Chapter Two: The Language of Grace

She'd had a lover, once, in college-- a Iyawo priestess of Yemaya who paradoxically held a Bachelor of Arts in Religion from one of the South's largest universities. A woman with broad shoulders and long flowing dredlocks, who had seduced her with the lyrical cadence of her Louisiana patois and the indefatigable glimmer of amusement in her endless brown eyes. "You're too much of the mind, cher...Where is your sense of wonder? Your awe of those things greater than you?" her lover had chided on more than one endless sweating night, their bodies twined about one another in a shameless display. Had it been seen—it would have brought the Klan to their door, burning them out the way her lover's father and grandfather's churches had been burned. A vain attempt to sear out the ideas they had preached, the passion they had carried within them. "You are the most secular Catholic I've ever met."

And you're the most disingenuous, overeducated voodoo priestess I've ever met," she had always countered dryly, forestalling further lecturing-- such as that initiation into la Regla Lucumi didn't imply immediate surrender of one's modern sensibilities—by straddling her lover's broad hips and bending her mouth to a task that invoked many gods in all their multicultural glory.

But twelve-odd years gone, the admonition still remained with Kim Legaspi-- her life's work a seeming testament to mind over matter, despite her incessant attempts to holistically treat the damaged souls and hearts of the people who came to her for care. It was never enough, she mused more often than she'd wanted to admit. Treat the mind, sacrifice the soul. Were she to believe in the Western concept of the soul as demarcated by the religious powers-that-be, hers would be sentenced to an unfathomable Hell all too soon. There was just enough Catholic in her to make some renegade synapses in her brain believe that maybe Dante wasn't completely wrong, and shuffling off this mortal coil held no particular appeal to Kim because of it.

Still, she had shaken off the dregs of her father's Old World side of the family and lived her life the only way she had known how. Integrating her own heart and mind, offering her lovers the best of her soul and her body, never promising more than she was able to give at any one time, never accepting more from an overzealous suitor's affections than she was prepared to reciprocate.

But though she could argue that her secular scales of romantic justice were balanced, Kim knew deep down that her ex-lover would have merely pointed out that Oshun was never a goddess of moderation, and that the term femme fatale was appropriate to them both on more than one count.

And if right now her heart could be generously termed fickle, her body was nothing but downright traitorous-- aching as it was for something that she had willingly given up.

For that reason she had chosen to be alone on this night-- when the moon and the stars were decadent in their beauty, keening to lovers everywhere on the wisp of a breeze that even now did nothing to cool the heated blush of her bare shoulders.

She was brooding, she knew-- seeking respite in things that she-- of all people-- knew offered only false havens from the lurking claws and tendrils of the torments only her own self could create.

A hand in her hair... fleeting.

A voice in her ear... indecipherable.

A flash of skin out of the corner of her eye... gone.

Cries. Whispers. This wasn't an Ingmar Bergman film and no one would ever accuse her of being Liv Ullman... that whole tall, blonde thing aside. She'd once had a lover who had compared her to Catherine Deneuve, but after seeing Belle Du Jour, she knew it wasn't a compliment. Especially after that night when...

Dammit... Legs... Stop thinking about sex...

Her body only snickered at the reproach and sprawled further back in the canvas chair that resided in the corner of the small fenced-in enclosure of her backyard. She knew she was half-dressed and should vaguely be worried about rapists and killers and X-Filian things that went bump in the night, but she couldn't tell if she was too lit to care or if she really didn't care.

And she didn't know which truth should worry her more.

Out there in here, did it really matter any more? Two women, wanting both having neither and serial monogamy had always been her game, never this all at once.

Or nothing.

Never that. Never her.

And not this time.

Abby... oh god why had she gone up on that roof, but that wasn't the issue really, was it? Not the roof. Not the heat. Not the sweat binding their skin-- and she couldn't blame anything but herself when she knew she was letting her cunt make the decisions she had been avoiding. To put it crudely.

And where was her heart in all this?

Oh, that was on the ground floor of County General, probably with her hand in someone else's chest cavity-- and vaguely Kim wondered if one could resuscitate an already beating heart. Or at least recalibrate it so maybe it would match the cadence in her blood. Or the twitch in her muscles that sent her hand skittering to the phone and dialing the first half of a number that she had no business knowing by heart.

At least not anymore.

"What are you doing?"

Pause. "Nothing." Pause longer still. "Watching TV." Hesitant laugh. "Not even that, really. You?"

"Thinking."

"About?"

"Things I shouldn't."

"Is this a wise conversation to be having?"

"No."

"You drinking?"

"Self-medicating."

"That getting to be a habit?"

"Not looking to twelve step it right now."

"I understand the feeling."

"You?"

"Still sober."

"Good."

"Barely."

Silence.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

"I shouldn't have called."

"I had a love affair with the stuff long before I met you."

"I seem to have the same effect."

"That's true." The scritch and shuffle of someone stretching out. "But you're not quite as lethal to my liver."

"Your psyche, however..."