Page 33 of Hounded: Ashes to Ashes

I wasn’t strong, but I could hold him like this. Skin on skin in the soapy water, I kissed his cheeks, his shoulders, and the curve of his neck. I put my lips on every part of him I could reach and reveled in the way he arched into my touch.

I wanted to never let him go. Even a momentary break of contact felt like it might be the end of this fantasy. This dream. If my sleep-deprived mind had managed to hallucinate Loren’s return in such detail, I would find a way to stay awake forever.

But it felt real. Real enough that I finally worked my way around to breaking the pervasive quiet, “Sully fixed me.” My fingers brushed along Loren’s jaw, tickled by the scruff that was just long enough to be soft. “I think we fixed everything,” I murmured.

My memory was restored, and Loren’s eternal servitude had ended. We could be together in a way we’d never been: wholly, completely.

When I grazed the side of his throat to where the thick steel chain used to be, a smile tugged at my mouth.

“You’re free, baby. Can you believe it?”

He reached back and cupped his palm to my face, and I tipped my head into his hand. My mind swam with recollections of this closeness, this intimacy. The scope of it was vast, and my brain stretched trying to contain it all.

We’d shared hundreds of tender moments and more than our share of firsts—words, kisses, hugs—, but one first occurred to me more vividly than the rest.

Manhattan, New York

February 1st, 1923

Snow blanketed the ground and piled up to our ankles where Loren and I stood at the foot of the lonely grave. He usually came here alone, and I felt like an intruder watching him bend to lay a bundle of flowers at the base of the headstone. The flashy red blooms were stark against the field of white, and I thought it a shame that something so beautiful was wasted on the dead.

I wasn’t sure why he invited me. Rather, why he hadn’t refused when I asked if I could join him. I was grateful enough to be included that I bit back the questions I’d had since we walked through the cemetery gates. His family had passed years ago, leaving him as alone in the world as I was, and I expected to be checking up on their final resting place.

But there were no Morettis here. Instead, one Jonathan Abernathy. The dates beneath his name showed him to have died a year ago, shortly before I met Loren.

Birds lit in the nearby trees, flapping their wings like rustling leaves. They chirped and chittered, as restless as I was shifting side to side and fussing with the flat cap that kept my curls in check.

Loren straightened and smoothed the wrinkles out of his trousers. For ten months, he’d been my flat mate. He was away from home more often than not, working long days at the automobile factory and venturing out most nights. My inquiries about his comings and goings were met with succinct replies and excuses I didn’t quite believe, but I enjoyed his infrequent company. He had a calming presence, and he listened while I prattled for hours about Max Ernst making the move from dadaism to surrealism, and how I thought I might like to learn to paint.

The cold nipped at my fingers, and I tucked my hands into my coat pockets. Loren didn’t so much as shiver, even when the wind whipped his long dark hair around his cheeks. He simply stood, motionless as if he were another statue in the graveyard keeping vigil.

I read the epitaph again. Jonathan H. Abernathy. Beloved husband and father. Passed from this world at fifty-six. Too old to be a paramour, too American to be a relative.

“Who was he to you?” I asked.

“A friend,” Loren replied.

I tucked my chin into the folds of the wool scarf wound round my neck. If I’d learned anything in the past ten months, it was that Loren was content with quiet, and I was eager to fill it. But I was more determined to wait this out. To prove that I could be calming, too, and that I could listen, even if all there was to hear was silence.

Another few minutes dragged by. I glanced at Loren’s stony profile and tried not to think about how handsome he was. Whether in vests and slacks or grease-smeared coveralls fresh from the factory, he managed to be enticing yet wholly unaware of his looks or the inordinate amount of attention I paid to them.

He paid attention to me, too, though. He knew my favorite meals, brought home the latest issues ofThe Art News, andeven took me to the Brooklyn Museum once or twice. He didn’t seem to care much about the exhibits, but he tailed after me as I darted from one canvas to the next, studying the brush strokes and reading the plaques aloud for him and any passerby to hear.

I studied the art like I studied him now, tracing the slope of his nose and the fullness of his lips while wondering what it would be like to kiss him.

My hands fisted in my pockets while Loren’s hung at his sides, apparently unbothered by the chill. Would he be unbothered if I touched them? Caught them up in mine?

I should have been somber, surrounded by corpses and miserable winter, but my insides were aflutter. It was like I’d completely forgotten the reason we were here—not that I’d truly known it in the first place.

We were already standing close, but I ventured nearer, pulling my hand out of my pocket and sliding my fingers between Loren’s long, lithe ones.

Our palms barely touched before Loren jerked back as if he’d been burned.

He faced me. The grave was forgotten, and all signs of sorrow had fled him, leaving his expression hard and unforgiving.

“W-we’re in mourning.” I gestured to the grave. “I’m… I’m comforting you. Because you were sad.”

He looked the farthest thing from comforted. In fact, he appeared profoundly unsettled as he glanced around the cemetery, checking for onlookers or eavesdroppers to our private moment.

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