Incapable (Love Triumphs 3)

He grinned at her excitement. “Tell me.”

“They’re surprised, maybe disgusted. There is a body behind the car in the garage. It’s hard to tell if it’s someone fixing something underneath the car or not.”

Damon smiled. He knew from the script this was the murder victim, but he didn’t want to spoil the discovery for Georgia.

“There is a mum and dad, the baby, two older kids, both boys, and another female, older, maybe an aunty. The body under the car wears jeans and boots. I’m guessing it’s a man but maybe not.”

There were two mums and the man wasn’t the dad. The dad was dead under the car. Ed said, “Cue opening, Damon.”

He toggled the mic on the headset, aligned it with his mouth and spoke the opening monologue. Jace patted his arm. Georgia was somewhere in blackness in front of him. He had four minutes of narration and spoke them from memory. This part and the concluding monologue were unaltered from Dalia’s emailed script. The rest of it was going to be harder.

When he finished he felt Georgia’s hand brush his knee, her shoulder touch his. He realigned the headset so he could hear Ed in one ear and Georgia in the other. On Ed’s next cue, Georgia said the line and he repeated it. This one was unchanged. Ed’s next words were an impromptu line about an audience member in a Midnight Oil t-shirt. He repeated the line straight and they heard a bubble of laughter from the set. With his hand on Georgia’s shoulder they moved the dozen steps to position B. Damon took Ed’s cues, Georgia’s words, and fed them into the performance space.

Ten minutes in, Ed asked Jace if he was able to leave the gantry to help with audience control.

“Will you guys be all right?” Jace said.

“I’ve got Damon. We’ll be fine.”

Jace’s feet on the metal tread of the stairs.

Yeah Georgia had him, more and more with each touch, each graze of their bodies as they moved between vantage points A and B. He was totally reliant on her for script clarification and positionin

g and it should’ve irritated the shit out of him in the way being dependant on anyone did, but for now, in this, in their post red dress suspended animation, he was happy.

On the set, the mystery was unravelling as the audience pieced together the family dynamics and puzzled the who-done-it, like the police and detectives who arrived on the scene.

Up in the gantry the mystery was thick, fuelled by Georgia’s whispered lines, her glancing touches and the darkness of being alone together. By increments her hands lingered, his held and didn’t release until they were moving, bodies together like in a dance, where she led and he was excited to follow. By interval he knew he wasn’t going to wait to kiss her in the taxi home or outside her door before he said goodnight.

Ed gave the last cue before the break. Damon spoke his line sending the guests to the bar, where they were unknowingly about to be fingerprinted and have their mug shots taken as part of the experience. He pulled his headset off and did the same to Georgia’s, dropping them to the floor, cupping the back of her head and bringing her body to face him. She came into his arms willingly, with the softest of breaths across his throat.

He moved his hand to bracket her face and took her mouth gently, pulling away to give her time to protest. When her breath stuttered and she clutched at his arm, he kissed her again and her lips opened to his, starting a petrol fire in his chest. Its heat licked his lungs, softened his spine, made him press her closer to blanket the pain, bring on the pleasure. Her arms came up around his neck, one hand caught in his hair and she was kissing him back, no longer the recipient, but a willing partner writhing in the flames.

He reversed until he was against the gantry wall, bringing Georgia with him, a hand searching for the stool, dragging it behind him so he could sit, be closer to her, hold her between his legs. She made little gasps of surprise, of delight, when he let her breathe.

Now she touched him without the hesitation, without the accident of contact. Her hands were on his shoulders, gripping his biceps, moving across his back. She pressed against his body and he didn’t need to hold her there, they held each other in this momentary madness born of hesitation and matured fast with a red dress fantasy and impossible proximity in the deep dark.

He learned her like he’d wanted to almost from meeting the occasional lilt of her accent, the stiffness in her manner. She was slender but not painfully thin like Heather. She had muscle, she had hips he could flare his fingers over, and when they were both lost in sucking kisses he found her breasts, high and full in his palms, cause for her lips to abandon his, her head to drop back and her breath to come in noisy exclamations.

If he spoke he might break this, turn the light on it, make it daytime real, and he wasn’t ready to risk that. He had a sense she was more comfortable with the shadow meaning. The darkness had deniability for her in a way it never would for him. But full colour words and images rampaged across his brain, Georgia in her low-backed dress, the muscle in her calves bunched in her come fuck me shoes, their soles spiked dangerous and red when he tipped her onto his bed. If she left them on, he’d feel their stiletto sharp stab his thighs. He palmed her butt and pulled her closer still, kissing a line from her mouth to her ear, down her neck to her collarbone, then down the centre of her shirt to the button he opened so he could put his teeth to the edge of her bra and tug.

She liked it. Her jerky movements, the ebb and flow of tension in her limbs, her caught breath, the nails in his arms told him everything he needed to know about her current state of mind. She wanted more of this now, but when the world returned he figured on her withdrawing to cautious, to polite arm’s distance.

Before anything else, he wanted her branded with what could be so what was before lost its satisfaction score. Only fair, it’s what she’d done to him.

Made him less afraid of the dark.

12: Shadow Comfort

In the blackness Georgia’s body blazed, lit up like cut crystal shot with sunlight, fractured and reflecting a rainbow of bright pinks and blues. She kept her eyes closed so she wasn’t blinded, so the whorl of heat that made her tremble didn’t end, so Damon’s lips stayed on her skin and his hands held her upright, kept her from floating away like a dust mote.

Beneath his clothes he was lean and hard muscled. His body caged her in strength, made her fluid with need. She lost all sense of place and time, of purpose other than to feel the shocking weight of unleashed desire low in her gut. She overflowed with it, her breath snagging on it, her ears stuffed, her fingers made claws to hold him, stop him from dissolving into the night where she’d lose him, lose her sanity. It was already altered beyond recognition from his kiss, from the trace of his tongue and the movement of his hands, searching, possessive.

This would stop, and she’d be ended, burned up, cinder, ash, to rise a Phoenix, new and stronger. Or she’d be straightjacket, padded cell crazy.

In this moment was everything she’d missed out on as an adult except the sound of his voice. He’d locked that away behind warm searching lips and teeth that could sting to make a place for a soothing tongue to lap. She craved the anchor of his words but heard only the sound of her own desperate breathing and the wet snick and glide of their kisses.

Then Jace coughing. Then the tinny sound from the headphones on the floor.