Chapter 9: Voices in the Darkness

It was the middle of a moonless night, and Cora stood alone with a man she barely knew, deprived of her sense of sight. He'd hit the light switch, and she couldn't have re-illuminated the situation if she wanted to.

Cora's pulse sped up. She should probably be alarmed.

"I can't sleep either." His whispered words pierced the darkness. "They took away all my books as well."

What did he mean with all the book talk? It had to be an act, an elaborate effort to attract her notice. Every species had their rituals. Bullfrogs literally changed colors during mating season, temporarily casting off their drab browns and greens for brighter hues.

Somehow, Jamie had surmised the kind of mating dance she might find attractive. It annoyed her that she should be so transparent to him.

"You think you read me like a book," she said. "but you don't."

"No? What have I gotten wrong thus far?"

His hand was touching hers. She couldn't see a thing, but she could sense his presence. His four fingertips were the only thing that held her anchored in space. They hooked against the pads of her own fingers. Curling gently. Beckoning.

"No looking," he had said just now. "No touching. Two disembodied voices in the darkness."

Cora was under no illusions that his intentions were as chaste as he pretended. At least, she hoped not. She'd sworn off love, but that didn't mean she had to live like a nun for the rest of her life.

The truth was, she hadn't anticipated the frustration-level from having him around all day, every day, and shirtless approximately 87% of the time. How could she not find that distracting, when she hadn't been touched by a man in how long? Nearly two years?

She'd been trying to work up the nerve for the past two nights to do something about it. In fact, she'd been standing here, practicing what to say to him in the bathroom mirror, when he walked in.

But the sight of him had rattled her. Every last word she'd rehearsed went skittering out of her head. She'd meant to say some line about how she'd only packed one pretty nightgown, so she may as well let someone see it. Instead, she went all blushing and tongue-tied, and her natural reserve kicked in.

It was more than his looks that intimidated her. He had a way of holding himself, a presence that filled her field of vision and blocked out her ability to think. The way he stood there in his boxers without a shred of self-consciousness, with his dark hair all disheveled... and all that glorious male skin...

The light switch had come to her rescue, however. With the visual stimuli eliminated, Cora's brain clicked on again. She unfroze like a video that finished buffering.

Cora trapped his fingers against hers with her thumb. "You don't know anything about me."

"Neither do you," came his answer. "We're both in the dark. That's the fun of it."

He was toying with her on purpose. He had been since the moment they met. That moment on the mini-date, when he'd reached across the table to fix her hair. His hand had brushed her cheek, whisper soft.

It meant nothing. No doubt he had intended it flirtatiously at the time, but only because he was desperate. He needed a partner to get himself cast on the show. He would have executed the exact same maneuver on anyone the producers had plunked across the table from him.

But then again... The cameras hadn't been rolling at that moment. It was before the "real" date had begun, while the crew was setting up. One of their rare moments of actual reality, not the manufactured kind.

Cora kept reliving that moment for some reason. Lying in bed these past two nights with no reading material to distract her, she'd closed her eyes and touched her own cheek—and imagined her hand belonged to him.

"Come on." He gave her hand a gentle tug. "A friendly game of truth or dare. I'll behave, I promise."

Liar.

Still, Cora let him draw her closer, urged forward by his voice in the darkness (or perhaps by the darkness in his voice). There were only two reasons he would act this way now, in the middle of the night, with the TV crew conspicuously absent. She ticked them off inside her head.

Choice A: He felt the need to soften the ground a bit, to make sure their on-camera romance came across convincingly in the light of day.

Or, Choice B: He had no other options on this island. He could choose a month of celibacy, or he could have her.

Did it matter? A or B, it all amounted to the same thing. A "situationship," her friends would have called it if they had been here to dissect his motivations.

But motives didn't matter in a situationship. That was the whole point. There were no feelings involved. No expectations. No promises. And no future.

Exactly how Cora wanted it.

She'd sworn off love after the awfulness with Steven, but she would consider a casual arrangement. Her friend Penny had tried and failed to set something up. Penny's husband worked on Wall Street, with a whole stable of commitment-phobic colleagues ready to deploy. Had two years really passed since that fiasco? A commodities trader in his thirties had presented himself to Cora over drinks, in a gray suit with a gray tie on a gray Friday evening. That's how Cora recalled him anyway. Fifty shades of gray, but nothing like the novel. Fifty shades of boring conversation.

Not that either of them were there for smalltalk. Cora had mainlined two glasses of wine on an empty stomach for liquid courage, and flirted with him successfully enough to bring him back to her place.

And then it fell apart, the same way it always did. Sitting on her living room couch, he'd kissed her. He'd tasted of vodka and stale breath mints, with something sour underneath. He'd put his tongue in her mouth, and that had done it. The dreaded ick set in. The revulsion had been so sudden and complete, she'd feigned food poisoning to get him out the door.

No more prince.

Instant frog.

So the story always ended.

This was Cora's curse. The secret she'd never told a soul. Not her friends. Not even her past boyfriends. They may have had some inkling, but none of them understood the full extent. Only Cora's therapist knew the truth.

Kissing was supposed to be universal. It was the starting point for all other forms of physical contact, practically synonymous with love itself. The human mating ritual. The one undisputed turn-on that the entire human race shared.

Cora had always forced herself to put up with it. She would go through the motions, like a kind of sensory toll she had to pay in order to get to the more enjoyable activities. But the truth was, she couldn't bear it. If the mere thought of gum-chewing set her teeth on edge, the idea of kissing...

No, thank you. She was just fine on her own.

But that was the old Cora. Not the bold new Cora who asked strangers to spit out their gum. The Cora who politely asked the world to accommodate her quirks, instead of the other way around.

That's what she had been psyching up her reflection to say to Jamie. He could have her. A purely physical relationship. No emotions involved. And no strings attached except this one small thing...

He was waiting for her now. The silence had lengthened to the point just shy of awkwardness. She had to make a choice. Move forward, or turn back.

If only she had two glasses of wine in her system to steady herself now. Cora took a deep breath and drank in the darkness instead.

"I'll play," she said at last. "But don't forget my rule." She took a step toward him and reached out. Her fingertips made contact with some unseeable portion of his torso, and she felt his stomach cave in with his swift intake of breath. She let her fingers trace downward, stopping at the waistband of his briefs. "Touch is allowed, but only fingertips. No lips."

He was silent.

Cora dropped her hand. An eternity ticked by as she stood waiting, trembling at her audacity, thanking the darkness for concealing her from view.

Finally, he moved. His fingers found her shoulders, then slid smoothly down her arms.

"Like that?" His voice sounded different. Low and deep. The sound of the darkness itself, perhaps.

"Yes," she answered. "Touch me anywhere you like. But no lips. No mouths. No kisses. Is that understood?"

"I'm a good listener," the darkness answered. "Come with me."

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