I SAT IN ONE of the motel room’s two cheap armchairs wondering why the Millennium Revelation was turning me into some million-dollar silver-metal woman.
Well, maybe I was just a thousand-dollar one, given the current price of silver on the stock market.
Dr. Torres hadn’t had much explanation, except to say that the new “intertwining” with the bone wouldn’t have caused menstrual pain, but that she couldn’t recommend I ever have children, given the pressure that puts on the pelvis. Otherwise, I was fine.
The familiar had completely disappeared, unseen and unfelt. I figured it was hiding out among the plaits of my hair the kindly nurses had made.
Quicksilver sat on the floor beside me, my palm on his thick-furred wolfish head.
Ric and Quick had been waiting in Dolly for me and Helena to leave that last doctor’s office.
“Delilah, your hair,” Ric had said anxiously. “The braids. What about—?”
“Home, James,” Helena had cut him off. “A new hairdo can be a healthy distraction for a young woman.”
Ric got the idea fast.
“Love the look,” he said, and then drove us back to the Thunderbird Inn without comment, Quicksilver riding in what had become his doggy rumble seat. Leonard Tallgrass finally had found an occasion to get my dog back to me. Just in time.
I’d gotten out and, trailed by Quicksilver, unlocked the motel room door. When I turned back, I saw that the others had remained in the car.
“You relax here on your own for a while, Delilah,” Helena suggested. “I’m taking Ric for a drink.”
“Banished to the bar again?” he objected, his hopeful expression turning anxious.
I wanted to joke that I was the one who could stand being taken out for a drink, but Helena shut up her foster son with one tough-as-a-nail-gun look and the command “Not a word.”
Off they drove while she enlightened him about the bizarre state of my insides.
No one could stop Quicksilver from looking anxious, though. I ran my hand over his head, saying, “I know, I know. Just be patient.”
At least dogs didn’t need to have the messy facts of female anatomy explained to them.
Helena supposedly knew what stressed people required. I wasn’t so sure she did now. Was there anything worse than being stuck alone in a Wichita motel room feeling that alien spawn had set up shop in your very guts for some unholy reason? The past I’d been struggling, successfully, to put to rest had punched a literal hole in my very being.
Though this was summer, the room felt cold. I ran my hands down my chilled upper arms and over my clenched, denim-clad thighs. I rocked myself back and forth, recognizing the motion as a childish self-comforting ritual from the group homes.
Quicksilver’s warm furred side pressed against my legs, but my teeth began to chatter anyway. It wasn’t the temperature in the motel room, because the summer day was ideal, offering the rare but perfect Midwestern moments between winter heat and full summer air-conditioning, between mayflies and mosquitoes.
A faint purring drew my hands to a pair of dangling silver cat earrings suspended from a wire curved like spectacle frames over my ears.
At least the silver familiar had the smarts not to pierce anything on me at the moment. I tried to count my other “at least” blessings. At least my “rape” had been medical and institutional. At least what had been done to me without consent had been done to hundreds of thousands of other women by their own request. So I was not as alone as I felt. It’d probably hurt them too, but they’d known what to expect.
Quicksilver whimpered and rested his jaw on the chair arm, producing that “hang dog” look. Gosh, I didn’t want to bring anybody down with me. I was lucky I had people—and a dog—who cared to stand by me during this.
I thought about all the things I’d survived here in Wichita, and in spades in Las Vegas lately. Feeling sorry for myself had never worked. It was time to think, not feel.
What if, over the years … my body had turned the intrusive bit of plastic into something more useful? Something I really needed. Maybe it was a pre–Millennium Revelation “gift.” Maybe it was the source of my current silver talents: my ability to see things in mirrors and walk through them and reflective surfaces. Maybe it had even “grabbed” and created the silver familiar from Snow’s lock of hair as an external extension of itself. Maybe it had become my inner armor, my protector.
I had no idea how long I sat there in the demi-dark with the window curtains drawn, but eventually a knock came on the door.
I looked around. The perky patterned comforter was installed on the bed, so the maid had come and gone. Still shivering, I went to the door peephole.
I spotted a baseball cap with embroidered script and a rose on it, seen through enough gaudy coleus leaves and tiger lilies for a New Orleans funeral. Undoing the chain lock, I confronted a gawky delivery boy obscured by baskets of tissue and greenery.
I could now read the fancy script on the cap: Flowers ’n’ Bowers.
“Kin I put some of this stuff down, ma’am?” he asked. “It’s the whole Spa for a Day Super Package.”
I swept the door wide and stepped back.
He quickstepped to the table by the window and relieved his forearms of basket handles and his hands of the ambushing greenery and a tall bottle of champagne.
While he was setting everything upright so it wouldn’t fall over, he played eyeball-tennis with the occupants of the room. Since that consisted of the usual motel furnishings and Quicksilver and me, it didn’t take long.
“You just need to sign that you got this stuff, uh, ma’am. The charge is taken care of.”
He produced a receipt pad and a pen. An overbearing odor of roses was rising like swamp miasma. I hesitated to take custody of the lot.
“You, ah, alone here, ma’am?” he asked nervously.
“I’m not scared, if that’s what you mean,” I said, surprised.
“The champagne can be tough to pop. I kin jest get that, ah, started for you, if you want.”
I realized his roaming gypsy eyes were now concentrating on my figure.
“I can handle a champagne cork by myself,” I said. “Also, the dog is great at extracting things that are in my way.”
He nodded and gulped simultaneously, backing toward the door.
“Jest our friendly Flowers ’n’ Bowers super-service, ma’am. You take care now.”
I intended to, turning the dead bolt and restoring the chain lock as soon as his skinny ass was out of the way.
Meanwhile, Quicksilver was using his supersensitive nose on the array of baskets and audibly sniffing. I joined him in exploring our bounty.
The champagne was a no-name brand. I twisted the bottle’s wire basket open and managed to maneuver the cork out with a pop that made Quicksilver jump and growl.
Two stemmed plastic glasses hid among some potted bachelor’s buttons.
Everything was beyond cheesy, but whoever had sent this knew that any kind of bubbly right now would unravel the knots in my neck and shoulders as if they were made of satin instead of steel.
I gulped the first chintzy glassful of slightly sour champagne and poured another.
The showy flowers surrounding the potent posy of tea roses weren’t scented, so I set them on the dresser in front of the mirror. I didn’t linger to probe any images in it, including mine.
There was another bottle of bubbly, this one full of pink powder.
I imported it into the bathroom and took a long, foamy, pink bath.
By the time I got out, wrapped in a towel with my braids clipped atop my head, the safety chain was off its slide. I didn’t want to know who and how, but Quicksilver was obviously out on patrol and Ric was waiting on one of the plastic chairs. He’d taken off the visiting-social-services tie, and I liked the view through his top three open shirt buttons. Also his smile.
“Sometimes,” he said, “Mom-shrink gets way too lost in her head … and yours and mine. I owe her respect, but I don’t buy that my absence will make you feel better than my presence tonight.”
I was speechless. “She thought I needed to be alone here all night?”
“She thought you needed to be left alone,” he said. “Dios, Del. I came back to say you’re safe with me. We’re camping partners tonight, no more. I just want to be with you, mi virgen.”
“Virtual Virgin,” I corrected. “That’s … really noble, Ric.” I went to sit on his lap, my thick plaits tumbling to my shoulders as the savvy familiar slithered down into position as a slender ankle bracelet. “You responsible for the homey spa package, hombre?”
“Cheesy,” he admitted, “but—”
“Sweet,” I said, giving him a peck on the lips.
“And I do like the braids. Muy exótico.” He diplomatically neglected to mention that they evoked an ancient Egyptian wig and our second most dangerous, latest adventure.
“Mmm.” He nuzzled my neck. “You’re so warm and soft and scented.”
“You’re so warm and hard and drenched with virtuous lust.”
“I just want to comfort you, Del. Nothing more. I swear.”
“It’s not like you to fall short in the romance department, Montoya,” I drawled.
He seemed surprised, but my mood had peaked the moment he entered the room. All the nightmares of the last two days had shot into the distance like a fey maze. Mama Helena had been wrong and Ric right. I’d needed some pampering to ease my stress and now I was buzzed on cheap champagne and a fierce willfulness to be taken extreme advantage of.
“Look, Ric. What I was put through years ago was inexcusable, painful, and traumatic, but now I know the truth. I’d imagined a lot worse than an insensitive bureaucracy resorting to the sexual double standard.”
“Delilah, are you sure you’re all right with it?”
“Not … yet, but it has nothing to do with us. I’m supposed to be unfairly punished again? No sack time with you? I’m feeling like a new woman. Have you got the moxie to get me over on my back for the first time and crush me into the mattress with your manly needs?” I challenged before his lips hushed mine.
I could say he groaned, he growled, he rasped, he husked, but what he did was say nothing, just moved his lips to the sweet spot on my nape he’d made his signature start and stop of our erotic journeys. The moment they touched my damp skin I folded like a bad poker hand onto the trinket-laden bed. He was already there, and rolled me over on top of him.
“You taste so sugary, so salty, so sharp,” he murmured into my neck, “just sleeping partners for now, I swear.”
“With benefits,” I said, laughing softly until we were silent but not still, my lips glued to his neck scar, until he came and I fell asleep from emotional exhaustion and, my current BFF, cheap champagne, satisfied. There was nothing anybody had done to me in the past to stop me from being what I wanted to be in the future.
I AWOKE SLOWLY, still habitually lying on my right side, aware of dim light illuminating the bed. Ric was awake, watching me, his head braced on his elbow and hand, the soft light from the parking lot caressing the sharp lines of his forehead, nose, and cheekbones. He belonged on a twenty-foot-high pillar in my particular temple.
I looked down to see his other hand resting on my hip. My legs had scissored open while I slept and he’d pushed a leg between them. The sight of his face and our entwined bare legs set my pulse throbbing.
“Morning?” I asked.
“The middle of the night. Now shhh. I’m busy.”