Reading my thoughts, she whispered into my mouth. “You wanted to see more?”
Nodding, I reached for her sleeves. She, instead, undid a couple of buttons at the back of her neck. With a finger she pulled it down a few inches.
More letters lined her throat, various sizes and styles but all fine lettering.
I buried my face into her neck, kissing every inch of exposed skin.
While we stayed up late into the night, we did not have sex — just lots of kissing and fondling. I saw hints of her tattoos — along her neck and wrists mostly, but I also realized that what I thought was texture in her stockings was in fact more of the markings along her legs.
We fell asleep in each other’s arms. All night I dreamt I read the story of her, with each turn of the page I removed another layer of clothing. The end never revealed itself, only more pages to turn, more layers to remove, more words to read.
When I awoke, her back was to me. In my sleep I must have undone a few more of her loops, exposing the near-luminous skin of her shoulders. My face was too close to see anything more than the blurry forms, but the tattoo was there as well. I brushed the skin lightly with my fingertips, causing her breath to deepen.
“I need to see more,” I said.
“I know.”
She sat up, and I sat behind her, my legs to either side. She bunched her hair in one hand, pulling it over her shoulder. Intoxicated with need, my fingers fumbled with the loops of her buttons. She leaned forward, possibly in pleasure or perhaps to just give me more room to work.
So many words played across her skin, but the effect was not dense — no, there was a subtlety, a beauty, in the way the words traced her form.
Her hand played around my leg, rubbing the back of my thigh. With each button undone, with each word exposed, her hand worked farther up. By the time I exposed the small of her back her hand had buried itself in my crotch. I slid my hands around the inside of her dress, slipping the top off completely.
The words covered everything.
“Stand up,” I said.
She followed without comment, and I pulled her dress to the floor. She turned to face me, now only in black stockings. I did not hesitate — I stripped her naked.
Besides her face, hands, and feet, the entirety of her pale flesh ran with the tattoo. Even as varied as it was, I now considered it a singular entity, made up of intertwining and twisting words. No other place was sacred — words slipped into every crevasse of her nearly flawless figure.
I touched her hip with the intent to look closer.
“That’s enough,” she said, straddling me on the couch.
We spent the better part of the morning making love. I have no better words to explain it than heavenly, blissful. Still, as soft as her skin was — more supple than any leather-bound volume in the room — my mind never quite left the marks below my hands and tongue.
Later, as we cuddled, my eyes finally focused on the faint lines that made up each character. It was not filigree that made the letters so ornate — it was tiny letters. Looking closer, I saw hundreds of words constructing the larger forms.
“Where did this come from?” I asked.
“Where does any inspiration come from?” She smiled.
“No, the work itself — I have never seen its equal.”
She did not respond, but also made no move to stop me from investigating further. This was a first, and I took full advantage.
Complete sentences lined her body, twisting and turning in the larger structure of the tattoo. I could follow the idea for a few lines but then it would end abruptly. There was no structure, or at least not one I could find. At one point I discovered Raven’s name in the writing and worked to pull out the passage, retracing my steps with my index finger. I continued to lose my place, and Raven moaned at my efforts to trace it. Eventually she turned on her side, pulling my attention back to her.
“It’s not meant to be read like that. It’s not really meant to be read at all. Just enjoy it.”
I wasn’t so sure. As much as I desperately wanted to read, I also believed she needed to be read.
I dropped my obvious attempts at that moment and turned my attention back to her. We returned to cuddling, caressing, kissing, but still I read bits as I could — with my face pressed to her neck, or while fondling her breasts. It was a futile attempt, this was not the way I would figure out the story scribed across her flesh, but the snippets of ideas I could catch stoked my fires.
She stayed the weekend, and all of the next week. It did not dawn on me that she had effectively moved in without any discussion at all. I minded not in the least bit.
Around the apartment she wore my clothes, and never too much of that. She enjoyed my gaze on her skin and allowed me ever more time to explore — just never quite enough to grasp structure before she turned the encounter physical.
I would like to say I did not mind this, either, but the more I saw the more I wanted to see. I was confident given enough time I would one day have complete freedom to discover what I was missing — but I was not so certain I could wait that long.
We did not only stay in, though there was a lot of that. Occasionally I went about my own work and she disappeared for a few hours. This happened regularly, though my attention on work languished — as did my dedication. She would show up in different dresses, leaving many back at my place. I do not know where she lived or if she returned there at these times, but when I tried asking she only answered with a smile.
A couple of weeks in, I realized her tattoo had grown.
Lines had inched out onto the back of her palms, upon the tops of her feet, and up the neck to behind the ear. The large characters weren’t full words yet, but the smaller words comprising them somehow tied to the sentences in front of them — as if there was a master plan to the tattoo.
“Did you get more work done?” I asked.
“Not really,” she said. When she saw my look — no doubt one of frustration — she carried on. “It does not work that way.”
“What doesn’t work what way?” I dropped her hand and stared at her.
She sighed. “Please do not read too much into all of this.” She offered one of her smiles, as if to bring back the contact. “I am supposed to be a mystery, yes?”
“The best mysteries are those you solve,” I said.
“Trust me, there is no solution here. Try to unravel me and you may find you have nothing left.” She came closer, offering herself.
I pulled her to me.
She sucked on my earlobe before whispering. “Enjoy what you have in your hands right now.”
I did, at that moment, because it was the easy thing to do. Appeasing her meant keeping her around, and giving me more time to work it out.
And I thought I might just be starting to solve it.
A few weeks later and the tattoo extended to her palm, nearly reaching her fingers. More importantly it grew up her cheeks and around her mouth. When we went out she wore a veil — it complimented her full-length dresses quite well.
I had learned to not question, only admire and compliment. This attention excited her, and allowed me to stay close for as long as I wanted. This closeness, this full-body exploration, offered tantalizing hints.
I merely needed to wait. While I did, I plotted.
Some of my ideas were gloriously bad. I will not mention them specifically, but hopefully these allusions I offer will make what I did come up with seem not so horrible.
If only I could say the same about the results.
The day came when the tattoo was complete, at least as far as I could tell. Every inch of visible skin — the tips of her fingers, her toes, her brow — showed the lines. Even past the hairline, when the hair parted, I could find faint hints of the lettering. I gave it a week to see if anything more would show — by this point I knew the markings intimately — but nothing else changed.
The time came to act. I drugged her.
I did this in the living ro
om, beneath the gaze of the other books. It was where most of our love-making sessions took place.
This was not some pathetic attempt to take advantage of her body; I had as much of that as I wanted. No, this was simply setting the stage for an entire night of uninterrupted reading. She needed me to read her, I knew this, and I could no longer wait on her schedule. What if she disappeared before I got to the end? What if she tired of my passion for her words? I had to act.
The drugs left her malleable, easy to turn every which way. This was critical — the words covered every inch, every side, and I had to move her often to follow the sentences. But I could, and did.
It helped that I had found the start days earlier.
Seeing how the markings had grown out toward the extremities — and by then I fully believed it had grown, not been tattooed — I figured it had to start somewhere near the center. It did, between the breasts and just above the solar plexus.
Like ley lines, the smaller words moved outward and back, dancing through the larger words again and again. Sometimes the sentences would circle through a particular letter, other times they’d zip through the entire word and carry on in the word beside it. Occasionally the sentences would jump seemingly erratically, making me search for its continuation, but I learned to watch for these at the large characters’ ascenders and descenders. To keep track I traced light paths with my fingers — this brought gooseflesh to her skin and turned the words to Braille.
She shifted, and occasionally moaned, under my touch — but she did not wake.
Heavy in metaphor, Raven’s story unfolded before my eyes, providing more answers than she ever had. As the words portrayed her, she was a different girl than I knew — open, family oriented, not mysterious or lusty. And she was a voracious reader, which explained many of our early talks. In many ways she was much like me.
The tale was long. I spent much of the evening working through the minor dramas of her life. I actually felt closer to her than I ever had and occasionally lamented having to do this to her. Still, I could not stop. Near the nape of her neck the story introduced her discovery of a book — unique, and forbidden. Here the words disappeared into her hair.
I had planned for this, as bad as that might sound. The process took several minutes, but electric sheers buzzed her beautiful hair down to stubble. I hurried, wanting to get back to the story of the book — and in so doing nipped her a couple of times.
I pressed on.
Raven changed. The tale became one of madness and obsession, but it was not a cautionary tale — the story reveled in her abandonment of reason to the pursuit of the forbidden.
I reveled in it as well.
I was slow to catch that the book was a man, with words written across his flesh like those I read at that moment.
Stop.
Did she speak this word, or did I merely imagine it? I could not tell — and I could not stop.
Raven’s tale had once again become my own. She did things with this man, a great many things, just to get closer, to snatch moments of reading. She, like I, had come to realize that he needed to be read but he would not let her for too long. She began to read him in his sleep, using alcohol to give her more time. It was never enough.
I knew what was to come but I had to read it for myself. I had spent all night to get to this point, and I was exhausted from my efforts — my body sagged from turning her frequently and my eyes burned from the tiny text. With the lightening sky outside I pushed ahead. I read furiously, bending her ear or twisting her head without a care for the body under my hands. My need was too great.
So was hers.
She was not kind to the man. One night, after a tremendous frustration with her obsession, she struck him over the head. Besides this and a few other details, I experienced my own night through her encounter.
Still the tale carried on, though I knew the end was near. How her tattoo started did not appear in the text. Raven’s thoughts, however, did — at first she avoided others but slowly found urges growing inside of her. She had need of someone special, and put herself in places to find such a person. Here I appeared in the text, though not by name. The story of the past weeks flashed by. My own thoughts, never spoken, were here on her flesh.
My hands shook as I read this part. With near horror I read of my own actions — drugging her, shaving her head — drawn in words across her skin. This had been written here at least a week before this night. How did she know?
At this I collapsed — out of shock or tiredness, I am not sure.
I awoke on the floor of the living room. The wall of books loomed down, and I could feel their judgment burning into me. Raven, however, was not here — nor her shorn hair. It had been spread across the floor, but not a one could be found. Behind me, her pile of clothes on the chair remained.
I checked the rest of the house — there was no sign of her. If she had walked out, she had left all of her clothes behind — every long dress, every veil.
This proved to be a blessing.
I could not recall what had happened to the man in Raven’s tale after her night of reading his story. Perhaps it did not say. Many of the details had already faded in my mind.
I wondered, though. Somehow I knew I would never see her again. Had I driven her away, scared her, or worse — had I destroyed her by reading her tale? Maybe destroyed is too harsh a word — released?
Had she ever existed at all? It was not a real thought, though it stalked me at night. I knew she had been here — her clothes remained, as did her scent upon them. I had never considered trying them on before, they were not my style, but I could tell just by looking they would fit.
A few lines have appeared, flowing out from the center of my chest, near the heart — faint, florid, but not yet words. I do not know how long the progression will take. I avoid going out whenever possible, and I take detours around the bookstores I used to haunt — but they call to me more than ever.
How would my story differ? Would I find a reader who would care more about me than I had about Raven? Would they be kinder in the end — and did I deserve it?
She Never Says No
Christian A. Larsen
Vince stepped back from the table, his penis a tang of tempered steel. He wasn’t sure if he was aroused sexually, per se, or if he was just cranked up like a teenager because he had done such a damned good job. Brigitte was perfect – for those men who wanted perfection. Some men wanted the girl next door or the horny housewife, and there was nothing wrong with that, but Vince wanted a porn star, and now, he had one: Brigitte 2.0, a sex-doll that not only looked like a woman, but she moved like a woman (or she should), and, thanks to the advanced software in her CPU, she could even learn to do the things he liked even better.
The workshop was strewn with body parts, and looked vaguely like a serial killer’s dream come true, but there was no blood, only bits of metal skeleton, plain white subdermal faces with round blank eyes staring into nothingness, a row of wigs, and several mouth tubes, complete with teeth and tongue that could be inserted into whichever head suited the owner. It was a real mix and match, but most of those details were unimportant. Indistinguished. Even the medical grade platinum silicone flesh of Brigitte 2.0’s body was just a nice frill, as was her animatronic movement. It was her CPU that made the difference. But she was nice to look at.
He stared at her as he walked around the table, idly wondering what it would be like to eat sushi off of her soft flesh like at those elite rumored places downtown that were only mentioned in whispers. Her long, shapely legs met at her crotch, where a tuft of pubic hair looked like a dollop of golden cream. The rise of her pubis gave way to a flat belly punctuated by a shallow navel at the bottom of the faintly-defined line of her abs, above which large, round breasts swelled, topped by pink nipples that looked vaguely like the tips of soft-serve strawberry ice cream. The only thing that wasn’t quite perfect was the hair. He didn’t know how to comb women’s hair, but she would, as soon as he tu
rned her on, so to speak.
He already was, his penis pinned to him like the keel of a ship in dry dock. And he had been in dry dock too long, since his college buddies hired that prostitute during their 20th reunion a few years back. They all had wives, which somehow made it worse for them to even be involved with such a thing, but he had never felt comfortable dating. People even thought he might be gay, but nothing could be further from the truth. He was just too involved in his work. So one night, while he was poring over schematics for the robotics company where he’d been working since he matriculated from grad school, he thought: why not make my work more gratifying, and build myself a mate? So he founded Meretrix, Inc., assuming huge amounts of debt, but here he was, about to involve himself a little more…deeply.
Brigitte’s head tipped back when Vince reached behind the base of her skull and pressed the switch. He thought of putting her activator where the clitoris would be, but there wouldn’t be enough room for the receptors there to effectively mimic an erogenous zone, and he’d be liable to turn her off repeatedly during what he thought of as ‘playtime.’ Her eyes flitted open and she gasped as if she had been holding her breath for a while or someone had touched her in a very sensitive place, and that made Vince wonder if doing something as mundane as clipping her toenails would come off sexy.
If she had nails that grew, that is.
“Can you hear me, Brigitte?” asked Vince, leaning toward her face.
She moaned, sounding slightly drugged, or like someone allowed to wake late on a Sunday morning when the sunlight was streaming through the curtains. That was how he specifically programmed her to wake up, although if her model ever went to production, their owners could program them to be much more dominant, or even perky morning people, and Vince could see a large segment of morning risers wanting exactly that.
“Who are you?” sighed Brigitte. “Where am I?”
“I’m Vince, Brigitte,” he answered. “And you’re in my workshop.”
Of Devils & Deviants: An Anthology of Erotic Horror Page 22