by Alyson Miers
"Does this mean you want me to leave?" he asked.
"What ever do you mean?"
"You gave me some evidence to take home. Does that mean I’ve worn out my welcome?"
"Of course not! That was something I needed to make sure to give you, but you are welcome to stay until you’re ready to leave."
"Well, thank you. So, you asked me to come in here?"
"Yes. Our night by the fireplace," she began, "was just lovely, but I do appreciate a proper setting." She raised one leg just enough to rest her knee on the bed.
It was hardly a surprise, but still Charlinder thought that took a lot of ego on her part.
"A proper setting for what?" he asked.
Gentiola blinked in surprise. "You don't know what I have in mind?"
"I want you to say it out loud."
At this, she smiled; a wonderfully mischievous, excited smile.
"I want you to put your cock in me again," she answered.
She certainly has no need for euphemisms, he thought. Outwardly he said, "How long have you been planning this?"
"Since yesterday morning, I suppose. Now, shall we begin?"
"Okay," he answered. "Take off your clothes and sit on the bed," he instructed.
She did so with a cheeky arch of her eyebrows at his assertive tone; she wiggled her shoulders and her gown fell to the floor, then she perched at the head of the bed with her legs curled to one side. "Your aura is pinking up again," she observed. "That's what I like to see."
While she surely thought that was a reassuring thing to say, to him it was a reminder that he had to tread carefully with her. She still couldn’t read his mind, but observing his mood was close enough. She had admitted to having the power to heal his body, and if she could heal, she could just as easily hurt. For that reason alone, what he was about to try was possibly the stupidest thing he would ever do, and in his life, that was saying something.
"Now I want you to touch yourself."
"Say it out loud, Char. Touch myself how?"
"I want to see you pet your pussycat."
With a truly irksome grin, Gentiola uncurled her legs, resting her heels at the edges of the bed. She spread her knees expressively wide--his cock began to stir rebelliously in his trousers--and started by running her hands up and down the back of her thighs. There was that scar on her leg, but he would have to wait until later to ask. He kept eye contact with her and willed himself to think non-arousing thoughts. She didn't make it any easier for him as she brought her hands around to the inside, but with a satisfactory guttural moan she finally started stroking her clit and let her eyes roll to the ceiling.
"This is what you wanted," she sighed, "isn't it?"
"Yeah, that's what I like to see."
"Oh, Char," she moaned, "you like to drive me crazy."
"You're so gorgeous, I can't help it," he said automatically.
"But I never," she sighed, writhing around on the bed, "would have expected you," she undulated some more, "to be a voyeur."
"There are a lot of things about me that people don't expect." He thought, myself included. Outwardly he said, "When I first saw you, I never would have expected you to be over 150 years old."
Gentiola made a noise resembling "Haaaangh," and then managed to speak through her pleasure: "Beauty secrets," she said in a gasp.
Charlinder could tell she was close to coming, or at least sufficiently distracted from his attention. Taking care not to make any revealing noise, he undressed. Gentiola, sufficiently excited to be rocking into her hand with closed eyes, remained oblivious.
She reached a point at which he was sure that if she touched herself for another ten seconds, she would orgasm, and that was when he took hold of her wrist.
Gentiola's eyes flew open as she fell still. Charlinder leaned over her, meeting her demanding gaze with hungry eyes.
"Not so fast," he said. He lowered himself between her legs. He took both Gentiola's hands in his and held them to the mattress on either side of her head. She was smiling scandalously again, stopping only when Charlinder kissed her. The way it felt was like learning how to swim, like he had to struggle to keep his head above the surface of the water. All he’d learned in the past three days took nothing away from how it felt to touch her and see her beautiful face smile at him. There he was, in bed with Gentiola, and he could just as easily let himself go and drown. Part of him said, forget about the Plague, no one cares what she did, just stay here with her. The other part of him rose above the surface and breathed.
"This is quite a game you're playing," she remarked when he released her mouth. She wasn't annoyed, but intrigued.
"Yes, I suppose it is," he agreed.
He stroked her arms while kissing her some more, on her mouth, her neck, her breasts, her shoulders. She took her right arm out of his hold and grasped his left buttock, pulling his hips upward. Charlinder pulled her hand off his backside and returned it to its position by her head. He couldn't have her surprising him like that.
"Stay right there?" he requested. She nodded her consent, and Charlinder let go of her left hand for just long enough to put himself in position. He brought his hand back to holding her arm in place, and Gentiola groaned in satisfaction, as he slid inside her.
He thought of grading classwork, hunting trips on cold mornings, and attending prayer sessions while he thrust into her. He needed to stay under control. He also needed to pay attention to Gentiola. He could feel her writhing under his grip. She wanted to be in control, touch him, use her hands. He altered his angle; she liked it. This was a game of catch-up to her; he had to bring her back to where she’d been before he’d interrupted.
She was getting close again. It was tempting to forget himself and just keep going.
She got to that point; any second now and she'd come. Charlinder pulled out, pressed Gentiola's wrists into the mattress, and forced himself to stop moving.
"Would you do it again?" he demanded.
"What?!" Gentiola reacted, eyes flying open.
"Would you create another Plague?"
"You're bringing this up now?!"
"You never answered my question."
"I told you I didn't expect to live long enough to see the same conditions!"
"But that wasn't the question," Charlinder pressed on. He was far from comfortable like this. His shoulders and upper back were cramping up, and he wanted nothing more than to act like nothing had happened and pick up where he’d left off. "I didn't ask you how long you think you'll live. If human beings got back to the same numbers they had in the early 21st century, and if they made a wreck of the Earth in the meantime, and if no one was willing to do anything about it except what was convenient for them, and if you were still around to see it happen, would you create another disease to wipe them out?"
She didn't answer right away. She didn't push him off, she didn't tell him to finish fucking her and they'd talk later. Instead, she looked off to the side and began to cry. It wasn’t just a few polite tears, either; her face contorted into a knot of agony like he’d seen in one of her memories. Her body shook with each raw, choking sob that tore from her throat. It took over her and didn’t let up; she could not run out of tears as she grew tired, and she could not merely get it out of her system and calm down. She seemed not just unhappy but in physical pain. It was a sensation he couldn’t ignore; he let go of her hands but otherwise didn’t move and didn’t look away from her. She pulled her hands in and wiped her eyes.
"No," she moaned at last.
"Why not? What would be different the second time around?"
"It was...awful," she said. She looked up again, still with tears pouring from her eyes. "I knew there would be death, but I never expected the suffering."
"You created a virus that ravaged the internal organs, and you didn't think there would be suffering?"
"I don't mean the sickness," she explained. "It was...the mass suicides, because people were afraid of the disease. The looting and riot
ing, the suicides when people lost too many loved ones, all the funerals held in the same church in a day..." she went on while struggling to bring her crying under control. "I knew there would be pain, but to see that much...misery. I won’t do that again."
"And if the goddess in Earth spoke to you again, and told you to do something, like She did in 2010? What would you do?"
"I wouldn’t make another Plague," she sobbed. "I’d think of something else to do. I don’t care how She’d punish me, I won’t be a part of that again."
Now it was Charlinder's turn to pause. He hovered in his tense, uncomfortable position while he let her answer sink in. Did he believe her? Could he accept her answer?
"Yeah," he whispered. Yes, he believed her. Gentiola took deep breaths, and soon enough, she was mostly calm.
"Char, I want you to finish," she said.
"As in, you want me to get back inside you?" he asked. He was still hard, and she was never one to lie about what she felt, but after the memories he’d just brought up... "Are you sure?"
"Yes," she breathed. She brought her hands around and stroked his upper arms. "I’m sure. I want to feel something other than this."
She responded just as agreeably as in their first time; she rose to match his thrusts and wrapped her arms around his back, closing her eyes and sighing in pleasure.
They stayed in bed, lying together under the sheets without talking, for a long time afterwards. Gentiola lay draped over Charlinder, clinging to his side. Her face looked downwards so he couldn't tell if her eyes were open, but he was certain she wasn't asleep.
Soon enough, she lifted her head and looked up at him. "I noticed you were looking at my scar," she said.
"It doesn't look like something you got accidentally," he explained.
"As long as we're here," she began, and rather than complete that thought, she went on, "I didn't get it accidentally. After the Plague was finished, I thought--well, first of all, in the middle of the pandemic, I destroyed my lab. I think you know enough about what I felt at the time, so I don't need to explain that. Anyway, when the pandemic was over, as I told you, I used the globe and told the survivors it was safe to come out," she recalled. She held her chin just above her hands which overlapped on his chest. Her affect was perhaps as calm and neutral as he had ever seen her. He could have been listening to one of his spinning buddies in Paleola relating a conversation with her mother. "There were several hundred thousand people left, and it took a few days. I didn’t sleep and barely ate until I was finished. And then I thought, that was enough," she said with a flourish of the hand that belied her understated tone. "I thought I would join the Plague victims, and relieve the survivors of my presence. So, after I was finished telling the survivors to come outside, I went up to the kitchen, grabbed a carving knife, and went outside. I magicked open a little trench in the ground, sat down in it, and used the knife to...open up the femoral artery. The insects could have my body, I thought. It hurt like hell, and it bled like a faucet, which was the idea, and soon enough I lost consciousness and I went under thinking, that was it." Another flourish of the hand. "Then I woke up early the next day, just before sunrise, in a puddle of my own blood and a world of pain."
Charlinder shifted out from under her, but kept his eyes on her to show he was still listening. Gentiola sat up and continued talking.
"It must have been three-quarters of my blood volume on the ground, but there I was, waking up."
He pulled on his shorts and trousers.
"So I started screaming--no words, I just screamed, and it scared away a lot of birds. I felt like a train had run over me for at least a week afterward, and I couldn't walk normally for a month, but I did walk out of that trench and I haven't aged a day since."
That was enough for Charlinder; he was covered in cold sweat and his stomach was churning. He rose from the bed and made for the door.
"Char, you're all sweaty and gray," she observed, "and your aura's going crazy."
"I need air," he said.
"After everything else I've told you..." she said, clearly puzzled as he clambered out of the room.
He stumbled through the hallways, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other until he found the back door and got outside. After everything else she'd told him, indeed, he shouldn't have been surprised, and he wasn't. However, the image of Gentiola laid out in her shallow grave had brought up the memory of another thirty-seven-year-old woman lying on the ground with her leg torn open. Her brother held her hands together and flinched at her screams, and her teenage son held her good leg to the ground to keep her from thrashing about while an elderly white man set her broken bone.
Charlinder leaned on the outside wall, looked at the ground, and vomited up the day’s meals.
There was Gentiola, now dressed, holding out a glass of water. She looked at him like she didn't fully understand what was the matter, but she stroked his back while he rinsed the bile from his mouth.
Chapter Thirty
Aftershock
"I'm not a terrorist," Gentiola said later in the day. They were outside, taking care of the bunnies on a small folding wooden table that stood at waist height. Charlinder combed Nevila while Gentiola plucked Enkelejda of her molting wool. Another, Zamira, waited her turn. The statement caught him off-guard because neither had spoken since they'd set up the table, and neither had mentioned terrorism all day. "I never was a terrorist."
"Did anyone ever say you were?"
"You sort of implied it, the day after I told you about the Plague." Charlinder tried to recall making this accusation, and Gentiola caught his blank look. "When you were talking about Eileen and her friend Patricia."
"Patricia! Right," he recalled. He had, in fact, brought that conversation from Eileen's journal up to Gentiola that day, but the later confusion had pushed it into the background. "No, Genti, I don't think you were ever a terrorist."
"Because terrorism isn't about taking lives," she continued, regardless of Charlinder's response. "It's about using violence to control living people. The terrorist's real target isn't the casualties of his attack; it's the survivors, the bereaved and the witnesses."
"And you didn't intend to leave any survivors," he observed, without malice.
"I didn't want anyone to be afraid of me," she replied.
"You accomplished that much," said Charlinder. "No one knew what hit them."
He called his Anima again that night. She entered the room with raised eyebrows, wearing a sort of what-does-he-want-now? expression.
"I haven't even said anything," he said defensively upon seeing her face.
"I know what happened today," said Eileen.
"So you don't need me to explain it to you," Charlinder responded.
"Well, yes I do," she returned. "I still need to hear about the events in your own words."
"Yeah. My own words. Okay, then. Gentiola answered my question today. She says she won't do it again."
"And she said this while you were in bed with her."
"Well, she wanted to shag again," he pointed out. "This morning I wondered if I would ever hear an answer. Now it's here."
"And I suppose Genti should have thought about that before she asked you to put your cock in her again."
"Hey, I can't believe she told me. For a moment there I thought she was about to pop my balls off."
"But she did not pop your balls off, Char, she gave you the simple yes or no you had requested."
"Yeah, and she says no. And she’s obviously had a lot of time to think about this, so I can’t help but think it would have been so much easier on both of us if she’d just told me that when I asked the first time."
"It would have been easier for you, but easier for her? That’s disingenuous and you know it. She hasn't had anyone to talk to in over 120 years and she knows exactly how she brought that isolation on herself. You can't expect that anything about the Plague is an easy question to answer, or even to hear."
"Okay, I'm sor
ry. The point is, she says no, and of course that was the answer I was hoping to get, but now it feels weird."
"You didn't honestly think that was an easy question, now did you?"
"No, I guess it wasn't. Only, okay, great, she won't do it again. She says she won’t give in to the voices in her head if it comes to that. Is that supposed to be it, now? Am I supposed to say, just, 'Well, that's all settled, then,' and go my merry globe-circling way?"
"Char, are you trying to figure out what other questions to ask, or wondering how much longer you want to stay here?"
"Neither, actually."
"Anything else you want to know from Gentiola probably won't have an answer until long after you're dead. So, how about those three things we put on the chopping block?"