Everlasting Bad Boys (27 page)

Justin sighed and let her go. “It was real.”

“Come on,” she said. “It was not. Just tell me I’m not going crazy. That’s all I need to hear.”

“No, you’re not going crazy.”

“Well, then. I guess you fucked my brains out.”

He shook his head. “Ugly phrase. Never liked it. Didn’t do it.”

“Okay, I know when I’m being humored.” She pushed the covers aside. “What’s for breakfast? I gotta get out of here, get home, and get changed.”

Justin rose so she could get up. “No rush. I told the receptionist we were going out early to scout a sign site, and that we would be in late. Let her do the explaining.”

“We can’t come in at the same time, Justin. People will know.”

He studied her for a long moment. “You may be right. Go look in the mirror.”

“Tell me what I’m going to see. Pouty, kissed-up lips? Rosy cheeks?”

He nodded.

Beth rose and dragged a sheet from the bed to serve as a robe. Uninhibited as the sex had been, the light of day still demanded a little modesty. She let a couple of yards of sheet trail after her like the train on a wedding dress, and it wound around the doorjamb when she went into the bathroom.

She peered into the mirror. Sure enough, she looked like she’d been kissed, good and hard and often. No surprise there. Her eyelashes were glumpy with leftover mascara and her lids were puffy. Her hair was a hopeless snarl. It was kind of funny, though, that she also looked happy and satisfied and womanly. Beth gave herself a scrunched-up, screwy little smile.

“See it yet?” Justin called.

She stretched her chin out, looking for a hickey on her neck. The skin was smooth and unmarred. “See what?”

A flash of moving light on her face caught her eye. She tried to focus on it, but it was small and kept moving. To her cheek. To her forehead. Shimmering. The colors in it kept changing.

Beth saw Justin standing behind her in the mirror. He nodded. “Full disclosure,” he said. “I’m made of light. It seems to be catching.”

Beth whirled around and the train of sheet caught on the doorjamb tightened all the rest of it and made her lose her balance. She fell into his arms.

Justin held her, looked at her ruefully and dropped a kiss on her nose. “It wasn’t a dream, Beth.” Right before her eyes he started turning colors again. Glowing. He felt just the same. Big and warm and strong. But he wasn’t the same. She pummeled his chest. It didn’t echo and he wasn’t hollow. She stopped and looked up into his eyes. They were turning an otherworldly shade of blue, little by little.

“Explain!” she shrieked.

“Like I said, I’m made of light.”

She was willing to believe it by now. He had stood stoically in the bathroom while she did her damnedest to beat him up, changing colors on her again and again. When she’d scratched at him, trying to draw blood, he’d glowed red and his eyes had flashed.

Beth had bagged it at that point. She’d run into the living room, collapsed into the sofa and curled up into a ball of misery. His gentle and very real caresses had made her uncurl eventually.

“I wanted to come to earth. The stratosphere was kind of boring. Nothing to do but wave at Swedes and Inuit walrus-hunters and a couple of Canadians now and then.”

“How did you end up in New York?”

Justin shrugged. “It’s pretty fucking bright. Easy to blend in.”

“So’s Vegas.”

“Yeah, but who wants to go to Vegas? The whole city smells like an ashtray. And I don’t like to gamble.”

“Gotcha.” It did make sense. She hated gambling herself.

“So, I zoomed around in the skyscrapers for a while. This was a few years ago. Lit up a few new ones that hadn’t been turned on yet, just for fun.”

Beth looked at him curiously. “Is that you?”

“What?”

“When the spire of the Chrysler Building switches on or the Empire State Building turns different colors, is that you?”

Justin smiled. “I wish. No, lighting designers do those buildings. And I guess one of the building crew gets to flip the switch. No, that’s not me.”

Beth had a point to make but it was kind of escaping her. What he did do was enough to boggle anyone’s mind. Oh, yeah. It came back to her. “But that’s not me. I may have caught a little piece of your rainbow but I’m still only human. While you’re zooming around in the sky, I’m on the sidewalk, just being ordinary. Walking around with the pigeons.”

Justin looked interested. “Hey, why is it that New York pigeons hardly ever fly?”

“Because they can’t get off the ground with a whole bagel in their beak,” she snapped.

He laughed. “Good one.”

Beth didn’t know whether to cry or howl or what. “I wish I could fly,” she said all of a sudden. “I’d be outa here in a heartbeat.”

He gave her a sad look. “Don’t say that. It’s not that big a deal. By my standards, you’re the lucky one. I wanted to be inside a real body. I was doing too much zooming around the universe, if you really want to know.”

“Doing what, exactly?”

“Causing trouble and raising hell. Joyriding on comets. Kinda got old after a while. I didn’t have anyone to do it with.”

“Oh.”

Justin slumped down on the sofa, looking unhappy, and didn’t say anything more for a little while.

What a trip. Even a man with superpowers who traveled at the speed of light—who was light—was just a great big baby when he didn’t get his way. “Sulk if you want to.” Beth got up, grabbing at the sheet. “I’m going to take a shower.”

She went back into the bathroom and looked very, very hard at herself, naked, all over. The moving spot of light seemed to have vanished. Good riddance.

She turned the shower on full blast and stood under the hot, pulsing jets of water, hoping it would wash away all trace of her contact with him.

Then she began to cry. The shower washed away the tears. She didn’t want that, not at all. His touch, his lovemaking, his born-yesterday eagerness—born yesterday. From what he’d just told her when they sat on the sofa, it was literally true. And she had to go and practically fall in love with him. She bawled like a baby. From what she remembered of the properties of light, he could be born yesterday and live forever. It was everlasting. He was everlasting.

She was not.

But there was something about him that she had to have. They’d worked together, and been pals; they’d slept together, and now they were lovers. No matter the circumstances, she felt different around him. Brighter. Her heart felt genuinely happy for the first time in a long while. It wasn’t just thudding along, it was really beating.

Well, she resolved, as she toweled off, she was going to enjoy this as long it lasted. When she came out of the bedroom to find him, she was dressed in a shirt of his that went down to her knees.

Justin had gotten dressed while she was in the shower and was pottering around the kitchen. He looked at her and ventured a smile.

“Not mad at me anymore?”

She shook her head. “I want some coffee. And more explanations.”

“You want milk and sugar with your explanations?”

“No, I take mine straight up.” Beth eased on a high stool and leaned on the counter. “First of all, where’d you get the body?”

He poured two cups of black coffee and pushed one over to her.

“Friend of mine at MIT. Brilliant guy but a serious wacko. I used to hang out with him when I was in a photon state. But I’ll explain that later.”

Beth narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

“I just want to begin at the beginning.”

“Okay.”

“Beth, you have to understand that light takes a lot of forms. And humans can only see a small fraction of it. Being in a body and having a brain is really new to me. A whole different set of rules applies.”

“Uh-huh. I think I understand.”

“It’s not like I only wanted to roam around the galaxies, you know.”

She shot him a not entirely sympathetic look. “Poor you. No comets and UFOs and asteroids to play with.”

Justin sighed. “You know, when you said you loved comic books and superheroes, I thought you’d get what I was all about, if it ever came to that.”

“I do. In my book, you’re not a hero.”

He drank half his coffee in one go. “Maybe I’m not. But I felt like I needed to be contained. To be pure light is just so—so amorphous.”

“Explain.”

“Sometimes I’m wave energy that no one on earth can see—no one human, anyway. I’m not so sure about cats.”

Beth thought of old Freddy and how he stared at nothing for a long, long time. “You could be right about cats.”

“Who knows? Anyway, getting back to what you were asking about, sometimes I was a sunspot or rays of sunlight that hit the earth.”

“Which did you prefer?”

Justin thought it over. “It was kind of cool being sunlight. Every woman who turned her face to me got a kiss and didn’t know it. The office chicks grabbing a few rays before they had to get back to their cubicles. The nice old grandmas who just dug being warm and outside. The teenagers with all that glossy hair I could shine on. Swinging, bouncing. And I helped out on a lot of modeling shoots, of course.”

“Did you like the models?” Beth asked, disliking the jealous edge in her voice.

Justin shook his head. “They don’t do anything for me. Too skinny. They complained that the lights made them sweat.”

“Was that you?

He gave her a sheepish look. “I got into big lights sometimes. On photo shoots and movie sets. Not table lamps or anything.”

“I see.”

“Could we rewind this discussion?”

“Sure. Let the sun shine in.”

Justin gave her a bad-boy grin. “Let me explain. I could shine on beautiful girls on the beach, get them to roll over. Glistening butts. Lotioned-up boobs. The more I shone, the creamier they got. It was making me insanely horny. But that was as far as I could go.”

“Right. Got it. You know,” she hesitated, looking at him with a little more respect, “sometimes when I was sunning myself I could swear the warmth felt like an invisible hand moving over me.”

“Yeah,” he said with satisfaction. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

“And when the clouds got in between it used to make me really annoyed,” Beth added.

“Then it would have been time for a cloud smackdown. I always tried to dissolve them. Or ask my best friend, Wind, if he wanted to move them along.”

“And did he want to?”

Justin lifted up both hands in a who-knows gesture. “Wind does what he wants. If what you want coincides with that, then count yourself lucky. Know what I mean?”

“I don’t know him. So, no.”

“Depended on what he was up to. You know, if he was playing with summer skirts in Chicago or making a sarong blow open in Tahiti, then he wouldn’t bother.”

“The two of you are double trouble for womankind.”

Justin eased onto a stool next to her. “Maybe. You’re cute. Come here often?”

“Once might be enough.” She looked into his eyes, which were plain blue again. He slipped a hand under the part of the shirt that covered her thigh and caressed her there, moving up but not too far up.

He came close enough to nuzzle her neck, and she let him. When he raised her head, she’d turned her face to catch a kiss. He gave her one, slow and deep and easy and lightly flavored with coffee. Then they bumped noses and he smiled at her, the dimple flickering in his cheek like he wasn’t sure she was going to smack it off him or not.

The smile stayed where it was, though.

God, she could love a guy who was sunny in the morning, instead of grumpy and foul-breathed—oh, fuck me, she thought. How ironic that she’d found him at last.

“Could I have more coffee? And a croissant, if you have one.”

“Blackberry jam, or strawberry? How about honey? You look good in my shirt.”

“Thanks,” she said, fluffing out her nearly dry hair. “I’ll try not to get jam on it. I’ll take strawberry.”

“I don’t care if you do mess up my shirt. I want you to be happy and I’m an easygoing guy.”

“You and Wind both,” she said. “Let me guess. He, like you, fell to earth once upon a time. What name does he go by?” She was beginning to enjoy this. It beat reality, at least for a while.

Justin went about making her breakfast, getting out butter and the jam, and putting a pat of one and a spoonful of the other on a plate. He took out a croissant from a bakery bag—it looked like a real one, with multiple buttery layers and fragile flakes—and put it in the microwave on a paper towel to warm up for a few seconds. Then he leaned across the counter to kiss her again.

“You’re so pretty in the morning, with no makeup and your hair off your face. I can’t help myself. So…where was I? Oh yeah, he decided to go by Windham Devane—” He stopped talking when the microwave beeped.

He took out the croissant and slid it onto the plate, handing it to her. “Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t always about chasing women for Wind. Sometimes he was at Birdland with old J.T. Carten when J.T. was playing the saxophone, giving him the extra breath for cool grooves. Sure worked for him. Women just have to hear good music that makes their bodies move and they’re, like, all over a guy. Music gets them way down deep, in a secret place. So Wind was getting something I couldn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“You ever see the sun in a jazz club? They’re like caverns. Most of those guys don’t even get out of bed until nightfall.”

“You have a point.”

“So I could hang with Wind during the day but I was pretty much limited to the great outdoors.”

“Hard to believe that a good-time guy—” she stopped in midsentence—“or a good-time being or whatever the hell it is you are, didn’t go out at night,” Beth said.

“I just didn’t. No chick was going to throw her leg over a lamp, if you know what I mean. And I didn’t have a body then.”

Beth giggled.

“Anyway, when J.T. sat out a set, Wind could make his sax moan and whisper and cry just like he did—it was emotional, not just physical.”

“Got it. The women went wild for him. You were frustrated.”

Justin stole a bite of her croissant and dipped it in the jam, then ate it thoughtfully.

“He and I discussed getting our own bodies, but that wasn’t easy. I hadn’t met up with the MIT guy yet, so we figured we had to wait for the right ones. And they had to be unoccupied but not dead.”