in a relationship. I guess I just wanted her to want that with me.
So it was the Saturday before Christmas, the extravaganza was scheduled to begin at seven and she said she would meet me there. I waited nervously out front. Part of me thought she would stand me up. But she didn’t. She was drop dead gorgeous in a cocktail dress slit so high on her leg that every man in the room knew heaven was just beyond what could be seen.
She held my arm. She oozed charm and sophistication. She played the game better than any man I have ever seen. Maybe it was that power she called VooDoo and she really did have the ability to see inside all of us.
She was with me.
She was mine, but really I was hers. She was the one in control.
She called me Liam for the first time. And the last.
I took her home with me. We drank wine we danced slowly to jazz music on the stereo I painstakingly assembled just for this moment. She kissed me the way no other woman ever had and my heart pounded in my chest. What we did that night was not like any of the other nights we’d spent together.
We lay there satisfied. Aziz had her cheek pressed to my chest and she was stroking my cheek as I lay gazing at her.
“It’s Aloysia,” she said quietly, lifting her head to look into my eyes.
“What?”
“My name. It’s Aloysia.”
“It’s beautiful. Why don’t you use it?”
“It’s personal, Liam. It’s who I really am. It’s all the things that I keep hidden.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
She nodded and lay back down.
And that was the last time I ever saw her.
I searched that city. Every restaurant, every night club, dive bar and hole in the wall. I asked every bartender, waiter and valet if they knew her, if they’d seen her. I could hardly do my job because every restaurant I sat in I just scanned the place praying for a glimpse of those legs, of that long hair, a whiff of that perfume or the sound of her laugh.
And each night that I went home to my empty apartment, I freaked. The bed, the memories, everything in the pace was touched, tainted with those three weeks and the woman who stripped away my facade, the character I built of myself and left me exposed and alone.
Maybe it was only ever supposed to be lust and I thought it was more because I wanted it to be more. I was too used to getting what I wanted.
Everything I thought I wanted was empty when she was gone.
Aloysia.
* * *
“Did you just tell me a story based on a Disco song?”
“Yes,” I laughed, “but it’s your favorite disco song, and really I guess it’s more of an amalgam of songs.”
“How did you know that was my favorite?” she asked with a smile as she stroked my hair.
“I know so many things about you,” I admitted softly. “I listen to everything you say, even things you don’t say with words.”
“You would be Liam in that story if I walked away?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if I could walk away. Tell me something dark, something cruel. I want to hear about when it isn’t love or lust, when it’s something worse.”
“Why? Why do you want to think about the dark side of life?”
She shrugged. “I guess maybe as an affirmation that we are more than pain. I want to hear it and know for sure that it isn’t us, it isn’t this story that we are living.”
“I’m not sure I can tell a story like that, I can’t think dark thoughts about you.”
“You see that really tiny, remote star, way over there?” she pointed. “It’s that star. It’s so far out on the fringe that it can hardly be fathomed.”
“I dropped my chin. If that is what you want, I’ll try.”
“You always try for me. I don’t know if you know what that means to me.”
* * *
THE DARKNESS
THE LOOK:
He has that look in his eyes again.
Those eyes.
Eyes like ice, cold and cruel, that house a look that is rage and lust, a concoction always on the verge of boiling, a dangerous chemical reaction ready to explode at any moment. He is beautiful and terrifying at once.
And one day he is going to kill me. I know that.
So why can’t I just walk away?
He’s a drug and I’m an addict.
His hands are never gentle, but he kisses like the glory of his soul depends on sucking the life out of me. I can’t breathe. The pleasure is brutal, so violent. I need to feel him inside me even though he finds joy in causing me pain. How cruel is nature to hide pure evil behind such a beautiful facade?
I know I only have a moment to pretend that I don’t see him and get to safety.
Is there any place that is safe?
If he wants what he always wants, he will take it. Privately, publicly, it does not matter to him. When that look reaches his eyes, he sheds his humanity. He is a
I should run. I should run right now. The last bruises are still tinged green and yellow on my skin. The cuts are still lines of dark dried scab. Perhaps the police can protect me. But I can feel him.
I am sick.
I know I am because I’m still here justifying the pain even as I wonder if he has that knife in his pocket or if he has something worse this time. I should be trying to preserve myself. I know when he loses himself he would kill. He has no conscience, no internal voice to warn him.
And even though I can practically see my death at his hands, a ridiculous thought flits through my warped mind: am I the only one? Are there others he does this too?
Suddenly, I am jealous.
He is mine.
I want to walk over there and slap him hard across that pretty face. His rebuttal would be vicious, but public, right here where all these strangers would see that he belongs to me...
My thoughts are cut short.
He’s seen me. He’s looking right at me.
He’s coming....
* * *
“No! Stop! I don’t want to hear anymore. I don’t want to know what he’s going to say. I was wrong! I don’t want this to be one of our stories. I can’t think of you, of us, like that! I just can’t!” she cried.
“Shhh, it’s okay, Baby,” I whispered, holding her tight to me. “I don’t want to tell that story. I don’t ever want to think about what we have being anything but true love because that’s what it is to me.”
“I want that true love. I want the happily ever afters. Please, tell me something else, something full of hope.”
“Okay, okay.”
* * *
Cybilla
I:
“Will you be here in the morning?”
“You know I won’t. I can’t.”
I threw my arm across my eyes, partly to hide the disappointment I knew was visible upon my face, partly to avoid looking at her with the desperation I knew she could see. “Are you ever going to tell me or should I pretend this is all still just a dream.”
“Oren, what you want is not possible.”
“You told me once that it had been done.”
“One time, Oren!” she said, exasperated. “One time in all the history of man has it been done! Once! Do you not understand that you ask the impossible?”
“One man completed the task, therefore it is not impossible,” I answered stubbornly.
“You frustrate me so!”
“Who was he?” I asked, rolling to my side to face her. I was angry, more hurt than angry really, but enough so that I could overlook the beauty, the simple perfection beside me. I did not gaze into her eyes, I did not long to kiss her mouth, I just wanted my answer, because without it, I could never keep her.
“I don’t know who he was,” she whispered as she ran her delicate fingers over the rough stubble on my cheek. “I don’t even know if he was real or if that is just a romantic tale we tell.”
“Now your just saying that,” I said rolling away from her and off my bed. “If you don’t love me, then go and don’t come back, but don’t lie to me.” I reached for my guitar where it stood beside the window. I sat on the bed with my back to her and let my fingers play upon the strings. I knew she could not resist the music, and yet, I didn’t play for her. I played because it was the only thing that soothed the hurt inside me.
She slid close behind me, rested her chin on my shoulder and pressed her cheek to my face. It was a long moment that the music filled the space around us before she spoke. “Oren, you know that I love you. You know that it is more than that. You are the only man who has ever loved only me. I do not know the place or the task, I only know that once you start this quest, once you pledge your intention, I will have to leave you. And I fear beyond all else that I will never see you again.”
“Why do think that?”
“Because none have ever returned to me.”
I set the guitar down and pulled her to me on my bed. “How many have tried?”
“Three.”
“What became of them?”
“They died,” she whispered.
“Was Quentin Gallagher one of them?”
She shook her head. “Quentin couldn’t do it. He wanted to, he wanted it so badly he vowed his intention. But he was only a man of words, Oren. He would never be able to find the gateway. His vow meant my departure and he went mad with grief. He wrote haunting stories about his loss, he made his fortune, but I do not think that success brought him any joy,” she sighed. “I did not love him the way I love you. Leaving him was not...”
“It’s a gateway.”
She sighed. “You hear only the things you want to hear, Oren.”
“I hear everything you say. I know the risk. But I am willing to die for the chance to live a real life with you, and if I can’t have that, if I am not man enough for the task, I might as well be dead anyway.”
She sighed. “Do not say the words tonight, Oren. Give me tonight to hold you in my arms.”
“If you aren’t here when the sun comes through my window, I will shout my intention to all the world.”
“Kiss me goodbye then, my love.”
“No. My kiss is a promise that I will bring you back.”
II:
She was not there when I awoke, nor did I expect her to be, but that never stopped me from asking. I reached over and took the picture frame from my bedside table. I traced the the delicate lines of her face with my finger and imagined sweeping her dark hair from her brow. I lay back in my pillow and remembered the very first time she appeared in my dreams. I was only a boy of fifteen, but I thought I was a man. My only love until that time had been music, but I suppose that is the reason this was possible at all.
...
Fate works in its own unique way. For me it was a story I had to read for an English class. It was a short piece in rather large volume of works by a man named Quentin Gallagher.
Gallagher had a knack for giving his stories very potent one word names, names that invoked a specific feeling. This particular one was called Dismantled. It was a dark and frantic tale of a painter who’d lost his vision and could not find satisfaction in his work, and his restless discontent drove him mad.
Needless to say, I was not interested in that story at all. In fact, as a musician, it really sort of irked me. Perhaps it was because some small part of me acknowledged how easily a person with such a gift could find himself in that situation, more likely it was because I was a pompous boy and I thought that could never happen to someone who was truly talented. Anyway, I read it because I had to, and scoffed at his hardship. I was glad to reach the ending, the story was frustrating and I was ready to throw the book down.
Until I glanced at the title on the next page.
Ardor.
As I said, I was a bit cocky, arrogant maybe. I considered myself something of a wordsmith. I wrote my own lyrics, so I was poetic in a sense. But the word just jumped out at me with all it’s implications: fire, fervor, passion.
‘If only you could have seen her.’
That single sentence seemed to call out to me. I read. I finished the story and sat dazed with desire for a woman I couldn’t even accurately describe. The writer captured me in his raw need for this woman he could not have.
I immediately read it again. I drank in every word. I felt every pain from a heartbreak that had to have been real, but likely happened nearly a hundred years before I was born. It did not dawn on me at the time how remarkable it was that the preceding story, which was most assuredly born of this same loss, kept me stubbornly detached, while this tale threatened to suffocate me in emotions my youth did not own.
His final words still echo in my mind: ‘I made a vow that haunts me. My muse gone to the place I cannot follow.’
I sat looking at the ending for a long time. Then I did what I
I did not know that sleep had taken me, because when the dream came, I still sat on the floor playing the tune my heart sang. It should have been obvious, I mean, again, I was a fifteen year old boy. I’d never had a girlfriend and yet there she lay, on her stomach across my bed.
Her chin rested in her palm, her face was just beside mine and her soft breath tickled my ear. She reached out and stroked my hair and I leaned into her touch as though I’d been expecting it.
At last I damped my strings and turned to face her.
“That was lovely, Oren Gale,” she said.
I sat mute. Dark hair shimmered as though each strand had been coated with the evening sky and the stars woke with each tiny movement. It framed a perfect face; a gentle oval with just a slight point to her chin. Long lashes curled away from irises like the ocean on a picture postcard and she smiled the pearl white of moonlight as I hungrily devoured each image my mind made of her.
“Did you like the story?” she asked.
In that moment my dazzled brain tried frantically to make some connection to this girl that still lay upon my bed. Surely I must have known her from school, how else could she have known about the assignment? “No.” I admitted. “I didn’t like it at all. The painter just gave up on his work, on himself, on all he was...”
She began to laugh a little as she sat up and criss-crossed her legs beneath her. “Not that story, my love, the other one.”
I was looking up at her from my seat on the floor or perhaps I was kneeling in reverence, but she was otherworldly. “How did you know about that? Who are you?”
“It’s getting late. I have to go.”
“Go? You just got here. Wait, how did you get here? Why are you here?”
She smiled. “You called me, Oren.”
I shook my head in denial, but she pointed at my guitar and said; ‘the music has its own