by Kim Deister
His fingers traced the edge of my bra where it met my skin and I fought to keep from crushing his hands to my breasts. I wanted his hands on me and I wanted them on me hard. But he moved them away before I could, sliding his fingers to my nipples. He brushed them through the lacy fabric and it was torture of the sweetest kind.
As he touched me, he whispered in my ear. Sweet nothings in Irish that I didn’t understand, but it didn’t matter. His smoky Irish brogue sent shivers up and down my spine. Somewhere along the line, my bra had disappeared and his strong hands took its place. Between his hands on my skin and his whispered voice in my ear, I was on the edge, ready to be pushed over it.
I tried to turn around again, but Finn had other ideas. I let out a groan of frustration and struggled against him, despite the fact that I had no chance of breaking free. Judging from the chuckle, he knew it and wasn’t at all threatened by me.
As amazing as his hands felt on me, it wasn’t fair that I couldn’t get my hands on him, too. I wore only panties, but he was still fully dressed. I wanted to feel his skin against mine. I needed to feel his skin against mine.
“Come on, Finn. Take pity on me. At least take your shirt off. I’m practically naked. That’s hardly fair, is it?”
“’Tis true, a ghrá, but as you pointed out earlier… do pirates, even former pirates, have any honor?”
I hated it when my words were thrown back at me. Even when gorgeous pirates did it. “So, prove me wrong,” I challenged.
The man's smile should be licensed as a weapon. He stepped away from me and moved to the side. I had learned my lesson and didn't bother to turn around. He loved to torture me and I knew he wouldn't let me touch him even if I tried. So, I watched him in the mirror and fought to keep myself from jumping him. He grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled it over his head in that super sexy, alpha-male way that some guys do. Even that was enough to make me itch to have my hands on him. He slid it down his arms and stopped with it binding his wrists inside, meeting my eyes in the mirror. He made my mouth water.
It was hardly the first time I’d seen a guy without a shirt. It wasn’t even the first time I’d seen Finn without a shirt. But there was something sensual about watching him in the mirror, watching him but not touching him. The tattoos did nothing to hide the rippling muscles. The tiny barbells that pierced his nipples winked in the light. He looked good enough to eat. He fired another smile at me before finally throwing his shirt across the room. He knew the effect he had on me; he couldn’t not know. But somehow his smile wasn’t cocky, just teasing and sweet.
His eyes were still on mine in the mirror when he reached for the top button on his jeans. My mouth went dry as he began to open the buttons of his fly one by one. His fingers lingered over the last one and I watched with intense anticipation. To my disappointment, he dropped his arms without unbuttoning it. He didn’t move to stop me when I finally turned around to face him.
He reached for me and pulled me towards him, finally letting me touch him. His skin was hot under my hands as I ran them over his chest. My lips trailed after my hands, kissing him. My fingers found one of the barbells in his nipple and closed on it. I tugged it a little and heard a low moan escape his lips. I looked up at him, worried that I had pulled too hard. But what I saw on his face wasn’t pain, at least not the kind of pain I’d been worried about. He was feeling the kind of pain he had already inflicted on me. Delicious, sweet, torturous pain.
Serves him right! It was my turn to torture him. Leaning forward, I swirled my tongue around his already aroused nipple, sucking hard. The moan was louder this time and his entire body shuddered against mine. I pushed back while sucking one end of the barbell into my mouth and tugging on it. He moaned incoherent words as he dug his fingers into my butt, pressing me even closer. I felt him against my stomach, thick and hard, but I wasn’t done with him yet. I teased him mercilessly, tugging one end then the other of that tiny barbell, moving from nipple to nipple. His hands were inside my panties now, kneading the flesh of my butt with his fingers.
I finally took pity on him and stopped. His jaw clenched as I slid my hands down his chest and ran my fingers along the skin he had exposed in his open fly. He was fighting for control and he almost lost it when I teased him with my nails before unbuttoning the last button. I was sure he was cursing me when a string of Irish words came out of his mouth in a raspy breath.
I pushed his jeans down just enough to let him spring free before he shoved my hands away with a growl. With little ceremony, he tore off his jeans and threw them aside. Like a Viking taking his woman, he picked me up and tossed me on the bed before tangling himself with me.
We were desperate for each other, but now that we were on the bed, it was as if time itself had slowed. We took our time touching each other, to explore, to learn. Whispering words of need and affection. Moving together as if we'd always known each other. He stoked my desire in ways I never imagined, made me feel things I had never felt. His whispered words told me that it was the same for him.
It was as if the outside world had ceased to exist for us. Nothing else mattered but each other. The last sound I heard before I lost control was the sound of his voice saying my name over and over again.
The outside world didn’t stay away for long. It came creeping back in, whether I wanted it to or not. I tried hard to bury my head in the sand, distracting myself with work and the mundane aspects of life. It worked, but not long enough.
I threw myself into work as often as I could, needing the escape. Finn left me to it and hit the pavement to find gainful employment since it was obvious he was staying awhile. I questioned how that was possible, considering he was more than three centuries old. From a practical standpoint, you needed a Social Security number and citizenship. Or at least a valid visa and a driver’s license didn’t hurt, either. The man was born almost two centuries before Ireland even had birth certificates. So, the question of identification stumped me. It turned out Finn “knew people.” The kind of people who provided these documents for the right sum of money without asking uncomfortable questions. It was handy to be a loaded former pirate.
It had to be a decent sum of money. The guy he called a week ago didn't even bat an eye to hear Finn's voice, even after more than a decade. The updated photo Finn sent elicited no questions, even though it could have been taken the same day as the last one, almost twelve years ago. I had no idea why he bothered to change his photo, considering he hadn't aged more than a few months, but Finn wanted to be safe. Much like curses and fairies, fake identities were a bit outside my wheelhouse.
It only took a few days before he found himself a job at a tattoo shop. It turned out that Finn's tattoos were more than a hobby or a masochistic love of pain. During his last foray into humanity, he managed to get a license to be a tattoo artist. I suspected his document-making friend had something to do with those papers, too. And, as if life weren’t complicated enough, he unknowingly got himself hired at a shop owned by no other than Taylor’s husband. So far, Mark had no idea who Finn was, no idea of the connection between us. He even made a joke about having only met one other Finn in his life, a frog that was the pet of his wife’s best friend’s niece. I was running out of time. I needed to get the guts to spill the beans about Finn soon.
Our days fell into a routine, usually beginning with strategy meetings at Grandma Fi's over breakfast. If I was lucky, I was back my studio by early afternoon. When Finn wasn’t at work, he was usually with me in my studio, drawing tattoo designs while I worked. It was idyllic… while it lasted.
But I had to leave my house sometime and everything seemed to fall apart every time I did. Suddenly, the threat of Siofra was everywhere, looming over us every moment of every day. I wondered how she knew when Finn was no longer a frog. It made me wonder just how deep her obsession with him ran. Maybe there was some kind of magical alarm system that alerted her when he went from frog to human. But if there wasn’t, it meant that she had to spend most of her time
watching him, waiting for the moment he turned human so she could sabotage him once again. That, more than anything else, scared me. If she was so invested that, even after more than three centuries, she still watched him that much, there was no limit to how far she’d go to get what she wanted. It was a whole new dimension to the crazy ex phenomenon. And we knew she was watching.
Siofra was playing with us, stepping up her game and taunting us every chance she got. She wasn’t trying to hide, either. Finn saw her all over town, but every time he tried to approach her, she disappeared as if by magic, which it probably was. She seemed content to torment him from afar.
It was an impossible situation. Finn knew her, could usually recognize her. But to me, she could be anyone. I knew she probably watched me, too, but there was no way for me to know if I was looking into her face. I finally related to Finn’s story about the woman who walked to the sea in madness. That was how I was beginning to feel every moment of every day. I didn’t know who was real and who wasn’t. It seemed like everyone I noticed was watching me. It was no way to live.
I made an ass of myself a few times already and I wasn't anxious to repeat the experience yet again. Last week, I lost my damn mind on a woman I saw way too often around town. She was about my age with curly blonde hair and she looked just like the woman who had stared at me that day from across the street. Before that day, I’d never seen her before, but, all of a sudden, she was everywhere I went. At the grocery store, at the coffee shop, at the post office, everywhere. I tried to ignore it, but it got to be too much.
To say I was on edge was to say Finn was a little bit gorgeous. I was a ticking bomb. And the blonde figured that out up close and personal when I accosted her in the parking lot of the coffee shop. It wasn’t my finest moment as I stood in front of her and demanded to know why she was stalking me. Thank the Goddess, some part of my brain worked that day and I managed to stop myself from ranting about enchanted frogs and curses. But I still sounded like a mad woman. Needless to say, I scared the hell out of her. Fortunately for all involved, Taylor was with me during my meltdown and somehow managed to extricate me from the situation before I could make it even worse. She was the only reason I wasn’t sitting in a jail cell, with her excellent mediation skills and bribery in the form of a fully loaded coffee gift card.
It turned out the blonde was the new French teacher at the high school, not a killer fairy on the war path. She had just moved into town, which explained why I suddenly started seeing her everywhere. And it hadn’t been me she was staring at that day. That had been the blank stare of a woman engrossed in a conversation via Bluetooth. Somehow, in my stressed state, I had missed the moving lips and jumped to conclusions. I felt like a flaming idiot. Now every time Macy saw me, she cringed. The feeling was mutual. But even though I knew who she was, there was still something about her that set every instinct in me screaming. I was convinced that she was Siofra and that she was fucking with me, but I couldn’t prove it.
And, of course, my mother found out about it because Macy taught at the same school. She was still mad at me for Kyra’s party and this sure as hell didn’t help much. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her so angry. She couldn’t even bring herself to talk to me, choosing to berate me by text, instead. She had a right to be mad, but she sure wasn’t helping my stress levels.
That particular incident should have taught me a lesson, but it took a time or two. There was another unfortunate incident a few days later. This time I went ballistic on a dude. I had no idea if Siofra’s shape-changing skills extended to gender swapping, but I flipped my lid regardless. I was running in the park along the river and passed a man running with his dog. He’d barely run by me when he turned around to follow me. When I left the park to run up to road to the college campus, he followed in my footsteps. He didn’t say anything, didn’t even appear to be looking at me when I glanced back suspiciously. But he followed me. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I snapped.
I whipped around and tore into him for following me, only realizing after he pulled out an earbud that he hadn’t even heard me. That set me off all over again as I demanded to know why he followed me. I’ve never seen anyone turn so red as he blushed and stammered an explanation. He was a grad student at the college, just out for a morning run. He wasn’t following me. He was just coming back to campus along the most logical path. I tried and failed to stammer out a reasonable apology, but it soon became clear that I was the crazy person, not him.
I’d made a complete ass out of myself again last night, too. Finn was at work and I didn’t feel like eating dinner alone. So, I called Taylor and we met at a Mexican place for margaritas and chimichangas. At first, dinner was fun, although it got a little uncomfortable when she began waxing poetic about the new guy at the shop. She still didn’t know the truth about Finn and it made me squirm. But, soon enough, she changed the subject to my erratic behavior with Macy, which wasn’t much better. I played it off as a result of stress and insomnia and I knew damn well that she didn’t entirely buy it. But she let it go with a look of concern.
But whatever ground I’d gained with her in terms of my sanity was blown in an instant when we went outside. We stood by our cars, saying goodbye before we went our separate ways. A woman stood across the lot watching us, never taking her eyes off us. She stood in the shadows and her face was hidden, but I knew it was Siofra. I was so focused on her that I didn’t realize Tay had stopped talking until she poked me in the ribs.
“Earth to Cass? You okay?”
“What?” She startled me out my reverie. “Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just that woman over there. She’s been staring at us since we came outside.”
Taylor looked where I was pointing, a confused look on her face. “What woman?”
I looked back over and saw the woman still standing there with a smug look on her face. “That woman, the one by the red truck. Jeans, gray shirt.”
She looked concerned as she examined my face. “Cass, there’s no one there.”
What? I glanced over and the woman was there. But Taylor couldn’t see her. Siofra. There was no other explanation. I tried to brush it off, but I knew she didn’t buy it.
The paranoia didn't go away, but, after that, I forced myself not to act on it. Other than acting like a crazy person, which hadn’t worked so well, what other options did I have? What could I say? “Hi, I’m Cassidy. Are you a fairy who’s stalking me?” I didn’t think that would go over any better than my meltdown with Mademoiselle Macy.
Not all of my meltdowns were public, thank the Goddess. This morning, I woke up after a night of crazy dreams convinced that Taylor was Siofra. Taylor… who I’d known since practically birth. The dream had been so vivid that even now, hours later, I couldn’t quite shake it. In it, Taylor paralyzed me with a single look and I fell like a rock to the ground. She stood over me, a cruel smile on her lips. In real life, that was so unlike the ever lively Taylor I knew. But in the dream, I just knew that somehow Siofra had hijacked my best friend’s body. As she looked down at me, she said something, but, in the light of day, I didn’t remember what it was. She bent down and touched a finger to my forehead between my brows. A blaze of white hot pain shot through my skull, blinding me with its intensity. Seconds before I thought I would explode, I woke up.
Day drinking sounded better to me each day. Maybe if I stayed loaded, it would keep the paranoia at bay. Nothing else was helping, not even work.
Even the grocery store was a place of panic these days. Melvin had finally been replaced by a short, blue-haired old lady. Sometimes it felt like she was paying a little too much attention to me. The rational part of my brain knew she was harmless, but every time I caught her eye, my heart jumped alarmingly.
I was suspicious and paranoid of everyone and everything around me. Even Grandma Fi was starting to think I was losing my marbles and she was usually the only one who understood. Poor Finn probably thought he’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire, even if he was too
nice to say anything about it.
After that, I became as much of a hermit as humanly possible. It was safer for me and my continued life outside the prison system. And it was definitely safer for the world around me. If Siofra’s end game was to drive me insane, she was succeeding.
Fortunately, I had more than enough to keep me occupied, so much that there never seemed to be enough time in the day. There were good moments, but not nearly enough of them. Instead, our lives revolved around Siofra. I kept trying to tell myself that it would end, that someday I would get my life back. Sometimes I even believed that.
None of us knew what to expect, so we tried to plan for anything and everything we could think of and that wasn't an easy task for three mortals. We didn't have the advantage of innate magical abilities and it was difficult not to get discouraged. But we did what we could and Finn and I learned a lifetime of magic from Grandma Fiona in just a few weeks. Sometimes it felt like a lot of work for nothing.
By the time our lessons ended for the day, we were emotionally and physically exhausted. Even before dawn, I was awake and in my studio trying to work before going to Grandma Fi's, where we spent hours studying. Then it was back to work before falling exhausted into bed at night. The exhaustion made it very easy to give in to my doubts about Finn and I. I wanted this so badly, but I worried that it wasn’t real. We were both under so much stress and there was that little thing of magic involved. How much of what was between us was just a desperate need for comfort in the middle of total chaos? I knew what Grandma Fi said about love and curses, and I knew it made sense, but I couldn’t help but worry. Exhaustion made all those insecurities reign supreme.
I had other reasons for my doubts, too. Love seemed to have come easily for Finn, maybe too easily. By his own account, he’d always been a bit of a dog. Hell, that was why we were in the middle of this mess in the first place. So, how could he suddenly just find himself in love with me? Part of me wanted to believe it was because I was special, that I really was the one he was meant for. But was I? Did he really know how he felt? Here he was, stuck in yet another time not his own after centuries of turmoil. This was the first time he felt like he might finally be free. He spent centuries chasing the end of his curse, looking for the one thing that would break it. True love. And he found it, even if it wasn't what he expected, but I knew that a part of him still believed what it always had. That it was true love in the traditional sense that set him free. That was some serious pressure.