by Myles, Eden
He played, as always, like a concert pianist, less like he was milking the instrument of music and more like he was summoning it forth in some sorcerous way. It was a huge grand piano in white, almost exactly like the one in the Dollhouse back in New York. I’d bought it for Alexei the first year we’d moved here, and it had set me back quite a ways, but I knew it was one of Alexei’s treasures. “You do know you’re very distracting when you do that,” Alexei complained when he had reached the end of his current measure.
“How am I distracting?”
“I can smell you.”
I sniffed under an armpit just to be certain, but all I detected was the soap I’d used in the shower earlier that evening.
“That’s not what I mean.” He set his hands on the keys and looked up. He was still almost breathtakingly handsome in his black tuxedo, tall and lean, with his determined, vulpine face and glossy black hair and those thick-lashed dark eyes, so beautiful you almost had the feeling that God had stolen them from an Egyptian woman when he’d put Alexei together. Most folks thought I was cute and adorable, handsome in that All-American kind of way, but I paled by comparison to Alexei’s virile, old European charm, even now. “Tell he what’s bothering you,” he said.
“What makes you think anything’s bothering me?”
“You barely spoke during dinner, and, Daniel, you almost never shut up.”
I blushed even as I recognized my opening. “Sheri’s had a rough time this past year. Her boyfriend Steve left her recently for another man. Simon.”
“Ah, Simon again,” Alexei stated, his mouth quirking up bitterly at the name of the man who had almost come between us. “Bit of a home wrecker, isn’t he?”
“Maybe,” I said. I wasn’t going to discount Steve’s part in the affair. I took a deep breath and forged on. “There’s more.”
“You’re not planning on running off with Simon, are you?” Alexei asked, only half joking.
“No,” I laughed. “But Sheri…she’s pregnant with a baby she can’t keep.”
Alexei stared down sightlessly at the keys of the piano. “I was of the understanding that Sheri’s parents were moneyed?”
“They are. But that’s not the issue. They might have money, but they’re also very, very prejudice. And Steve, Sheri’s ex-boyfriend, is black.”
“I see.” He seemed to think about that for a long moment. Perhaps he was contemplating the strange nature of blind hate in general. “And what does Sheri plan to do about her…situation?”
The moment of truth. “She wants to give up the baby.”
“I see,” he said again. “Does she think that’s wise?”
“If you mean, do you think she’ll come to regret it? She might, but Sheri knows as well as I do that she can’t handle the responsibility. Maybe in five years, maybe in ten. Maybe if she found the right guy to support her. But not now.” I took a deep breath. “She never talks about it, but a lot of folks at college were really hard on her, calling her a slut all the time, but they didn’t know the whole story. They didn’t know what she’d been through. When she was still in high school, a bunch of punks gang raped her one night, really messed her up, and they were never caught. It was years before she could even let a guy stand near her, let along touch her. And…well, she’ll never have a completely normal relationship with anyone.”
“Not true,” Alexei argued. “She has a wonderful relationship with you, Daniel.”
“But I don’t judge her,” I said. “And, besides, she doesn’t really think of me as a guy, per se. I’m her girlfriend, you see. Her guy girlfriend.”
I waited for him to laugh at that, to make some joke, but he didn’t. He went back to playing his music and I sat there atop the piano with my eyes closed, realizing I had probably made a terrible mistake. I really was the stupidest smart guy who’d ever walked the planet, just like Sheri had said years ago. What made me think I could convince Alexei to go along with my stupid plan to adopt Sheri’s baby?
I listened to the music, which was both sad and strangely uplifting at the same time. Finally, Alexei stopped and glanced up at me—or, at least, in my general direction. “I trust you inquired?”
I looked down at my lover and life partner and said, “What?”
Alexei raised his eyebrows. “Daniel, you did ask about the prospect of adopting, yes?”
His words made me feel dizzy and light-headed. “You’re interested?” I asked with some wonder.
Alexei pressed his lips together, the way he did when he was vaguely insulted by something I had said. “I assumed that was still on our list of goals. You do still want a family with me someday, don’t you?”
I turned so my legs were dangling over the edge of the piano directly in front of him, blocking him from playing. “Yes, of course…but…what about our travel plans?”
“When is Sheri’s baby due?”
“Six months,” I told him. “So it’s going to really mess up our plans.”
“Daniel,” he said patiently. “What would you prefer to do? Travel the world with me or raise a child?”
I didn’t even have to think about that. “Well, actually, both. Just not at the same time, probably,” I laughed. “You have Kate all grown, but I’m still pretty new to this parenting stuff.”
Alexei stood up and rested his hands atop my thighs. “So I change our plans. We travel in a year or three, take the child with us. What do you think of that?”
I reveled in his words and the heat coming off his body. “Would you do that?” I asked.
Alexei smirked. “Normally, no, but since it’s you, my angel, I might be persuaded.” Gripping my thighs, he pulled me a little ways across the slick surface of the piano so it was just my ass on the edge, then forced my legs open so he could fit himself between. He placed his hand on my back and lowered his head and breathed in the scent of my hair and then the skin along the side of my neck. He breathed intimately against my lips.
With our workloads so heavy, I realized it had been several weeks since we’d had any kind of real intimacy, and I wasn’t counting the quickies at bedtime before the two of us, too exhausted for anything more adventurous, dropped off to sleep. “Hi, there, stranger,” I said when we came face to face. “Long time no see.”
And Alexei laughed at that. It was good laugh. And it was good to hear him laugh. It wasn’t often a sound you heard from him.
He had only brushed the briefest kiss across my lips when one of our cell phones went off—which one, I wasn’t entirely sure, since we were all tangled up together, and I’d somehow never gotten around to changing the ringtones on our phones to prevent confusion. By then, I’d slid my hands around Alexei’s ass and pulled him tight against the front of my body, wondering at how hard and muscular he still was, despite being in his mid-fifties, and he was busily working at seeing how far down my throat he could stick his tongue. I gripped the front of his shirt as he explored every inch of my mouth with his tongue. There was something to be said for experience, as Alexei had so thoughtfully pointed out years earlier. Once, an athlete like Simon would have thrilled me, but now I didn’t want a younger man. I didn’t want any other man. I only wanted my gentleman.
After the seventh ring, I broke away breathlessly to say, “We should get that.”
“Voicemail can pick it up.”
“It could be important.” He kissed me. “The end of the world.” Again he kissed me. “The end of everything…”
“Yes,” he agreed, the rough burn of his cheek grazing me so I whimpered against his mouth. “But it’s also important that a child have a loving environment to grow up in,” he told me. “Don’t you agree?”
“I think we’re definitely that.”
“Do you mean that, Daniel?”
I groaned a response. I looked up at him, and I felt my heart flit rapidly in that way it could sometimes when I caught Alexei in an unguarded moment, when he dropped his personal barriers and let himself be vulnerable with me. It didn’t happen often,
and, as far as I was aware, I was the only one who ever saw that side of him—that part that loved me, who needed so desperately to be loved in return. “I love you, Alexei. I lust for you,” I confessed. “But mostly…I love you.” I slid my hands over his silken lapels, then down the sides of his body. I pushed my hands up under the hem of his shirt under his tuxedo coat so I could feel the silken warmth of his abs against my hands and the feel of his trembling body pressed flush to mine. His cock stabbed into my belly, and it wasn’t long before he reached between us, to undo our belts and trousers, so we could rub our erections against one another.
“I love and lust for you too, Daniel,” he said in a low, growling voice. He closed his big hand around the back of my neck, his fingers drawing slow, sensual circles there even as he nuzzled the supersensitive skin under my ear. I closed my eyes and gasped as his teeth first nibbled and then bit at my skin and the slick, velvet hardness of him rubbed against the front of my body. He was wet already, almost dripping with arousal, and very soon the front of my body was drenched in his pre-cum so I smelled more like him than like myself.
His powerful hand squeezed my knee, then moved further up. He cupped my cock and balls, wetting his fingers, then traced his way down my perineum and found my quivering opening. He circled me gently, the lightest touch, before saying sweetly in my ear, “Do you like this, angel, do you like me touching you this way?”
“Yes, sir,” I told him. “I love it when you touch me. I love it more when you play with me.”
He kissed my throat. “You may have to take tomorrow off just so I can play with you.”
I thought about that and then immediately said, “Yes, sir.” I might be head of Daniel Collins & Associates, but I was also Daniel Collins, Alexei Karenina’s courtier, and I realized I’d let my duties in that department slack off a bit lately.
“Beg me, Angel moy. Beg me to touch you.”
“Please, sir,” I said, spreading my legs further, and he inserted two of his fingers. I arched my back against his penetration and started moaning and thrusting against him. He pushed me back on the piano so I was pinned beneath his weight, and replaced his fingers with his cock. He gripped me by the shoulders, held me down, and battered his way inside me until I cried out, the heel of my shoe striking a chord on the keys of the piano.
“Shhh…” Alexei said, his soft, hoarse voice purring against my throat, the vibration almost undoing me. “Someone might hear.” He started whispering in my ear in Russian even as he fucked me slowly, bucking his hips and moving in and out of me in a slow, sensual rhythm. I had learned just enough Russian over the last few years to follow what he was saying, more or less, and they weren’t the kinds of things you said to anyone unless you truly loved them, knew them, and knew they trusted you implicitly. I gasped at the blatantly erotic things he said to me, the way he kissed and fondled and fucked me, penetrating me in both places at the same time, slow and fast, gentle and hard. He told me again and again how much he loved me, the different ways he wanted me, all the things he wanted to do to me.
His hand traveled over the flat plain of my stomach, teased over my navel, and then he took my aching erection in his hand. He coiled his fingers around my cock, and as his tongue teased past the seam of my lips, he started to pump me up and down while digging his thumb deep into my slit. My whole body writhed in delight, wanting to come but unable to do anything with the solid grip Alexei had on me. All I could do was buck my hips in rhythm to his sharp, relentless pounding against my ass. All I could do was shiver and writhe for him like a puppet on invisible strings. He nibbled and sucked at my bottom lip, biting me. He turned his head and bit the side of my neck hard. He held me down, with his hands, with his teeth, and fucked me until I cried out at the stimulation surging through my body. Alexei had teased and conjured the music from the piano like some dark magician, and now he was pulling the most carnal and fantastic reactions from my body as well.
As my body arched upward and I began to scream for release, he kissed me, catching the scream in his own mouth, muffling it so Sheri wouldn’t hear, even as he came with a low, satisfied grunt deep inside my ass. He pulled out almost immediately, and his sweet, sticky seed spurted not just inside me, but against me as well. He immediately dropped to his knees before the piano and guided my erection into his mouth, swallowing me down until I hit the back of his throat. He sucked and I clawed at the back of his head and came hard, thrusting wildly against his face. He swallowed, and then he bit me, his teeth raking over my sensitive flesh, while his fingers found their way inside me once more, forcing his seed out of me. I came a second time with a cry of both pleasure and pain and spurted the last of my release down his throat.
After he’d swallowed me, he stood up and settled on the piano beside me, gathering me against the front of his suit. I lay snuggled in his arms, sore but satiated, and he bent his head to kiss me on the top of the head. “So it’s settled, then, my angel,” he told me. “We’ll raise that child first, and then take the world tour later.”
I thought about all that I had—Alexei, my house in the country, the dog, and now a child. A family of my own. And I realized then that I had everything a man could truly want from life.
* * *
DEVICES & DESIRES
by Madeline Apple
Chapter I
The first thing I saw was light.
The first thing I heard was a man’s exuberant voice saying, “She’s alive! Franz, come see, she’s alive!”
The light sharpened and took on different forms. I saw darkness and shadow and strange, glistening metal and glass apparatuses surrounding me where I was lying prone on a gurney.
I was in a laboratory of some sort. I saw test tubes, tesla coils, endless shelves of strange poultices in dusty bottles on the walls. I heard a dull buzzing noise in my head. Out beyond the walls of the lab, I heard the dull roar of a storm creeping in.
Soon I recognized two men standing over me. One was tall and broad, middle-aged, with greying hair at his temples and round glasses. His face was severe but very handsome. The second was short and funny-looking. I realized the second man must be a dwarf. He smiled at me and I smiled back.
“She can smile, Franz. Look.”
“You did an excellent job, Doctor,” said the dwarf. “She’s perfect.”
“She is, isn’t she?”
My eyes returned to the larger man. Pride had softened his severe face a little and I felt my heart skip a beat at the sight of his gentle grey eyes, the way they were trained on me. I felt an instant connection with the man.
I’d never believed in love at first sight until now. But yes, I loved him. He was all to me.
“Dr. Von Holtz, you’ve finally done it,” the little man said with admiration. “You’ve created life!”
I tried to say something, to ask questions, but a wave of fatigue overwhelmed and I slipped back into absolute darkness.
* * *
Chapter II
When next I woke, I was lying in bed in a grand bedroom in what I thought must be a very old castle or keep of some kind. The walls were made of black flagstone, and sconces lit with fires lined the room. There were candelabras on the mantelpiece of the fireplace and on the desk and dressing table. The bed itself was a huge, grand canopied affair, and there was a tall oval mirror in one corner of the room.
I sat up and touched my slender, catlike face, reflected in the glass, my reams of loose, russet curls, my redhead-pale skin and lightly freckled cheeks and throat. I noticed my eyes were mismatched, one sky blue, the other brown. The woman in the mirror seemed familiar, and yet…not. My mind was a jumble of images, names, places, people…like an old book with pages torn out.
The tall man from the laboratory, Dr. Von Holtz, sat beside me on the bed, my opposite wrist in his long, slender fingers as he read my pulse. When he saw I was fully awake, he gently set my hand down and leaned down to look into my eyes.
He smelled a little like the laboratory, a faint chemi
cal aroma mixed with old books, but his own scent was there as well, and it was warm and masculine, comforting. My body immediately responded to it. My heart kicked me in the chest and the juncture of my thighs was suddenly damp.
“Hello there, my dear. Can you understand me?” he asked. “Can you speak?”
I tried to answer, but my tongue seemed to stick to the roof of my mouth.
Seeming to understand this instinctively, he reached for a pitcher of water on the bedside table and filled a glass. “My name is Dr. Tristan Von Holtz. I’m a doctor of medicine.” When he put it in my hands, I saw they shook. My body felt so weak.
He helped me drink, then wiped my lips with a handkerchief. It was difficult to swallow at first, like I had never drunk water before. “And now?” he asked.
“H-h-how…?” was all I could manage at first.
“How are you here?” he offered.
I nodded.
He looked troubled, then said, “You had an unfortunate accident. But you’re well now. You’re getting stronger every day. Do you remember your name, my dear?”
I thought back to my last memory, but it was of awakening in Dr. Von Holtz’s lab. I had no memories prior to that, which I found odd. If I knew I had awakened in a laboratory, understood what a laboratory was, shouldn’t I be able to remember something so rudimentary as my own name?
I shook my head sadly. “C-can’t…remember.”
“Olivia. Your name is Olivia. Does that mean anything to you?”
I shook my head. He might as well have told me a stranger’s name.
“Do you remember anything about what happened to you?”
I thought back, but there was no back…just the lab. Finally, I shook my head sadly. “No.”
He smiled. It was the kind of smile that transformed his face. Normally, he looked aloof and preoccupied, like some cold, diffident lord, but when he smiled, I felt my heart thump in my chest. It deepened the creases around his eyes and mouth and made me want to touch them. “That’s quite all right, Olivia. When you see your fiancé again, I’m sure it’ll awaken all your old memories.”