by Justin Kairo
Saturday afternoon with the Roederers being themselves. Juliet and I pretending. Which gets easier for me. And then Saturday night when the Roederers are called away suddenly, the way I knew they would. They took off and left us alone for the rest of the weekend. Not worried because they were sure I was safe. A nice boy from a nice family. A suitable escort for their daughter. They couldn’t have picked out a more appropriate boyfriend themselves. They said good-bye and they left. They were not worried at all. But me. I was afraid. Terrified.
Juliet and I were alone.
Chapter 14
I hold Juliet’s hand because it’s safe. I don’t want to give Mr. Paisley anything to worry about, even though he isn’t here anymore.
But I have reasons of my own for worrying. I don’t know where Juliet and I are headed and I’m afraid to think about it. I’m not ready.
I continue to play the pretend game. Kissing Juliet on the cheek and keeping my fingers entwined in hers.
Aren’t They The Perfect Couple! That’s what love looks like! A wonderful boy and girl and see how handsome they are, smiling and making eyes at each other. They belong together, and I can’t imagine either of them with anyone else!
“It’s good to be alone,” I said.
She followed my lead the way she had from the beginning. “I’ve been hoping for this moment all weekend.”
“It’s nice to be by ourselves.”
“That’s all I ever wanted,” she said.
Juliet and I had been together for centuries, but we still hadn’t figured out who we were in this incarnation. We’d just met, and it wasn’t easy getting to know each other all over again for the very first time.
We’d made love tens of thousands of times but not even once in this current life. When we do, is it going to be different than it used to be? Do I even remember the distant past accurately or have I buried it for a while until the present takes shape?
And what about the more recent past that Juliet doesn’t know about? The one with Lanny that I am trying to forget. I have no idea what frightens me more: forgetting or remembering.
“Dance?” I said
She smiled. “I’d love to. Something old fashioned—”
“Sinatra?”
She nodded and I took her into my arms. I put my cheek against hers and smelled her faint lilac scent.
I moved my hand to bring her even closer to me and suddenly my fingers touched the back of her neck where I had pricked her flesh with a pin. At that moment, with that caress, the present disappeared and I no longer had any reason to continue fighting.
• • •
Moments from the past came back as if I were staring at events through a hazy blue mist. Memories and feelings returned suddenly but also slowly. Very slowly. Too much to remember all at once. Time hitches, starts and stops, and not everything reappears at the same time.
Maybe the music ended or perhaps we just stopped hearing the Sinatra sounds, but the dancing changed. We moved instead to new and different music that both of us heard and we let the notes take us wherever the cosmos wanted us to go.
She moved the bottom half of her body from side to side and forward and back. This gave the illusion that intense passion was just beginning, and yet she was not making love to me but to a force.
At the same time, I was also making love to a force. Forward and back and side to side. Just the same as Juliet.
We both sensed at once that the two of us were the force.
We went outside and continued. We left the living room behind but the music followed and kept us company after we departed. Today I can still hear the sounds. Flutes and harps and instruments I had never heard anywhere else until we began pouring ourselves into the dance.
I took her white blouse in my fingers and, while our bodies were still in motion, I ripped the cloth. Pulled it apart in my hands and the sound became part of the music.
She unhooked her bra, took it off, held it in the air and looped it over my head. As we continued moving our feet with the rhythm, she pulled me toward her with the bra.
She slipped off her skirt and underpants and was naked. Nothing between us except skin. And my clothes.
She was naked and I was dressed. I knew then that was exactly the way it had to be. Now I understand the reason. I am the high priest and the last one to remove clothes. I am the final person to be naked.
I broke off a branch from a tree and tapped the ground in time with the beat of music that was getting louder for both of us. I held the branch in my hand. Waiting. Ready.
Naked, she lay on her back and moved from side to side feeling the rhythm. She rolled over three times and then, on her stomach, she crawled along the ground using only her elbows to move forward. with her body, she made a nine foot circle on the ground, and when it was complete, I motioned with my hand and she stood. Which she would have done even without my signal.
We faced each other. Very slowly, she took off my clothes. I let her undress me until I was naked in front of her. She looked at my skin and my chest and the hair on my chest and the large stiff member between my legs that was longing for her and for the perfect place between her legs that was waiting for me.
When I was finally revealed to her, a soft and almost frightening sound of pleasure emerged from between her lips as she shielded her eyes from a blinding light produced by the force.
I lowered myself a little and she began to lick. Starting with my forehead. She went to my eyes, my cheeks, my mouth, my ears. She covered my entire face with her tongue.
When she was finished, I stood at my full height and she moved down. She licked my neck, my shoulders, my chest. Her mouth moved to my stomach and then her final destination. She lingered between my legs.
She licked the bottom of my erection and then the top and finally her tongue circled its round tip. She held it in her mouth and, inch by inch, her lips moved ahead until they reached my pubic hair.
I took the branch that was still in my fingers, gently cracked it against the back of her legs and dropped it on the ground.
We both stood and faced each other and heard a new kind of music with a different beat. We hopped. First on the right leg and then on the left. Three times. We clapped our hands together and jumped in the air. Three times.
My open fingers moved to her buttocks and massaged her there. Three times. We were face to face and touched each other’s bodies with our hands loud enough to make the sound of flesh against flesh, and the noise was in rhythm to our music.
The rest is a blur. I remember the blood and the moans and the screams from both of us. Delight in our throats as we accepted the blinding truth that we were one with Merlin. Our bodies were slipping into each other as if we were built to be together. The taste of her was in my mouth and the silence and stillness filled the air.
I understood then that from the afternoon we discovered each other again on the bus, she was leading me to this moment, unaware she was returning me to the arms of Merlin. Even though she did not know yet who Merlin was and what his arms felt like.
She was leading and I wanted to follow with a passion more intense than our lives. She was leading and I was making her lead, even though I had been afraid to be back with Lanny again. In an unnatural world (once the only natural world I knew).
I could feel now in my heart there was no other life I could accept. No happiness in denial. But I didn’t expect the incredible feeling of relief that took me over. I was not prepared to be back home again where I belonged.
In the stillness that followed, I looked at Juliet on the ground. I was not alone anymore because she was with me and, for the first time, I understood where she had been leading me.
And she now knew how much she had needed me. I was the only one who could have unleashed the deepest secrets of her body and mind. Only I could have helped her find what she had been searching for.
Before this evening, we had wandered. Taken a long journey together from a distant past until we reached this destina
tion. At last she discovered what she needed to know. She had found her identity and had finally become what she was destined to be.
Like me. A possessor of sacred knowledge. Separate and apart. Ever alone and always together.
Chapter 15
And thus it began for Juliet and me. Joined in blood and pain and pleasure. Bound by the most sacred vows in the universe. After the first night came the exploration and we never stopped learning. For the two of us, mind and body and spirit were together in an unfamiliar place.
We touched each other with strange words. Made odd noises. Delivered chants. Exchanged inverted syllables and responded to them by trembling. We noticed the way sounds made our skin dance.
We studied an alien world, and the more we searched, the more there was to discover. We were still finding out about our craft. Surprising phrases entered my thoughts and I wondered where they were coming from. They didn’t seem to originate with Lanny but in a far off past of my own. Juliet and I tapped our instincts and our memories of other lives. Sometimes I unearthed memories of my own current life—which Juliet could not do because I was her beginning.
Juliet responded to me with her own words and actions. Sometimes they were answers to questions of mine that I had not yet asked. We were still getting used to each other, but it was clear that we belonged together. No doubts. We were under each other’s spells and two parts of a single creature.
We had more than love. We were so content we wanted everything to remain the same. Fortunately. Because there was nothing we could have changed if we had tried. We thought we were choosing but there was never a choice. Only the inevitable.
We were always together and her parents were pleased. They accepted us. Enjoyed having us around. They felt I was a wonderful influence on Juliet in every way that mattered to them. Ways that don’t really matter at all.
They were pleased to have a new daughter. One they liked more. Dutiful and obeying. Filled with respect for them (or so they imagined).
Juliet really was different. Before I came along, her passions made her restless. She was filled with hungers that were pushing for release. Arguing often with her parents: teenage rebellions. But after we discovered each other and ourselves, her surface was calmer. She accepted herself and everyone else.
I was surprised by my own inner changes. I cannot remember another moment in my life when I turned into another person so quickly. At last I was comfortable with my powers and learned how to use them.
On a skiing trip with Juliet, I was heading up the slope when I sensed activity on the mountain’s higher ranges and shouted an avalanche warning to the skiers nearby. They moved out of danger’s way, and minutes later we all heard the cracking noise of a snow pack breaking away. It tumbled down hill and turned into a racing snow wave.
Four skiers were in its way and would have been carried away. I couldn’t stop the avalanche as it gathered size and speed, but I was able to change its course just a few degrees, enough to save lives. The skiers, shaken by the near miss but unharmed, walked away.
“A miracle,” I heard one of them say that night at the lodge.
On the way home from the same trip, I sensed that a young boy waiting at a bus stop had just missed the school bus. He was anxious and crying and feared he would miss an important math test. I slowed the car.
“Can we help?” I asked. Juliet was sitting in the front seat next to me.
“I’ll flunk if I don’t get to school in time,” he said.
“Where is the school?” I asked.
“Over there,” he said and pointed.
I focused on him and the direction he had indicated. The power came to me in a burst of bright light and he was gone, levitated off the ground, over the trees and houses and let down gently in the hallway in front of the class room where the test was being given.
“What happened?” he asked, rubbing his eyes in wonder. He had no idea how he got there.
“Shhh,” said the teacher. “The test starts now. Get your pencil ready. You were almost late but you have plenty of time now—”
• • •
The battles I had fought with myself in the years after Lanny were at an end. I was at peace.
Now that I knew more answers, the questions seemed obvious. I wondered why I had never realized all this before. I had looked around and never noticed a truth that was clear and easy to see. I didn’t understand why I had fought my own nature for so long. Ignored my destiny. Until Juliet reappeared and I became alive and free.
Juliet was the instrument that released me. But even if she disappears one day like Lanny, I won’t go back. She is my second beginning and there will never be a third. I promised myself I wouldn’t again have doubts about who I was.
• • •
We speeded up our lives and moved forward together. We compressed our higher education. Then we graduated and found daytime jobs: I continued at the same Madison Avenue advertising agency where I had started out as an intern; Juliet became a school nurse. Patiently we waited. Aware of the important moments still to come.
We knew where we were headed and confided in each other without words. Communicating with a sixth sense and a seventh. Our destination was our own coven. We were meant to be the High Priest and the High Priestess. Together.
How long did it take? Time for Juliet and me doesn’t feel the way it does for others. We’ve been present for centuries and don’t think about months and years and decades the way other people do. We were eighteen when we discovered what our future was going to be. How old were we when we achieved our goal? Adults!
During the waiting period, I was farther along than Juliet. Lanny had started me off on my education in the craft, but I was Juliet’s first and only teacher. The result: I was a few grades ahead of her in our academy of learning. I was High Priest before Juliet, an outsider, even joined the coven. We were always equal, but in the very beginning I was a little more advanced than she was.
We loved our journey together but all of a sudden we became aware the days were no longer the same. Each one was different and the two of us were changing too. We were never the same people with each other. In past lives, we were a different couple every century. In our current life we were having that experience in the same incarnation. Forever relating to each other in new ways.
How we touched and held each other changed from day to day. So did the way we spoke and made love. We were constantly surprising and satisfying each other.
Every morning I found out all over again who Juliet was. And every evening in bed I asked myself who she was going to be this time. Even wondering if we would remain in bed. Perhaps we’d migrate and turn tonight’s fornication into a very different and more erotic experience.
Sometimes we felt the way I imagine other men and women feel. Sometimes Merlin took over and led us in new directions.
• • •
I remember one of our evenings. I walked into the bathroom and Juliet was in the shower. I stood silently and watched her behind the glass door singing, oblivious to everything except her own far away thoughts. Completely unaware I was in the bathroom too.
I enjoyed seeing the pleasure on her face as she was holding her large, full breasts in her fingers while the water poured down. I stared at the nipples, which I had licked so many many times with my grateful tongue, happier there than almost any other place. Except of course, her vagina.
I watched in silence and I could see and feel my own erection rising inside my tight jeans. At the same moment, I saw her reach for the soap. She seemed surprised when she realized the soap dish was empty. I grabbed a cake from the sink and opened the shower door. She was even more surprised to see me there and pleased by the speedy soap service.
She held out her hand to take it from me but instead I climbed into the shower with her, still wearing my jeans, my shirt, my undershirt, my socks and my sneakers.
I headed first for the beautiful upper part of her body, put her left nipple in my mouth and soaped t
he rest of her breast throughly. When I finished, I performed the same exciting task for the right breast.
She thanked me by pressing her lips against my open mouth, then moving her tongue along the roof and, best of all, my own tongue.
Then she bent over (another of my favorite Juliet positions) and while she started taking off my sneakers and socks, I ran the fingers of my left hand along the edge of her pubic hair. She made a soft purring sound.
With my right hand, I began to unzip my fly, but she brushed aside my fingers and replaced them with her own. She did the unzipping herself, pulled out my cock and held it up, admiring my pecker as if she were examining a work of art at the Metropolitan Museum. Then she lowered my jeans.
“I love your underwear,” she said.
I wasn’t wearing any.
“I love yours too,” I responded. “Same brand.”
My lower body was now as naked as all of hers. Immediately, she made us equals by pulling off my shirt and undershirt.
“This is how we should always dress when we’re together,” she said, once again reading my private thoughts.
Two can play at the same game. “Go ahead,” I urged. Instead of thinking about putting my pecker in her mouth, she went ahead and did it.
She took it out long enough to speak. “You taste as good as you look,” she said.
“You’re just finding out at this late date?”
“Different flavor today,” she said.
She licked the tip, holding the rest in her hand, and then put it back inside her mouth. But just an inch this time.
I ran a finger along the edge of her pubic hairs and she moaned. I touched her vagina with just one finger and then stroked her there over and over with my entire hand until it seemed there was as much wetness coming from between her legs as there was pouring down from the faucet.
I was still outside and she began moving her lower body back forth in rhythm with me. Slowly I inserted my middle finger in her vagina and moved it around slightly. I inserted a second finger and spread her labia until I could insert a third and rubbed her clitoris with my thumb. More groans of appreciation from Juliet.