#fractured light

Kala thought about her cluster, now scattered to their home countries except for Riley, Will, Nomi and Neets, who were still London, dealing with the aftermath of Wolfgang’s extraction. Sun was the last to leave Kala, her parting gesture a remarkable strong hand placed over Kala’s fist.

I take everything I'm feeling, everything that matters to me... I push all of it into my fist, and I fight for it.

Kala knew a fight was coming, and her biggest adversary lay, weak with torture and self-loathing in the master bedroom of her Parisian flat.

She sipped a cup of strong coffee on the paint-chipped balcony, shivering in her pajamas. The black silk pant-set was much more demure than what she would wear in the heat of Bombay, but she found Paris to be much colder than she’d imagined though it was already spring. She’d taken to wrapping herself in a bright pink comforter to keep away the early morning chill as she continued to hold her vigil over Wolfgang.

He was awake now but he neither called out to her nor made any attempts to move; in fact, he had barely spoken to her since they’d arrived. It was clear that he wanted to ease into the day on his own. She understood this. Privacy was an illusion with sensates, connected as they were but she could pretend to give him space. To let him be alone with the tumult of his feelings, as long as they did not carry him away. That she would not allow.

She rose when he was ready and went to the kitchen to fetch his coffee and fix a meal tray. She tried to arrange for a typical German breakfast - butter bretzeln und käse or even pfannkuchen but they were in Paris and so she opted for a crusty, buttered roll, dutch cheese and a tartine.  She carried the tray to the bedroom and set it down on the end table. He’d risen, making his way gingerly to the bathroom. She wanted to help him, support him in some way but Wolfgang was not the kind of man who asked for help, even if he needed it. And he wanted very much to stand on his own feet after what had happened, becoming stronger and stronger every day.

Kala smoothed out the soft, white blankets as he ran the water, and took in the airy room painted in pale yellow, bordered with a typical ornate balustrade in braided leaves of tinted gold. The floor was a mosaic of tile in colors that picked up the pale yellow, adding blues, pinks, purples and golds of the decor. The blue sky beyond the wide balcony was dotted with the thick, white clouds of a perfect spring morning, complementing the cheerful colors within. These were tones she would have chosen for herself and she was again reminded that Rajan had bought this apartment, decorated and prepared it for her comfort and to keep her safe.

Her husband, who had so considerately arranged for the perfect hideaway for his wife and her lover.

Why didn’t she feel more ashamed of herself?

“Because, you have something dark and wicked inside,” Wolfgang’s voice came from somewhere inside of her, startling her but only for a moment. He now stood behind her - she had sensed not only his approach, but the intention behind it.

She turned her head to find his face was only a few inches from hers. “Just as you have something good and beautiful hiding inside of you.” She made sure to speak the words out loud.

That familiar, dark feeling flowed through him again, nearly crippling him, and in consequence, her. Instead of closing the space between them, he sat heavily on the mattress. She took the chair near the bed, folding her hands on her lap. Everything tasted of bitterness and it was tied, irrevocably, to her.

“Why do you do that?” she asked.

“You know why,” he said, turning his head away as if the sight of her pained him. It did, in fact, pain him. She was too aware of that fact.

“It means nothing to you that I disagree entirely?” she asked..

Wolfgang’s face became hard. There was still a drained look about him that was slowly improving, though the agony was the result of something that could not be seen. “It doesn’t matter if you agree or not. It’s the truth.”

Kala flipped the bangs that had fallen over her face.“You’re right. You betrayed me.”

His eyes went wide in surprise. “What?”

“You did,” she shrugged, numbering off her reasons as if she were reading from a delivery manifest. “You were tortured. You were drugged. And in your moment of greatest weakness, you betrayed me. Had you been held longer, you would have betrayed our entire cluster. They would have hunted us and either killed us or turned us into zombies. Did I leave anything out?”

“You’re crazy!” he said, the look of horror on his face bordering on the comical.

“This, I can agree with. In fact, I would propose that we are both crazy in the same way.”

She felt his struggle, the way he gnashed his teeth to keep from doing something embarrassing, like cry in front of her. She wanted to wrap herself around him, heal every wound that had ever been inflicted upon him but she could not make him forgive himself. This was one thing he had to do alone.

She reached for the blood pressure sleeve, the sound of velcro tearing itself apart resounded in the hollow space. Fumbling, she wrapped the black elastic material around his arm, receiving only his tortured silence. He said nothing still as she pressed the button on the machine, the pneumatic pump whirring to life. While the machine worked, she put the stethoscope over her ears, pressing the cool metal disc to his pulse. She was hardly a medic but she understood the fundamentals of human physiology.

“I think you are healing well despite the fact that the shocks put a great deal of strain on your heart.” She pulled a clip board from the end table, detaching the pen and updating the information on the pad. “You are very strong.”

He only stared at her, though he was a mass of conflicting emotions beneath the surface.

When the machine gave the digital reading, she made a notation on the chart, removed the sleeve, and set it aside. She picked up his coffee cup, offering it to him, her hands unsure but she willed themselves to be steady. Still he said nothing. Butterflies grew and spread throughout her body as she waited for him to take her offering.

“I think it’s gone cold,” she said finally.

He woke from his stupor and took the cup from her, placing it on the table next to them. Then he pulled her towards him and held her, a hug that said everything he couldn’t bring himself to say in words. Kala’s body gave itself up the contact, the press of skin against skin, the scrape of stubble as he dragged his chin across her shoulder. After a long while, he leaned back, his fingers curled in her dark hair.

“You should have stayed with Rajan,” he said finally.

Kala’s eyes narrowed until the muscles twitched. “Never say that to me again. This is not about Rajan. This is about you and me. Us.”

“BPO knows who you are now because of me,” he continued. She could barely sense anything beyond his self-loathing, like an opaque screening hiding him from her sight.

“None of us would have been able to withstand what you did for very long.” She dropped her eyes to her lap.  “You cannot be held responsible, for it is entirely my fault,” she whispered.

“How?” he asked with genuine confusion.

“If I had gone away with you instead of waiting for Rajan---”

“That’s not true.” He place a finger beneath her chin and gently lifted her face look at him. His eyes hungrily devouring every detail, a look of pain crossing his features. She felt that bottomless well of misery open within him, causing tears to spring involuntarily to her eyes. “I’ve given you nothing but trouble. It would be so much easier for you if they had ---“

“Would you stop it already!” she said, unable to separate her feelings from his, her anxiety and frustration with his guilt and and anger that was so old, it was an open artery that bled through his soul. “I told you, if something ever happened to you, my life would feel as if it were not worth living. You cannot use this argument with me any longer.”

“I could disappear.”

“You cannot!” she exclaimed, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I will not let you go.”

He sighed, the opaqueness of his sadness giving way to something more primitive, that thing she recognized as always burning between them. She clung to him but he pulled slowly back, his lips finding hers. A small gasp escaped her, an opening he took advantage of to taste her and kiss her thoroughly. She finally understood what Riley had meant by presence - Wolfgang was everywhere, his breath on her, inside of her. Her heart raced but there was an echo, a repeated cadence that told her she was not only experiencing herself, but also the sensation of his heart hammering inside of her chest. Everything was duplicated, multiplied until she thought she might overflow the boundaries of her body.

When they broke apart, he pressed his forehead against hers, his breath nearly insufficient for words. “Do you know this is the first time we’ve ever kissed in person?”

Kala smiled in relief. “We should make this count.” She sought out his lips and kissed him, sinking in a sea of sensation with only a dim perception of the world beyond them. Voices of pedestrians from the street below blended with the sounds of traffic to form a background that faded before his light blue eyes which now stared back at her with undisguised need.

He slipped his hands under the hem of her shirt, electricity springing from the points of contact. She couldn’t stop kissing him while his hands traversed her skin. Her hands, his skin, the wanting they felt for each other became tangled up until she could not tell where his ended and hers began.

His large palms covered her breasts, kneading them beneath the thin material of the silk pajamas. She shuffled to straddle him, pressing herself down onto his erection, poorly hidden by the flimsy cotton of his sleeping shorts.  It was his turn to groan, his hands fumbling impatiently with the buttons of her pajama top. The sun-warmed breeze blew across her exposed skin from the open window, his hands following the material, caressing her shoulder and arms. Simple. Such simple touches were enough to make a fire burn throughout her body.

He pressed her down onto the bed, tugging her pants and underwear off of her, pausing to admire her. “I have imagined you naked so many times,” he said, running his hands over her shoulders, down the side of her ribcage, over her waist and hips until they chased down the long muscles of her legs.

“Here, I thought you loved me for my mind,” she stammered.

He smiled, his first smile since she’d visited him in Berlin the day of his capture. A sob left her lips and she pulled him down to kiss him ferociously, her legs winding themselves around his waist, clasping him to her. Unlike their shared fantasy, in which she experienced him surrounded by waves of water, here she was rooted firmly by gravity, pinned between his hips and their bed. Heavier, more solid than in the abstract. He licked her neck, a long taste that made tremors race across her body, tremors whose response came in an answering shiver of his own. She was no longer a virgin - not in the technical sense - but the newness of his every touch returned her to the uncertain days of her girlhood.

She reveled in the confounding sensations of having him and being him - of his hand ghosting over her breasts, his tongue swirling over her nipples before his lips descended over them, the path of his mouth over her ribcage and her belly, squeezing her legs to pressure him for what she most wanted. This was met with gentle denial as he undid the knot of her feet and opened her, putting his mouth there and making fireworks burst inside of them both.

As she came down from her high, he was flushed and panting. He had felt her climax and was teetering at the edge of his own precipice. Their hands became tangled as they worked his shorts off, their mouths colliding wildly. His length rose from the dark blond curls at the apex of his thighs, which she encircled with her hands, working him with slow deliberation. The noises he made mingled with nonsense words, German words that held no meaning.

He pulled away suddenly, eyes that were normally hooded with danger now dark blue with lust. Kala leaned back as he crawled over her body, leaving kisses as he went, every sensation he evoked now connected as if by a cord to the deepest place in her belly. She clung to him, kissing him as he pressed his hardness against her, rubbing against her slickness until, without warning, he froze.

His eyes were filled with uncharacteristic vulnerability. Even the slight quivering in his voice was not hidden from her because he was asking for something beyond that moment.

“Do you really want this?”

Kala tilted her head. “When I told you I loved you, I meant it.”

He dipped his forehead to touch hers. “That's a yes?”

She was breathless now with her need to have him inside of her. She lifted her hips, pressing against him.

“Yes.”

He nodded once and lunged, filling her in one, powerful thrust. She arched upwards, a loud cry exploding from her before his mouth smothered it. Locked together, he spared nothing as he rocked in and out of her, at first slowly, then more frenetically. She no longer felt the ever-present chill of this city which now belonged to them. Instead, sweat burst out in a damp sheen over them both.

Kala could only hold on as the tension rose, multiplying between them. She had a sudden vision of a lecture on the natural e function, heard her professor’s voice defining the number and its slope, describing how e goes to infinity in both x and y, how there was no natural end to the function at its limit. As they climbed together, she felt Wolfgang’s breath near her ear and thought they were approaching something without limit, something that could rise and rise, each coordinate driving the other toward eternity.

Then he whispered her name.

“Kala…”

Everything burst into a thousand shards of fractured light.

Light and dark, fire and water; the point where there were no longer distinct elements. Kala and Wolfgang disappeared.

And after, there was only peace.

XXXXX

Kala could not say she’d fallen asleep. That would have implied unconsciousness. And she was far from unconscious. She heard life bubbling up beneath the balcony. She felt the pressure of the bunched up blanket pressing insistently into her lower back. She smelled their sex hanging thick in the air.

But beyond that, she was completely surrounded by Wolfgang. His head lay on her breast, his chest rising and falling against her belly.  Kala wedged her toes between the mattress and his thigh. Presence. Kala was not simply with Wolfgang. She did not exist alongside him. She was submerged in his being, just as he was in hers. She also understood how the loss of such a thing might irrevocably damage a person, or a cluster, forever.

Wolfgang stirred, his cheek sweaty where it lay pressed against her. She didn’t mind it, even whining in protest when he tried to lift himself from her.

“Don’t,” she ordered, squeezing her arms around him.  His long sigh sent warm breath over her skin.

“I will crush you,” he murmured.

“I can handle it.”

He lay a while longer before lifting his head to look at her. “What do we do now?”

Kala ran a finger over his lips, indulging in memorizing his face. “The first priority is for you to heal completely. Then we wait for Will to tell us what the next steps are.”

He captured her finger between his teeth, nipping it before releasing it. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know.” She shifted when he rose to lay beside her, pulling her onto his chest. “We are in Paris! One of the most beautiful cities in the world. We enjoy it.”

She sensed the encroaching self-hatred steal over him again, the one she wanted to hold back forever. “I’ll never forgive myself, but I’m too selfish to leave you alone.”

Kala lifted herself on her elbow to look down on him with a smirk. “I believe this demonstrates a particular lack of good character on your part that should be of great concern.”

His eyes widened before crinkling in humor. “If this is the case than we are perfect for each other.”