Page 41 of Rainshadow

Flora looked back and forth between Sylvia and Ethan. “You’ve got to be kidding!” She was sputtering, furious, and most of all, embarrassed. “You can barely walk, much less ride a horse!”

“I wasn’t so sick when I sent for him,” she said, brushing past Flora to make her way into the barn. “And maybe I’ll get better. I’m certainly more motivated now.”

“But—” Flora cried, not knowing what to say.

Sylvia moved closer to her, so that Ethan could not hear what she said next. “That’s a fifty-thousand-dollar horse, Flora. Not a toy for a simpering horse girl.”

Flora felt like throwing up. She felt rage, utter humiliation, and betrayal, because Ethan, still smiling, seemed amused at the conflict. She looked at him, and he gave her a sympathetic look.

“Darling,” he said when she went to him. “Don’t let her get under your skin. She was so broken up over that last horse, whatever his name was.”

“Still,” Flora seethed, speaking through her teeth. They both watched Sylvia hobble through the barn door. “To let a woman who is barely able to walk buy a horse like that?—”

“I don’tlether do anything, Flora. She’s my partner. She manages my finances entirely.”

Flora was so shocked at those words she couldn’t even speak. Ethan seemed amused by that, too.

“I told you I couldn’t just leave her!” he said, chuckling.

“But she’s barely functional!”

“I think she’s rather more functional than you give her credit for.”

Flora realized she was being teased and simmered with frustration. She thought she had gained the upper hand with Sylvia, but now she wasn’t sure. She couldn’t return to being Sylvia’s supplicant.

She just couldn’t.

That night, she and Ethan slept together again. Now they were barely trying to hide it. He lingered downstairs after Sylvia went to bed, fingers tapping the table elegantly, watching Flora with a seductive intensity. Sylvia had watched them, their flirtatious glances and their affectionate touches, brushing against one another as they moved about the kitchen and then the dining room. Flora thought it would make her feel powerful, forcing Sylvia to watch them together, but the amused smirk on Sylvia’s pale lips, like she still knew something Flora didn’t, was driving her crazy.

“I love touching you,” Ethan growled later, his hands on her hips, thrusting into her from behind, her face pressed helplessly into a pillow. “You’re so young, so fresh.”

Fresh?

She looked over her shoulder to see him, his face twisted with pleasure, his lips peeling back to show his teeth. In the shadows of the dark room, they gleamed, sharp and threatening, and for a moment Flora felt like she was going crazy, crazy with need, crazy with frustration. She reached for herself, pulsed her hands, feeling more and more desperate for relief. She looked again andEthan’s face was serene, his mouth shut tight, a straight, serious line of concentration and he came. She did too, shuddering, feeling tears spring to her eyes at the release. Her feelings were so darkly confused, and she was so close, she thought, to getting what she wanted.

The next day, though, she woke up and went to the barn by ten to find Sylvia already there, saddling her new horse.

“I’ve decided to name him Mithras,” Sylvia said, looking at Flora with bright, mocking eyes.

“Oh, ok.” She wanted to say that “Mithras” was a stupid name, that she hated it, and a beautiful horse shouldn’t have a weird, made-up name. Instead she went to work mucking the stalls.

She watched when Sylvia took the horse into the arena for the first time. If she had been hateful toward Sylvia before that morning, seeing her on the new horse, so skilled and confident, so elegant, so beautiful, even in her diminished state, was like torture. She was, Flora knew, a master horsewoman, something she herself would never be. She had Ethan, though, didn’t she? She wanted to scream out “I’m fucking your boyfriend you stupid bitch! I won!” But of course she didn’t.

No. She only watched, her eyes narrow with hatred, as Sylvia danced around the ring with otherworldly grace, like the horse was not even a living, breathing thing, but a manifestation of grace and exquisite beauty. Sylvia, a light smile on her pale lips, seemed to be in a blissful dream.

20

Flora got the shock of her life the next morning. When she rolled out of bed, dressed in her new clothes, and stomped through the living room on her way to the barn, Sylvia, who never woke before ten, was sitting there waiting for her.

“I thought,” Sylvia spoke in the lingering dark of the morning, “that maybe there was a way we could both come out of this alive.”

Flora was frozen. She stood in the darkness of the room, gazing at Sylvia, startled and annoyed.

“What are you doing, Sylvia?” Flora said, a gasp contained in her voice. “Were you waiting for me?”

“I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said. “I listened to you, with Ethan, thinking you were so stupid, that I should, that maybe I could just go?—”

“Go,” Flora said forcefully. “Maybe he’ll give you some money. You can just?—”

---