liked that we might get caught.” She eased forward, one hand on the front of his jeans. “I wanted to, kind of. I like being watched. It feels like that here, doesn’t it? Like the ghosts might be watching...”
“Nobody’s watching,” he snapped.
“There could be. You were here then. You met them. Maybe they know you’re back—maybe they can see us. I’m pretty intuitive, my mom always said so. Maybe I can call them.”
He caught her hand and pushed it away. “You might be the least intuitive person I have ever met.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Her head tilted to one side. Though there was a fighting spirit in the words themselves, her eyes were big and soft, head tilted again in that befuddled way, as if she couldn’t quite believe he meant to insult her.
Julian felt a rush of words surge up his throat, unstoppable and bitter as bile.
“It means that I couldn’t be less ‘into it’ if you paid me. If you were swinging a dick. If yours were the last pair of plastic tits on planet Earth and if yours was the last ass I could ever grab and if you were the owner of the last hole between the last pair of legs, I still would not be ‘into it.’”
Her face crumpled, as suddenly and completely as a child’s. Tears welled up at the rims of her wide-open eyes and rolled in wavy gray lines down her cheeks, bearing specks of glitter in their wake.
Julian raised his eyes to the ceiling.
“Why did you even bring me here?” she said.
He dug his car keys from the pocket of his jeans and held them out to her.
“No idea,” he said. “Go home. You can take my car.”
“I—I can’t drive your c-car. Where would I leave—” She teetered around the room, pulling on her clothes, hopping into a boot.
“It doesn’t matter. Go home.”
“How can I—”
“Get out,” he roared, and she snatched the keys from his hand and darted out the door. He heard her feet pounding down the hallway, and she was gone.
Julian stood for a minute looking down at the bed. He smoothed the covers, straightened the pillows and tucked the bedspread underneath. This wasn’t Celia’s bed, he realized now. Her room had looked much different from this, filled with candles and books, and her mattress sat right on the floor without a frame and with only an old door for a headboard. She had a piece of fine silk hung on the wall, embroidered with brightly colored birds sporting long tails that curled like bouquets of flowers at the ends. He had asked where she found it.
“A friend gave it to me,” she said. “This nice old guy who used to come in for coffee every afternoon—black, no sugar, no nothing. He liked to talk. He told me stories about the Blackbird, people he remembered from when he was young.”
That was her. That was Celia all over. He imagined her nodding gently, encouraging the old man’s nostalgia, revealing nothing about herself.
His throat ached. He couldn’t lie here in Celia’s room, where she’d lived and fucked and wept and died. The walls still smelled like her, that peculiar warm scent of her, that smoky vanilla mixture of sex and incense and Celia’s own sweet skin.
He went out to the hallway, down the row of doors. Four on each side, counting the one he’d closed behind him. A tiny hotel by anyone’s standards, but Celia had dreamed of it since she was a little girl. She and Rory and Eric had played here as children during the years when the hotel stood vacant, and Celia had fallen in love. He imagined her wandering down this hallway, her tawny hair made dark by the shadows, fingers trailing along the walls. She would have skipped down the curved staircase, her little feet pattering on the floor. She would have been humming, craning her neck at the pine trees outside the leaded windows. Would have laid her hand on this very banister and felt the smooth wood warm to her touch.
Later, after Eric had bought the place, they had stripped the pine floors and waxed them to a lustrous amber glow. Celia brought in low couches lined with pillows and blankets in rich colors and contrasting patterns and arranged them around the river-stone fireplace with a copper-sheathed coffee table at the center—a contribution from Rory, a nod to the hotel’s mining days. Everywhere there were candles and old brass lamps, dropping pools of golden light that flickered and danced when anyone walked by, and from the ceiling hung a chandelier made of elk antlers. But the brightest light came from the fireplace itself, and this was where they gathered every night after dinner, cradling cups of mulled wine or cold mugs of beer. Rory always sat nearest the fire, stirring at it lazily with a long green stick. Then Kate in the chair next to him, and Julian directly across. Celia would stretch out on the divan, facing the hearth, her long legs draped across Eric’s lap, her eyes sparkling with firelight.
Sometimes, rarely, Eric would bring Celia her guitar and she’d play them a song. She had a book of old children’s poems and had composed some simple melodies around them.
My age is three hundred and seventy-two,
And I think, with the deepest regret,
How I used to pick up and voraciously chew
The dear little boys whom I met.
I’ve eaten them raw, in their holiday suits;
I’ve eaten them curried with rice;
I’ve eaten them baked, in their jackets and boots,
And found them exceedingly nice.
But now that my jaws are too weak for such fare,
I think it exceedingly rude
To do such a thing, when I’m quite well aware
Little boys do not like to be chewed.
She was not particularly musical and the chords were uncertain, but her voice carried with it a sort of enchantment that held him frozen and breathless, hardly daring to blink. She had a slow, throaty drawl, a holdover from her father’s Cajun heritage, and she’d set the melody to a gentle waltz rhythm that rocked her body in small circles as she played. He remembered thinking that she should have been somebody’s muse, an artist’s lover, but had the misfortune to be born and raised among athletes.
He would have watched her for hours. But she’d see something in his face and she’d hesitate, pressing her fingers flat over the strings to silence them.
The fireplace was dark now, and the room had been redecorated. The velvet divan had been replaced by a leather sofa, so slick and firm that he almost slid out of it when he sat down. The side tables were ye olde lodge style, made of logs and twigs; a pristine iron coffee table had been sanded around the edges to make it look worn. Celia’s collection of local art had been replaced by matted nature prints in thick frames, and next to the door, a brass plaque declaimed no smoking in neat black letters. No copper bin full of logs, no scent of pine sap in the air—and, cruelest of all, the hearth had been fitted with an electric fire and a pile of fake ceramic logs.
Julian crossed his arms to warm himself. He hadn’t realized the hotel would be so different. In a thousand years
