The Black Train

she sighed in what could only be desire.

Collier felt he had stepped into a precious demesne, a place where desire was more than instinctive brain cells firing to compel reproduction. He was overjoyed to be in that special place—the first time, truly, in his life. But he also knew it was a place he did not deserve to stand in…

Her could feel her nipples go rigid against his fake Tommy Bahama shirt; he could swear he even felt his own nipples sensitize. Another hot, liquid sigh, and she pulled his mouth back to her, and sucked his tongue, inhaled his breath…

Her hand opened on his chest and she pushed back.

“Time to stop—”

SHIT! “I don’t want to,” he said, and tried to recaress her. But her opened hand remained firm.

She seemed disappointed and awkward. “Justin…I’ve only explained some of myself, not all. There’s stuff you don’t understand about me. I’m just the way I am, I can’t help it, and I don’t want to.”

Collier felt like a popsicle that had just been run over on Arizona asphalt. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “I want to know what you mean. I want to know everything about you.”

“It just wouldn’t be fair.”

“Fair? To who?”

“To you.”

The reply stunned him. Next, she was leading him by the hand back to the bench. “It’s too soon.”

“Okay, that’s fine,” he nearly pleaded. “I’m very patient—”

Her chuckle fluttered in the dark. “Yeah, right.”

I’m fucking crazy about you… “I can wait till it’s not too soon.”

“No, you can’t. Shit, in this day and age there’s probably no guy anywhere who’d wait that long…and you’re distracting me, anyway.”

“Distracting you?”

She turned on the bench, still grasping his hand. “You’re the one who wanted to hear my story. I didn’t want to tell you, but you insisted.”

“And you told me. It’s a great story, and I believe it. But what’s that got to do with—”

“My story’s not over,” came the abrupt information.

Damn it…“There’s more?”

“Everything I’ve told you until now is squat compared to the rest. Now. Do you want to hear it, or not?”

“Yes…”

So this was how she checked her boundaries. I don’t care, Collier thought. He was content to sit with her hand in his, their shoulders touching…that is, he was content, but the same wasn’t holding true for a certain part of his anatomy. Deal with it! Don’t be an asshole and piss her off…

“The stench from room two, like I was saying, disappeared so fast, I honestly don’t see how it could’ve been there. I must have imagined it.” You didn’t. Collier kept the correction to himself.

“And I found no trace of the old guy with the screwed-up nose, so I told myself that was my imagination, too. Shit, it happens sometimes. Tired, long day, hadn’t eaten much—it happens. No big deal, right?”

“Right.”

“But I told you, except for room two, the other rooms had their doors open, and the second-floor rooms on the stair hall all have balconies overlooking the garden, the courtyard, and then all that scrubland past it.”

“I know, it was the first thing I noticed about my room when I walked into it. So…what happened?”

For the recital’s entirety, Dominique had maintained a smooth, none-too-serious composure, as though she were fine with the likelihood of it all being imagination. Now, though—

Collier’s gaze on her face hardened.

It was akin to a Hollywood morph the way Dominique’s expression went dark. Her eyes, at once, looked troubled, and she almost stammered a few times. “In one second, there was—was—orange light, real bright —”

“Orange light? Where?”

“In the French doors right when I was standing at the doorway of the room you’re staying in.”

“Dominique, I don’t understand. Orange light?” Alarm. “Was part of the house on fire, or the fields?”

“That’s what I thought at first, but no, and then I thought I must’ve fallen asleep and woke up at the crack of dawn.” She paused. “But my watch said it was going on two in the morning.”

“So you went to the balcony, right? And looked out—”

A stifled nod. Was her hand shaking? “I went out the French doors, and saw that it was a fire, all right. And I heard a ringing sound, too. The entire backyard was lit up, and shifting. I could feel wafts of heat…”

Now something began to nag in Collier’s mind—

She spoke in front of her, not to him. “There’s an old Civil War-era iron forge out there. I don’t know if it’s still there but—”

“It is,” Collier spoke up. “I saw it the day I came. But Jiff told me it’s never used for anything but a barbecue nowadays, for holidays and parties.”

“Jiff wasn’t there, and this was no barbecue. Ore was being smelted in that thing. Every time the bellows pumped the orange light doubled…that and the intermittent sounds of a hammer made the whole thing feel maniacal. There’re several different chutes on the walls of the forge, and all that light and heat just poured out of them.”

Collier remembered the look of the thing, and the vents, one quite large. “What next?”

“There was a man down there, too, of course, but I couldn’t really see any details. He seemed to be working in cycles: pumping, hammering, pumping, hammering, like that. But every so often he’d disappear around the other side of the forge, and the light would go down some ’cos he wasn’t pumping.”

“Probably skimming slag or whatever it is they do.”

“He was pouring molten metal out of a little crucible,” she verified, “but I didn’t find that out till I got down there.”

Collier considered the scenario. “Must’ve been pretty scary.”

Another slow nod. “The whole thing was so crazy, I had to go out there. Somebody smelting iron in a bed-and-breakfast garden at two in the morning? You’ve got to be kidding me. I was freaked out, yeah, but I was also mad. I ran down there—”

Collier couldn’t help but anticipate. “And the guy was gone and the forge was cold.”

She nudged him. “Hey, I’m telling the story!”

“But am I right?”

“You’re dead wrong. By the time I got down there, if anything, the light was brighter, the air even hotter. The guy’d come back around, pumping the bellows and hammering something on an anvil, but now…I could see him…”

Was she doing it on purpose? Collier didn’t think so. He used the old line: “You sure know how to keep a jackass in suspense. Tell me. Who was the guy?”

She looked directly into his eyes, straight-faced. Now her hand was slick with sweat. “What did you think? It was a blacksmith—circa 1860. High leather boots, canvas pants, a slick rawhide apron. He was hammering a strip of metal, and alternately yanking the bellows chain. So I said, ‘Hey, what the hell are you doing?’ and I said it loud. But he didn’t hear me, just kept whacking away.”

“What did he look like, I mean, his face?”

“Big bushy mustache, and the skin on his face was like pitted leather. He wore this hat that was sort of like a leather cowboy hat but without the sides curled up, and the front flopped down. I yelled at him again, and he kept ignoring me. He walked back around the side of the forge and that’s when I saw him dipping the crucible into the vent. He took it out and poured it into a stone mold that looked like it had wax or something in it, and he did it very carefully. Then he picked the mold up with tongs and dunked it in a tub of water.”

Collier could feel the pulse in her hand pick up.