and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

  “Not till Monday,” Madalene purrs back.

  Gaehod returns from the kitchen with a heavy, steaming tray, and Dominic springs to help him. In the chaos, while fragrant plates are passed around the table, Madalene excuses herself to take a call from someone with a cat’s name.

  When everyone lands again, Dominic has dragged the room’s last table up to make space for all the food, and Dysart has moved eagerly from Gaehod’s right to his left beside Maeve. As plate after plate of food is passed around the table, everyone relaxes and begins to float on the smells and tastes, the light and promises of the night.

  “I don’t know how Gaehod does it,” Maeve marvels, looking at the loaded table. “He must have been cooking for weeks, and I can’t imagine you can buy dried morels locally.” Gaehod waves the praise away, but the food is truly sumptuous, gratifying to look at and delicious, and the wine weaves the tastes and people together in easy loops. Under the table, my legs press against Dominic’s like roots around rock, anchoring me. I am ready to be alone with him.

  The room is filled with the warm glow of wine-flushed cheeks, candles, and conversations allowed to wander and twine. When dessert—a delicious rose-infused cake—is finished, Dysart sets aside his wineglass and pours burgundy into his water tumbler. He climbs a little blearily to his feet, glass raised. “To love!” he declares.

  “Yes,” Gaehod says, looking across the table to us. “To love, because we are powerful in love, especially on this night, halfway between perfect balance and the longest day. Love reinvents us tonight. Makes us angelic, titanic.”

  “Here, here!” Dysart roars and bumps his tumbler to Maeve’s glass. Gaehod salutes Madalene with his teacup, and Dominic’s deep eyes hold mine as we raise our wine to one another. But Dysart reaches across the table to clink both our glasses and then to Madalene’s, and what began as a simple toast becomes a tangled dance of arms as we each find every other glass to touch.

  “To love!” Dysart cries. “Logarithmically!”

  And we all drink.

  Dysart fills his tumbler again, and surveys the small room. “You have quite the full house tonight, Innkeep. Will you have a room for all of us?”

  “I believe so. If Dominic and Olivia will share a room?” His shrewd eyes hook mine and I nod. “I’ll open the third floor. The room up there doesn’t get used much, a bit old-fashioned, really, the bridal suite, but it will have to do. Shall I show you two up?”

  Dominic and I rise to follow our host, but Dysart, despite the fact that he’s slipped his chair much closer to Maeve’s, begins a slow, ironic applause, grinning.

  “Weren’t you the man just toasting love?” Dominic asks archly.

  “I was. It’s true. But pure, true, undying love and ‘going upstairs’ are two very different things, my boy.”

  “They don’t have to be.” Maeve speaks so quietly I scarcely hear her, but it silences the room. “Good night, my dears,” she says.

  Her words slip under me like the tiny, washing waves on a pebbled shore. I slip my hand into Dominic’s proffered elbow and follow Gaehod upstairs, floating on the smiles and waves of Dysart and Maeve standing beneath us.

  Gaehod stops on the second landing and touches my hand. “Olivia, I’m expecting a significant uptick in new arrivals at my hotel in the coming year. I wonder if you’re looking for work?”

  I am dumbstruck. “I lost…”

  Dominic’s blue eyes flicker from Gaehod’s to mine. “I could get a job at St. James,” he says.

  “They’re doing such important research there.” Gaehod’s voice is soft, but it holds Dominic completely. “Potentially very beneficial to so many, I think, here and elsewhere.”

  I watch the two men, eyes locked like dancers. “You might both split your time,” Gaehod suggests, “between Cashel and Dublin, if Olivia consents to work with me.”

  Gaehod and Dominic are watching me closely, and I see myself reflected in their eyes. I was invisible when I entered the hospital. Is enough to have met the terms of Gaehod’s test? Light that feeds a leaf can kill the root. “I’d like that,” I say.

  Gaehod ushers us into a small, pitched-roof room whose sole window offers an unobstructed view of the rock. Dominic and I stand together, looking out at it, holding hands. A small rain falls faintly through the starry, blue Irish night, against the illuminated Rock of Cashel, on the graves behind the abbey, and into the dark, swollen Atlantic. Dominic rubs between his eyebrows.

  “Can you see that?” he asks me.

  I follow the tilt of his chin into the partial dark between the electric lights illuminating the rock’s stone towers, and our snug room. Ophelia stands under a dripping tree, in the hungry grass, her pale throat elongated and hideous, her tiny body obscenely distorted by a belly so distended it pulls her body toward the ground.

  “What?” I whisper back.

  “The lilacs growing under that tree?”

  I look again. Ophelia has become a hungry ghost, faded so thin she has slipped from the crypt that imprisoned her, and now steals into houses and shops, breeding sinners, an immortal, howling emptiness creeping over lives. Nothing in this world can fill her.

  “They’re violets, I think,” I say.

  Lightning cracks the night, open to the heavens.

  Look up! I psycast to my bat-winged, baby-faced sister.

  But she’s climbing down the bell tower wall, feet facing the moon, and her black hair, pulled tight as a violin strings, whispers back to me I need the light to hunt by.

  “Olivia? Dominic?” Gaehod says quietly. We turn around. He is standing in the doorway, his face almost obscured by the two white-wrapped packages he holds.

  “Your things,” he says simply, and places them—one long, shallow and light, one compact and heavy—on the bed, like offerings on an altar. “Give them to each other.”

  Gaehod leaves, and we stand motionless, staring at the bed.

  My wings and Dominic’s life vitae.

  Dominic bends down and picks up the heavy box. “Olivia?” he says softly. I meet his clear eyes as he puts the bound stack of scroll, tablet, and sheaf in my hand. “You should have these.”

  “I can’t read them.”

  “I know.”

  I hold it against my beating heart with one hand and pick up the other package. It weighs nothing in contrast.

  “I didn’t know these survived,” I say, “but I don’t want them anymore.”

  He takes them reverently. “I can’t use them,” he says.

  “I know.”

  Then he kisses me.

  Standing by the window, holding my freedom, his life tucked against my breast, he kisses me. His mouth is strong and soft, and eloquent, and I am keenly aware of how my flesh imprisons me, creates a barrier between us. His strong kiss deepens and hardens, feeling it too, trying to eat it away. I slip my hands under Dysart’s borrowed jacket and slide them up the hard, broad landscape of his back. His hands travel from my shoulders down my spine, and I wince. He looks into my eyes questioningly, and I touch his proud face with my fingertips, tracing the worried lines that score it.

  “Your back?” he asks.

  “I got a tattoo today,” I say. “It still hurts.”

  “Will you show me?”

  And suddenly I—who have been looked at forever, who has fed on the hunger in the eyes of men and changed to please them—am terrified of being seen. He searches my face. I turn my back to him, and he pulls the zipper of my borrowed dress down. His tremoring fingers feel too large pushing open the dress halves, and I am frightened. He slides my dress forward, and the exquisite red silk falls from me in a stiff puddle on the ground. I am naked now.

  “Wings,” he whispers.

  “Over a very old scar,” I say.

  His fingers trace the fresh lines with wonder. “They’re perfect,” he whispers.

  “They don’t work as well,” I tease, but I turn to face him.

  My exposed body throws a shadow against the wall behind h
im, but it mingles with his to form a single dancing darkness on the white plaster. He looks momentarily simpleminded. The sound he makes is something between a whimper and a growl, savage and awed.

  He undresses, and I run unashamed eyes over him, tracking the twining strength of his masculine arms and legs. He should always be naked. His body was created for this. He comes to me, circles my waist low, beneath the unbleeding, black ink wings, and pulls me hard against him. I gasp at the feel of his bare flesh on mine. A thousand centers of sensation burst throughout me. No wonder man is so helpless in this.

  His mouth finds mine again, and even our exploring hands fall still in the pure communion of our mouths and skin touching. His lips are caressing, but the force of his restraint sends tremors through him. He is afraid of hurting me, afraid for me, and I am afraid, too. But fear is grown familiar, and this is all so new.

  Our kisses are a feast tasted, but not consumed. Every mouthful makes the hunger grow, and I feel it—not in my gums, not in the hollow places of my mouth—but in all the full and swelling places of my body. At the peaks of my shuddering breasts and the depths of my pulsing sex, a flameless fire licks me. Although desire stakes me to him, my body begins to twist.

  Finally, I break the kiss, gasping. But his lips burn down my throat to engulf a shivering nipple, and my sex ignites. My breath comes in tiny pants through kiss-scorched lips showering slow sparks down my body. And all my awareness is caught in the storm flashing from my suckled nipple to deep between my legs. When his strong fingers take my other breast I cry out, and he takes his lips and hands away.

  He lies on his back in our bed and pulls me to him. I straddle his strong hips with my knees, and the hard tower of his cock stands shockingly vertical from the landscape of his body. I’m uncertain what to do, and lean over him, knowing his kiss will guide me. But I don’t need it to. My flaming nipples graze his chest, his fingers make strong circles on my ass, and his cock touches a focus of sensation that almost blinds me. This is the sister locus of the inferno in my sex, a sentinel of pleasure—precise, minute, and raging. I scrape it against the shaft of his straining cock and sob with wanting more.

  But he will not rush this. Although his panting chest moves swift and hard beneath me, although I see the agony of his restraint in the rigid cords of his shoulders, he does kiss me again. My living sex shudders. I feel coiled too tight, and every twist of my writhing body, pushing cock against sex, breasts against chest, no matter which direction I turn, only tightens the spiral. It is wound both ways, and there is no loosing it save the final torque which will release and launch and fragment it.

  He kisses me, and my blind hips answer the slow suck of his summoning mouth, pulling my back into an arch and curling it forward again, dragging the opening of my searing sex and its twitching sentry along the pulsing length of his cock. His lips move imperceptibly against mine, no longer kissing, whispering, praying.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I say. And I do.

  He kisses me again. “I will love you forever.”

  “I will not live forever.”

  “That’s life, I guess,” he says, smiling. And it is.

  “I will always love you,” I say. This is my immortality and my immutability.

  I wind my hungry body under his strength. He moves over me until the tip of his stone-hard cock kisses the mouth of my liquid sex. He does not move, but I slowly raise my willing hips to him. His body plunges into mine, opens me. His hard arms are trembling, and his eyes, gazing into mine, are fringed with fear for me. It does hurt. The wings on my back against the mattress hurt and the inexorable advance of his cock into my sex hurts, but I want this.

  He holds his pulsing body still inside mine and drops his seeking lips once more to my full and swollen breast. His warm mouth there raises a radiating heat in my stretched-wide sex, and I let the desire mount in me until my helpless body convulses, clutching at his rooted cock. My sex sucks at the flesh that chokes it, pulls in more than it can hold, and his body answers, pushing hard.

  Every place his body touches me ignites. He tries to kiss me, but our breathing comes too quickly, our bodies drive too hard. So he looks at me, eyes in mine, as his flesh is in mine. I grip his arms with human hands and wrap my clay feet behind his back. I am time and timeless, freedom and surrender, body and soul.

  His perfect face is twisted, focused on me, but mindless, and I am caught as well, release and restraint, the orgasm climbing higher. His cock is ruthless now, no longer striving for gentleness, but only for reunion. And I grind my sex against him. I want everything and nothing else. My body summons his invading sex, my breasts lunge toward the crushing chest.

  Our breathing is tortured and entwined. The pleasure climbs through me, balances—and for a moment I am dying—locked in a rigor of agony, mortality made too real too soon. Pleasure grips my belly in a cruel fist, and a glory of trembling takes me. I can’t breathe, am howling, have found the perfect totality of sensation, and scream to be released. My sex spasms, pleasure leaps. Dominic cries out. Another seizure takes my sex, washing me in the pure free-fall of orgasm flying through me.

  This is love. This is how mortals live with our too-few chances to bridge the rack we’re stretched on. This is how we look death in the face. With no Heaven I can ascend to and no God to cast me out, I stand, briefly, for a moment, in the love of a man and the joy of our bodies.

  Then I am falling. I am falling and see everything, always, one last time, falling into sleep. Dominic and I will buy a house between Dublin and Cashel. We will be happy there, living and working together. But right now, my secret sisters, safe in their places underground, are welcoming our first new guest. I notice she looks like me.

  Dominic’s mother and Dysart drink whiskey in the bar, while Madalene puts a call in to her son across the ocean. Outside my window, Ophelia’s ghost whispers filth into the Irish night. But Alyx, high above her, sleeps peacefully at last. And Gaehod, below us all, in the owner’s cluttered deep basement suite, writes to the undiscovered damned of the twenty-first century: My darling ones, Reborn and Undead, Damned, Cursed, and Misbegotten—Hell calls her absent children home.