Unchained Melody

by S. K Munt

  ‘You’re distracting me,’ he growled, removing his hand from her mouth and pinning her arms up above her head. One ankle curved around hers and he maneuvered it to the side, spreading her open on the blanket beneath them. ‘I’ve been waiting a long time for this Callie, so don’t think you’re going to rush me.’ He prodded her with his hips and she wilted beneath him, feeling so vulnerable to be almost naked on the rainforest floor while he was still tucked safely away from her grasp.

  ‘Oh- !’ She went to call his name out again but then his lips were on hers.

  ‘Ssh,’ his voice was muffled against her lips. ‘You don’t want to be disturbed until I’ve had my way with you, do you?’

  Callie shook her head, and Ryan’s lips parted hers again, kissing her deeply, with even more desire than before. He held her wrists with one hand and slid the other down her arms again, his fingertips leaving streaks of bliss over her collarbone before cupping one breast in his hot hand, catching the bud of her nipple between the webbing of two fingers and working her in a circle, the palm cupping her now heavy breast tender, the fingers clamping and squeezing over her aureole sharply, perfectly. Callie was panting, trying to lift her hips to his, to encourage the connection, and then Ryan’s hand swept down her, circling his fingers over her mound once more. Callie gasped and jerked wishing suddenly for her supernatural strength back so she could shove Ryan free, roll him onto his back and take what she wanted.

  And then one finger was easing inside her, soft, probing at every millimeter as though he’d never touched anything so precious. Callie sucked in her breath and Ryan groaned in a guttural way, like a man damned and then he was sliding his digit in and out of her, pressing along her inner walls, opening her, leaving no part of her unexplored. Callie whimpered into his mouth and then he was fucking her mouth with his tongue while his long silken finger echoed the sentiment within her sex; spiraling, carving a path for his entrance until she was so open that she needed to be filled. Callie’s stomach contracted and then she was coming apart. Ryan was possessing her, leaving her with nothing to hold onto after.

  ‘Yes!’ Ryan groaned into her mouth. ‘Baby… come for me again…’ he rubbed out the end of her orgasm with his thumb over her clit and Callie jerked beneath him, almost lifting off the ground with the sheer violence of her pleasure reflexes.

  Baby, Baby, baby… be my baby tonight, baby it’s you, baby you rock my world, baby we can make it last all night, baby, baby, baby! Callie felt electrified as the word was sifted from every other word in her memories and that was when Callie the human felt Calliope the Muse shimmer and merge as one single entity at last as she remembered who she truly was above it all: Calliope was ‘Baby.’ She was almost every baby that had ever been sung of, screamed of, drummed to or yearned for. She’d been known by so many different names over the ages but when she’d first been called Baby in song… that was when Callie’s hold on the world had gone from tentative to iron-tight. It didn’t make everything else she’d ever inspired, her dances, her lyrics, her ballads, her pop melodies worth any less but it made Calliope the Goddess more.

  Calliope grinned; Ryan was incredible at this. Ryan was the best lover she’d ever had- but she was better, and now that she remembered, he was about to find out! She bent, forcing her hand between his fly and his supple, taut skin and gripping the base of him, sliding her hand firmly, dotingly up every delicious inch of what he owed her.

  ‘Mmm…’ She clenched around his fingers as she caressed him, knowing that he had a weakness for words, the kind of words that would play in his head forever, like lyrics. ‘You wanted to give me this as a virgin? God... you would have had to slip in inch, by inch…it would have taken days to break me in… would you have kept me in that shed for days Ryan? Working me over with this beautiful, dangerous...?’ Ryan stiffened, and when her palm slid over the head of his erection and formed a taut ring with her thumb and forefinger, she heard his teeth snap together as her hand filled with his warm, wet release. Then suddenly; Ryan was the one jerking, ramming himself into her hand. He shoved his face into the blanket beside her neck and bellowed his satisfaction while Callie grinned triumphantly into his shoulder.

  And then he was in motion again. Ryan’s teeth clamped her nipple as his hand tore his velcro fly open. Callie hooked her finger through the tie above and yanked so that the weight of his still-hard cock fell from his pants and wetly onto her thigh. Then she scooped her hips to the side, flung one leg around the back of his ass and then tightened her calf muscle around him, jerking him up and into her.

  Ryan let out a shout of utter elation and curled his spine like a scorpion, driving himself deep into the core of her. He pushed up on either side of her shoulders, locking himself in place, gaped at her like she was surreal, closed his eyes and then retreated only to plunge up and into her again.

  ‘Fuck!’ His face contorted like he was in agony and he rocked again, hard, vicious. Perfect. Callie felt the muscles deep inside her relax to accept his length and then clamp greedily around it, every nerve ending in her body throbbing with satisfaction. ‘Baby yes!’ He grunted and drove forward again. ‘Yes!’

  His excitement was incinerating her. Callie moved her heel, using it to catch the shorts pooled around his upper thighs and shove them down to his ankles. Ryan shifted, kicking them off and then rammed into her again and Callie’s chest rose off the ground so that she was looking behind him into the blurry forest beyond. It was such a beautiful clear night and Ryan now clasped her tightly against him, keeping them pressed together, suspended while he rolled his length up and into her, panting hot breaths against her neck. She should have been freezing with her damp hair and bikini top still fastened around her ribs but his body kept hers feverishly warm.

  And then he moved, pulling her knee up to her side and scooping his hips lower, forcing the friction back over the sweet spot inside her while his taut sac slapped against where they were joined. Callie moaned blissfully, curling around him, reaching between the back of his thighs and stretching until she was cupping his testicles in her hand before squeezing gently.

  ‘Oh God Callie…!’ Ryan’s tone was threatening, his expression stricken as they both realized he was going to come sooner than he thought again. She smiled wickedly at him, feeling resplendent, but as his thrusts became more demanding, so did Callie’s own need. She lifted her hips to meet his every thrust and when she felt the tension in her abdomen begin to melt again, she rolled Ryan’s balls in her palm and milked another sharp cry out of him, jerking up to not only to get herself to the summit of her pleasure but to muffle his ecstatic groan with her lips as his cock twitched and shot another hot stream inside her sex. His thrusts became mindless, relentless and Callie almost blacked out as her exhausted human body tried to sate the appetite of the Muse under the musician. But Ryan’s mouth, his warbling moans and his tongue stroking hers kept her alert enough to realize that Ryan had slipped out of her and was now flipping her onto her stomach.

  ‘I knew it,’ he panted, raising her to her knees. ‘I knew we’d fit together like this…’

  Callie rose, wrapping her arms around the tree trunk and hugging it tightly when she felt Ryan’s hands shift to grasp her hips while his knee urged her legs apart. When he slid into her this time, his passage was slick and his reach even deeper. Callie’s body purred in response. ‘Ohhhh yes, Ry…’ she pushed back into him and felt him growing harder still, longer. ‘Harder! Deeper!’

  A hand lightly slapped her backside. ‘That’s right, Ryan.’ He eased in to her again and then Callie felt a familiar sensation, as a hat was tugged snugly onto her head. Not as she usually wore it, but backwards. Her heart skipped a guilty beat when she realized Ryan’s game but his heartless lust, his need to mark her as his own was so similar to her own desire to possess him entirely that she could not protest- she owed him one true victory. One moment he could reflect back on and tell himself: ‘She loved me,’ even though she would never get to say it to him. ‘You’r
e not my groupie, Cal. And you’re not just my best friend,’ her hair was pulled back over her shoulder and Ryan used it to pull her up and back. ‘You’re my soul mate.’ He whispered. ‘And this is where you belong.’

  His words made her tremble with need and then stiffen in fear as her heart took too long to beat its next. She felt so guilty, on Ardos’s behalf, who actually owned that title, on Ryan’s, who had no comprehension of what the term actually entailed, and for Hunter, who would weep to know what she was doing and feeling with Ryan in the foliage right under his nose. Because what she was feeling was-

  ‘Callie, I-’

  Afraid that a declaration of love from him again, now while she was so vulnerable to his every touch, his every move would break her, Callie eased off him and spun, knocking Ryan back to the ground, clamping a hand over his mouth as she eased him backwards, straddled his hips and impaled herself on him. His eyes bugged and her heart found its beat again, making her forget that the forest was silent, without song, and yet she was happy as she could ever remember being. And she was trying not to think about what that meant.

  ‘I belong on top for a while…’ she whispered silkily, delighting in the way his eyes rolled back into his head as she sank to his hilt. ‘And in about two minutes…’ she circled her hips, grinding onto him, and then rolled sharply, once, twice, thrice until he was grunting against her hand wildly. ‘You’re going to belong inside my mouth.’

  Ryan’s gripped her hips and forced her to repeat the motion, his head flinging back, the muscles in his body tensing, flexing in the dappled shadows of the frigid night. ‘Callie I’m going to die if you do that to me! I can’t even think about that while you’re-’

  ‘Then don’t think.’ Callie leaned forward and swept her lips across his. ‘Just exist in this moment with me Ry and never forget it.’ She rested her head on his chest, listened to his heartbeat and let a solitary tear fall down her cheekbone as she curled their bodies together again. She’d never abuse her powers again. She’d never cross another line. As carried away as she knew she could get, as much as she knew the music could sweep her up and throw her to the wind, Calliope knew that she’d sooner part with it, then risk someone taking her memory of this moment again for the triumph of another.

  And please God, she added silently. Don’t forget me.

  *

  Ryan awoke from the sweetest dream, where he was holding Callie’s hand, and she was brushing kisses all over his face. He could feel her eyelashes brush his skin, hear her angelic hum in his ear. He could see their future roll out before them on a cloudless sky. Callie in a wedding dress, something light and ethereal, Callie singing along while he strummed out a happy song, their dark-haired, rosy cheeked children basking in the harmony their union created. Callie older, but still so beautiful, her raven hair streaked with grey, her wrinkled hand still in his, her papery voice folding lyrics like origami and making him feel as young as the day he’d first lain eyes on her, as buoyant, as he circled her around some Bingo hall to one of Hunter’s hit songs. The music was on a record, and Ryan joined in, content to be in chorus, not having for one moment regretted the trade he had made- the microphone for the girl.

  He shifted on the dew-dampened rug, the memory of her warm body still flushing his skin. But when he moved her arm to nestle her against him, to whisper how deeply he loved her, how much he would give just to stay in this moment forever, his hand landed on crackling leaves and damp soil.

  Ryan’s eyes opened to the sight of grey light peeking through a million leaves of the canopy above him, and knew that his world had just rotated off its axis, at least for him. Because although half of the blanket had been folded over him protectively, and though the beanie was back on his head, and though his shorts had been pulled back up onto hips- he was colder than he’d ever been in his life.

  Because he was alone.

  Ryan curled, dragged one cold hand over his eyes and sobbed.

  29.

  When Hunter had finished tuning his guitar, he put it down gingerly and jumped up, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet, needing to wear in his cool new jeans, which were perfectly frayed and ripped but still a little constrictive from their ‘newness.’

  ‘Man you do not even want to see how packed it is out there!’ Nick came in, looking awfully cool for someone who usually went out of their way to look awful and called it art. ‘Guy at the gate reckons almost two and a half thousand tickets sold and that’s almost capacity. I mean… can we just take a moment and bask?’

  Hunter grinned, but his facial features felt like they’d been screwed on too tight to let the worth of the smile he felt like smiling shape his face. He was somewhere on the nervous scale between hysterical laughter and terrified sobbing. His fingers were tapping a million chords that did not go together on his upper thigh, and he didn’t know how he was supposed to get some good support breaths going when his belly had been invaded by the sissiest, most fluttering pink butterflies he’d ever had the pleasure of swallowing.

  ‘I know it’s… this is an epic moment.’ He paced the small backstage room, which was actually a locker room. The stadium only had one ‘real’ dressing room space and TFITR were up there, not pacing or bouncing, not stressing or farting pink butterflies but probably playing poker as they had been all afternoon and knocking back their free liquor carelessly, knowing they’d rock more for caring less.

  Then again, TFITR had done this a million times by then. Hell, they’d done it in the U. K, the U. S, Japan, Canada and and New Zealand, where they’d hit number one in every chart. And once this album was released after their tour ended, they’d probably go on to other countries, never remembering a single name of one of their opening acts, and not being expected to.

  Some day, Hunter vowed that when he was big enough to have some pitiful little local band open for him, he’d go down and shake their hands, ask their names, lock them in the room with their agent for an hour or so. The fact that TFITR had not so much as waved or belched in their direction when they’d met earlier that day was adding to Hunter’s fear that people just didn’t care about Lonesome October and might never come to.

  But then Hunter swallowed, and he gazed past the row of lockers towards the door Nick had shut behind him. There would be one face in the audience that cared. One face that would hear every note he played, every word he sang, and every thing he fucked up. She wouldn’t care that he fucked up for her sake, but she’d hurt for him. It didn’t matter if Callie had once again disappeared without a trace the night before, seemingly soaked up into the rainforest like some woodland nymph, he knew she would come. He hoped she would be front row. And given the way she’d used and discarded Ryan, Hunter was hoping that the next time he came backstage, she’d be waiting for him without being asked first. That she’d come to her senses.

  Guilt and regret and pain burned through Hunter’s stomach, killing the butterflies. When Callie and Ryan had first disappeared into the darkness and not returned, he’d know damn well why and the grief had made him curl up near the rapids like an immovable gargoyle, waiting for the moment they emerged hand in hand and shattered him for good. He’d kept the music off and when hours had lapsed and they still had not returned and the others were fed up trying to get him to shake it off or leave with them, Hunter had died a little more.

  Then the sun had begun to rise, tinting the leaves of the trees a dark lilac, and Ryan had emerged from the shadows alone, looking every bit as shattered as Hunter felt; he’d had bruised and swollen lips, fingernail marks staining his olive flesh with red streaks in uncountable places and leaf-litter embedded in his hair. Ryan had been exhausted, spent, devastated and utterly fucked. And when his eyes met Hunter’s across the gorge, his face had collapsed, and he’d caught himself on a rock while ankle-deep in icy water and cried: ‘She left me! I fell asleep in her arms and when I woke-’ and then he’d said no more because he’d sagged into the rapids, balled up, pressed his head between his knees and sobbed.


  Hunter had wanted to know exactly what they’d done to pass eight hours in the rainforest alone, and he’d wanted to pick Ryan up by the scruff of his neck and punch him in the guts until he knew Hunter’s pain, but there was no point because they were both going to lose her forever anyway. Hunter had toyed with the idea of telling Ryan about Callie’s prognosis, but he didn’t- because not only had he promised to keep Callie’s secret, but because letting Ryan feel rage for a while was preferable to fast-tracking him to feeling desolate, as Hunter did knowing that Callie was not running away but slipping away. And Hunter suspected that Callie had treated Ryan so harshly for that exact reason: to cure him of his dream before reality could serve it cold.

  As it had to Hunter.

  In the locker room, Hunter’s gaze searched until he located Ryan. His best mate was exactly as he’d been all day- his long arms folded around his long legs, his long face resting on his knees, his brilliant eyes as dull and vacant as stale blue paint turning grey. At Rathe’s insistence, Ryan had showered, dressed in clothes Hunter had picked out for him; the combo of leather jeans and a white cuffed shirt looking nauseatingly good despite Ryan’s wan complexion and fingering Hunter’s envy like guitar strings, and had even gone through a warm up with them and sounded, once again, sickeningly good for a man bereft.

  But the moment they’d been shooed offstage so the ‘real’ band could warm up, Ryan’s voice had gone silent again, his shoulders curling around the grief he was holding close to his chest. Hunter shared Ryan’s grief, and yet the promise of performing was helping him keep his head up, getting his heart to get from one heavy thud to the next. He’d shed endless tears for Callie Clay for weeks but tonight, he would sing for her, and her alone, and hope that it made her feel as he did.

  There was a knock on the door, low voices whispering and rising above the crackle of the crowd beyond.