Page 78 of Tempt

“Answer this letter,”he rasps, plunging inside her,“and I shall tell you more, and you shall know more, and we shall fuse worlds.”

“Me and you.”

“A wandering star.”

“And a wayward star,”she cries out.

He stills. Suspended above her, his body locks in place as if lashed by a whip.

The sudden break jolts Wonder out of her delirium. “Malice?” she heaves, gazing up at him. “Malice, what is it?”

His head plummets into the crook of her neck, then instantly lurches upward. He clutches her face, partly glaring, partly pleading as the embers dash from his eyes, leaving behind a surface cleansed of debris. Those aren’t the pupils of the demon she has come to know.

They’re the eyes of someone else.

She freezes as clarity stares back. Malice gazes at Wonder as if seeing her for the first time, or from a different angle, in a different slope of starlight.

“I remember,” he says.

20

Once the words are spoken, they cannot be unspoken. And while Malice should be relieved to utter them, and while Wonder should be relieved to hear them, they gawk at one another in turmoil.

I remember.

Attached to his announcement is a ligament of knowledge. They listen to the lingering margins of each syllable, a reverberation of sound permeating the room to its bones.

To say nothing of Wonder’s internal distress. The sight of his resurrected memory clearing the film in his eyes and peeling a layer from his visage should be a triumph. And it can be, depending on which recollections surface.

Or it can be a travesty, if other visions recover themselves.

Malice is still inside her.

Both he and that other boy are inside her. Truly, he’s one and the same, no longer separated by lost pictures or abstract sensations.

Wonder’s limbs remain knotted around his naked hips, which have long ceased their quest for that zenith of pleasure. Her palms grip his rear, her breasts tip against his torso, and their breathing labors. Strapped to each other like this, they shiver.

Wonder finds a stitch of time in which to muse. Did their nudity summon this turn of events? Is it felicitous? Is it by chance?

“How?” she queries, for once not trusting herself to unravel the answer.

Malice’s flummoxed expression lingers on her. His fingernails puncture the linens on either side of her head, the tips stabbing the mattress and creating slits. As if some innate power exists within him, or as if he just knows, he says, “Because I heard you.”

Is that it? Unlike his mortal self, he can hear her. So did this happen because he’d finally listened to her narrating aloud the scandals and desires of their past? Had that done it?

Had her verbal recitation triggered this resurrection, the writing and her voice working in tandem to activate the change? Had that combination become a magical force, thereby reaching its hand into the wellspring of Malice’s mind and yanking out the deepest roots?

It must be. After all, it’s the missing link between Malice and Wonder. It’s the one effort she’d made and failed at back then: communication.

Her, speaking the words. Him, absorbing them.

She ventures to touch the side of his face. On reflex, he twitches from the contact, so she withdraws, her hands landing carefully on his waist.

“What do you remember?” she asks.

“Everything,” he seethes, shoving out the response, getting the task over with.

The atrocity of his tone isn’t directed at her, but at the facts. He remembers everything, all that had happened during her attempt to woo him.

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