Love, Blood, and Sanctuary

by Brenda Murphy

  “Take me home,” Izzy said.

  Chapter Nine

  Izzy and Marun left the table hand in hand. Joined palm to palm with the glowing heat between them that warmed Izzy with every step. She’d missed this.

  As they walked through the café, she realized there was no real front door. The door with the bell above it led into the fenced, lamplit courtyard. Marun led her past the café’s counter to a set of wide double doors with ornate looking handles. The doors were pushed open as they approached and a tall woman, white haired and with glowing pale eyes, stepped past them, giving them a nod of acknowledgment.

  “Stay close,” Marun murmured and held her hand tighter. “It’s crowded tonight.”

  What?

  No sooner had the thought come than a thud of music overwhelmed her. Loud, sensual, vibrant. Startled, she jerked her head to look behind her at the double doors slowly drifting closed to hide the coffee shop.

  No way could this music have been playing the whole time they were in the coffee shop and Izzy didn’t hear it. But this wasn’t a party that just started. At four in the morning, maybe five, the crowd was still peaking. All around them, gorgeously dressed and undressed people leaned into one another, talking or laughing, dancing where they stood or on the packed dance floor nearby. The scent of sweat and perfume and clove cigarettes teased Izzy’s nose. Voices rose and fell in conversation while the music poured over them. Izzy felt the deep bass of it in her chest. Melodic. Intense. Throbbing like a desirous heart. Although she wasn’t in the dancing mood, the beat tugged at her hips.

  “What’s this place?” she shouted at Marun who kept walking, gently pushing her way through the thick crowd and keeping Izzy close behind her with their linked hands.

  “This is Sanctuary.” She didn’t shout but Izzy still heard her loud and clear.

  “Is this a coffee shop or a club?”

  “Yes.” Marun smiled back at her. “And much more.” She gestured to a long wall that held several evenly spaced doors. “Meetings rooms, sex club, restaurant. And those are just the parts I’ve seen.”

  Sex club?

  Izzy narrowed her gaze at Marun through the gloom broken now and then with flashing strobe lights. Did she come here for sex when they were together?

  A pretty man with glitter all over his bare chest pushed past them, apparently in a rush for the dance floor, shoving hard into Izzy. When she stumbled, he gave her a smile of apology and a shouted offer of a free drink she could collect later. His boyfriend or whoever squeezed Izzy’s arm as he passed, laughing, too, and then he followed in the shimmering boy’s wake. “It’s a madhouse tonight,” Marun said and swept her into the heat of her body.

  With her skin thrumming from their renewed contact, Izzy clung shamelessly.

  It wasn’t long before they tumbled out into the cool early morning air and onto what could have been any New York City side street. Outside the thick metal door of Sanctuary, the city was quiet. Not even a police siren sounded to break the dark tranquility.

  Izzy shivered from the sudden temperature change and, in search of warmth, shoved her hands into her jeans pockets. It was colder now than it had been when she’d gone into work earlier that night. Her shoulders felt tight, hiked up as they were nearly to her ears. “Do you come here a lot?” she asked, hoping she was being subtle.

  The amusement on Marun’s face said she wasn’t. Her wife shrugged off her leather jacket and held it for Izzy to slip into. Warm leather that smelled like verdant, growing things enveloped her. A sigh left her lips without permission.

  “I did come here before, yes,” Marun said, and managed to look only a little smug. “But not since you and I have been together. Since it’s a safe place for people like me—people who aren’t quite human—it used to be a kind of home away from my family. Now, you are my home.”

  Before Marun had even finished talking, hot emotion clogged the back of Izzy’s throat. Declarations like this had hooked her to Marun from the very beginning. Words that hummed with poetry and meaning Marun dropped between them in the midst of the most mundane things. There had never been any doubt about how Marun felt, but Izzy did wonder if those feelings had come and then left with the tide of passing years.

  Now, she knew they hadn’t gone anywhere.

  “Tell me about your family,” she said to Marun.

  They walked through the night toward the cottage. Izzy was in no hurry to arrive. It was just good to walk beside the woman she had always loved, their destination far away yet inevitable, the truths and words that mattered bare between them at last. Their footsteps fell in sync, and words flowed easily between them as if the three years apart had never happened.

  “We’re different,” Marun said. “Mother has always been the rebel in her family, and she encouraged us to be the same. But after a long time, it just felt like we were fighting against each other.”

  “I wish my sister would try to tell me what to do with my life,” Izzy said with a low laugh, thinking about Rose who had too many problems of her own to be lecturing anybody on how to live. “It would be a short ass conversation.”

  They walked for what felt like no time at all, passing through the city, under bright streetlights, through parks. The sky slowly brightened.

  “My mother is still worshiped by many, but they don’t know about us. We have been lost to stories and to time, the nine of us who, the last time I read, were supposed to have died in some sort of accident or deliberate homicide, which happens among us from time to time.”

  “I thought none of you could be killed.” Izzy frowned.

  “Well, it is difficult but, if there’s one thing living all this time has taught me it’s that nothing is impossible.”

  “I’ll remember that next time I see your brother.”

  Marun laughed. “That’s one thing I have always loved about you. Your ability to make me laugh, even about the most serious things.”

  “Your whole life is so serious, no wonder you want to keep me around.”

  They arrived at the cottage when the sun was just beginning to come up. “Oh damn, I left my purse at the bakery. It has my keys in it.”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t have a spare key stashed here somewhere. You were always doing that at our old apartment. No matter how many times I told you how dangerous it was.”

  Izzy sidestepped the question. “And who would have dared to break into our place, where an actual superhuman with flames shooting out of her hands lives?” She climbed the short steps and picked up the tiny fake turtle squatting to the left of the welcome mat. The spare key was inside the belly of the turtle, right where she left it.

  “Very secure,” Marun said, rolling her eyes. “Obviously very secret.”

  “It’s so obvious, no one would ever think to look there.” The door opened with a click and Izzy stepped inside.

  For a moment, she thought she smelled a staleness, one that wasn’t there before, but it had only been a few hours since she left. Then Marun stepped up behind her, gently crowding her.

  Izzy jumped. “God, your cheek is cold.” Then she remembered and felt like a selfish ass. “Shit, I have your jacket. Of course, you’re cold.” She grabbed a handful of Marun’s T-shirt and dragged her inside before shutting the door.

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. Temperatures don’t affect me like they do you.” Smiling in that subtle way of hers, Maran allowed herself to get tugged into the house anyway, and she stumbled against Izzy, their bodies bumping together, once then twice, in the coolness of the living room. The faint stale smell of the house disappeared beneath the perfume of Marun’s natural scent.

  “You always smell so amazing. Why is that?”

  “Because you want me to.”

  Hands still caught in the fabric of Marun’s T-shirt, Izzy looked up into smiling dark eyes. The pulse fluttered in her throat. “That’s a genuinely weird answer. How can what I want affect the way you smell?” Izzy leaned into her wife, aware that the long
night was catching up with her, leaving her thoughts a little floaty while her body felt electrified and far too wired to sleep. “Are you trying to get mysterious on me now that I know your biggest secret?”

  “Never,” Marun said. She lazily ran a thumb along Izzy’s jaw and Izzy shivered deliciously from the sensation. “Don’t you ever notice that when you say you like or want something, it appears in the house, or you’re suddenly in a position to get it?” She spoke in the present tense, as if their time apart never happened. “I would remake an entire world just for you, Isabella. Including myself.”

  Izzy drew in a sharp breath.

  That was both flattering and frightening. The words also conveyed a depth of feeling, a tenderness, that Marun had only ever expressed before with her body, and with the things she did for Izzy.

  “Then let me smell the real you, not what you think I want.”

  “Of course.”

  The scent around her, of citrus and tropical fruit, slowly bled away, leaving the barest essence of green and fertile things, the light perfume of a forest after the rain.

  It was wilder than the smell she’d always associated with Marun, not sweet at all. She liked it.

  “How’s that?” Marun’s hand slipped under the jacket Izzy wore, cool and firm between the leather and her thin T-shirt.

  “It’s…it’s good. Really good,” Izzy said and cursed that her voice came out sounding so weak.

  It was small, this thing with Marun’s perfume, but it led her mind toward larger doubts, as if she didn’t have enough of those. Was that what they’d been all this time—a relationship built on illusions? Izzy started to pull away but, with an arm around her waist, Marun snared her back.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I…” Should she even say? No, fuck it. They were supposed to be talking to each other now. Izzy took a breath. “Since the beginning, I’ve only ever wanted you. The real you. Not a curated idea of what you think a lover—my lover—should be. Is any part of the woman I married real?”

  Cool hands gripped Izzy’s. “Everything between us is real. This thing, it’s just perfume. Something humans do all the time to make themselves more appealing. That’s all. Nothing more. No more trickery than that.”

  She didn’t want to believe it. She shouldn’t. There were so many lies between them.

  “I may have kept things secret in the past, but I’ve never lied to you,” Marun said. “Not about my feelings, not about anything.”

  Her fingers were light now, this time underneath the shirt and directly on Izzy’s skin. The contact sped her pulse and she leaned into Marun and her wild, beautiful scent. “Earlier you said we didn’t know each other. I wanted you to be wrong, but in some ways, maybe you weren’t. We talked the night we met, but it wasn’t an exchange like it should’ve been. I was so captivated by you that I just took in everything you had to give, asking for more and more. And maybe we just got used to things being that way, me taking and you giving.”

  Agreeing would be easy, but it wasn’t true.

  “No, that’s not what I meant. You’ve always given. Maybe yes, we didn’t truly exchange life stories, but don’t suddenly paint yourself as the selfish one here.”

  Damn, wasn’t she supposed to stay angry at Marun for all the lies? And now here she was defending her, against herself.

  “So, what do we do with this?” Marun asked softly.

  Izzy bowed her head, rested her forehead against the soft slope of Marun’s shoulder. Her place of comfort, a place she’d missed. “We don’t have to do anything right now. I just want to breathe you in and stop—” She let out a breath. “—stop thinking.”

  She just wanted to feel something good.

  The soft hand under her shirt swept over her back, making slow and sensual strokes on her skin that made her quiver and accelerated the thick pulsebeat she already felt between her thighs. She licked her lips.

  “Can we go to the bedroom now?” Even to her own ears, she sounded breathless and desperate.

  “Whatever you want, love,” Marun said.

  No. Izzy didn’t want it to be like that. She wanted this only if it was something they both wanted. If it only came from her, then it wasn’t theirs to have, it was something she was doing to Marun, and they had never been like that. They had always been synchronicity and mutuality, desire meeting desire, love meeting love. And that was what she craved now.

  She met her wife’s eyes. “Do you want me?”

  “What kind of question is that?” Before Izzy could answer, Marun put a finger to her parted lips and the light touch sparked a flash of heat Izzy felt down to her toes and every place in between. “I always want you. The moment I laid eyes on you, shivering in your little black dress outside that gallery, I wanted you. A craving for you took hold of my appetites and nothing’s been the same for me after that. Since then, all I did was wait for your desire to catch up with mine.”

  Izzy caught her breath and released it in a trembling sigh. “Then show me.”

  If there was one lesson she should have learned from having Marun in her life it was never to give Marun any kind of challenge. A light flared to life in her love’s eyes, golden and warm.

  “I love you, Isabella.” Marun slid that warm hand down her back again, and lower, to cup her ass through the thin jeans in a blatantly possessive way.

  It was as if Marun was reminding her of this love, reminding her of her feelings, before she tore Izzy apart in a way that might seem to negate that love.

  Her breath shivered as she drew it deeply into her lungs. She was ready.

  Between that moment and the next, it felt like they moved from the coolness of the living room into Izzy’s bedroom. The curtains were open, inviting in the blush of dawn from the backyard. It was like the first night and morning they were together, when they stayed at the little café until sunrise and then walked across the city, drunk on each other, before ending up in Marun’s penthouse apartment. In her bed.

  Now, a cooling breeze slipped through the open window to wash over Izzy’s face.

  “I missed you so much,” she confessed.

  “I know. And I’m sorry.” Warm breath teased her lips and she gasped in pleasure at that light and stomach-tightening sensation.

  Had she always been so sensitive there?

  Anchored at Marun’s waist, her fingers flexed and dug into warm skin through her T-shirt. No, not warm, Marun was so hot, and all Izzy wanted was to burn from her love’s touch.

  Seeking, she stretched her neck for the kiss she desperately needed. Their lips met and she moaned at the perfection of it.

  God, it had been so long.

  Light touch, soft flesh, a huff of breath, and the heat of them coming together at last. A groan slid from her, desperate and probably too loud for what was just a simple kiss, but she didn’t give a damn. This was what she’d been waiting so long for. This connection. This heat. This woman.

  Gasping, she dug her fingers into Marun’s shoulders, stretching up onto her toes, and hungrily kissed back. Their tongues met and explored as, groaning deeply, Marun dug her hands into Izzy’s ass and lifted her up, helping her to wrap her legs around Marun’s waist.

  She’d been starving, and now here was all the food she could ever want, spread out to her in a smorgasbord.

  “I missed you,” Izzy gasped again, closed her eyes to better savor the wild lust running rampant through her body and leaving heat and wetness in its wake. “I missed us.” She tightened her legs around Marun, squeezed her thighs and held on, her center wet and clenching around the tampon she wished wasn’t there. Not today when she wanted to feel everything without the distraction of her period. As tempting as it was to let Marun feast on her the way they were both used to, something inside her held back.

  For now, though, this was enough. The sensation of Marun against her, hot and whispering in her ear, hands digging into her ass and ratcheting up her arousal to the next level. She’d always had a thing for when Marun
grabbed her ass like that, something about the sure and firm way her fingers dug into her flesh went straight to her clit and made her lose her mind.

  “Do you remember when I used to fuck you standing up?” Marun gasped against her ear, and the glowing ball of desire growing in Izzy’s belly became a bright star, a meteor threatening to immolate her from the inside out. “I loved how you grabbed my shoulders and spread your thighs wide like you were opening your entire world just for me.” Her hot breath panted into Izzy’s neck. “We can’t do that here—”

  No, they couldn’t. Every wall space in the bedroom was taken by the too-much she’d packed from her old life.

  “—but when we have the space, I’m going to do that again, my sweet wife.” A warm hand wormed between them, caressing Izzy through her jeans, pressing into her clit in long and firm strokes while Izzy sucked on Marun’s tongue and moved sinuously in her sure grasp, hunting for friction against her hard, tingling nipples. “Fuck you hard against the wall and make you scream my name, slide down to the floor and eat your hot pussy after making you come.” Izzy shuddered and bucked even as she and Marun swayed, a tower of arms and legs and desire, toward the bed. “Would you like that, love?”

  All Izzy could do with the only brain cells she had left functioning was moan. She grunted as they tumbled onto the bed, Marun on her back under her, Izzy crouched over her lap and leaning back to yank her own shirt and bra off.

  “Ease up, love.” Marun sat up, using her stomach muscles alone, to wrestle with the buttons of Izzy’s jeans. “I want this off too.”

  Yes.

  She moved back enough to shove off her loose jeans, underwear, shoes, and socks, and by the time she got back to the bed, Marun was already splendidly naked against the pale sheets, and reaching up for her.

  “I can’t go slow.” Izzy moaned as thumbs brushed across her nipples. “I want you too much. You made me wait too long.”

  “You don’t have to wait any longer,” Marun rasped.

  She flipped Izzy over on her back and Izzy let loose a soft scream of surprise at the sudden move and immediately groaned from the stroke of fingers between her legs, unerringly against her thick and wanting clit. Izzy felt it then. A gentle tug on her tampon string. But Marun, after meeting her eyes to read what was there, only moved it out of the way before leaning down for a devouring kiss. Their mouths slotted wetly together.