Jayla Mile. Chapters 14, 15, 16

14. Gone for Gold

In the wee hours of their first tryst, The Ride of the Valkyrie can be heard throughout the house, and Gold pours Jay more cognac while she pours herself a hot bath. When she is clean and towel-wrapped he leads her to a room where she sits down on the edge of a big brass bed. The frame gleams in the moonlight. He stands before her and she encircles him with her wet goose-bumped arms. Her towels fall. He pushes her softly into the bed, covers her with a cool quilt and leaves the room. Shivering and wet, she curls up and drifts off to restless dreams.

Morning comes into the room with sunlight and birdsong and a kind of calm. She wonders where he is and where she is. Slipping into her black dress, she follows the scent of coffee and bacon to the kitchen where she finds him reading the paper and eating breakfast. A ray of sunshine bounces off his bacon-greased lips. She has coffee only and there is little conversation.

She travels on the subway back to the city centre then eastward on a streetcar to where the city slopes down from steep bank heaps to two and three storey stores and houses near the beach. Here, her friends, Kyle and Andrew, offer her a respite and a room should she care to sleep over. Life with these friends is warm if intermittent. With them she feels like one of the boys and also one of the girls, and, at times, everything in between.

Now she tells them of the morning and the night with the man, the man with the true blue eyes, the man who disappeared in the night.

“It was wonderful,” she sighs.

“We can feel it,” her friends affirm. “It’s in your eyes. They’re sparkling like stars.”

Kyle proposes a champagne toast: “To Gold.” Flutes rise and clink, reflecting the neon palm tree in the window of their favourite beach restaurant.

15. Strange Alchemy

“Her hair is black,” Jay muses. “As black as the nights at the farm where a thousand and more stars shine like the silver threads that run through her midnight hair.” She takes hold of Samuel’s charcoal-covered hand: “Black as your hand,” and leads him out the door. They walk to the café where they’d spent so much time back in September, back when gold was just a colour the leaves were turning.

By November, she’d taken up with Gold, hook line and sinker, and Cornerstone was missing his pale sorceress. All the portraits he attempted, no matter of who, resembled her. But whenever he’d bump into her along the bar circuit they’d only make light conversation and name new colours: Bourbon Bronze, Lining Silver.

“I’ll call,” she’d say, then never did, except for the odd desperate time to talk about Gold and his mystical misogyny. Then Samuel wouldn’t hear from her for weeks. And then some night he’d be sitting at a bar and he’d feel those eyes of Myosotis Blue watching him from a dim corner. And there she’d be: virtually hiding, seemingly waiting.

He’d sit with her till she’d brush him off as if he were a piece of lint on her black lapel. Turning away from him to look out the window at the snow, she’d casually comment that for her it was not at all cold outside: “My boots are holding up just fine, thank you, and...all the rest is Gold.”

16. The Golden Mile

Jay often stayed at Gold’s place, always sleeping alone in the brass bed following coffee and brandy in the study. And then, one night he joined her. “Woman, thou art devil,” Gold’s golden voice whispered in her ear as his serpentine tongue caressed her earlobe. Wet kisses fell on her neck, then moved down, down, down...all the way down to heaven.

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If you want to read the first chapters, find them here: