“I’m not the only one,” he said. “We just don’t cross over too much. It takes a lot of sugar to keep a metabolism like ours revving. As you may have noticed.” Now it was his turn to blush a little, and Lire thought she’d never seen anything so magnificent as this big creature staring at her with obvious heat, two small dots of pink appearing on his cheeks.
He reached out to her again, but stopped just short of touching her. For the first time since she’d seen him, he seemed uncertain of himself.
“Do you want some…?” Lire stopped the question even as it came out. What had she been about to say? Lunch? Dinner? Sex with a sugar-coated baker? Yes, that last one was definitely it.
“I…I have to go,” he said. “Thank you for the sugar.”
“Oh,” Lire said. She felt suddenly worn out and smushed small, like her emotions had been thrown in a mixing bowl and tossed around for a couple of hours. Desire and hope folded in with embarrassment and worry, all mixed with a couple of drops of disappointment. Thank the gods she was better at baking than she was at flirting.
She forced herself to head back behind her pastry case where she was at least partly protected, even if only by glass and spun sugar.
“Well, then,” she said. “Come back anytime. We do our signature Devil’s Food Cake on Thursdays. It’s to die for. Haha.”
Despite her move away, she wished for him to say something obvious and delightful and cliché like, “Well, I came in for sugar, but I found you instead.”
He didn’t say anything like that. He didn’t say anything at all. Instead he gave her a long look, a pitying look she was sure, which she mostly avoided by ducking her head to wipe some crumbs of sugar off the counter. Everyone wanted her pastries. No one wanted her. Fine. Lire could live with that, if it meant she didn’t have to go through anymore emotional mixing bowls.
She heard the door open and close, and then Margipe’s tongue smack and squeal along the window before he pulled it into his mouth. “Big man go bye-bye!” he said.
Lire tossed a cookie at the frog’s head. “Shut it, or I’ll be offering frog’s legs as the special tomorrow.”
“Not sweet,” the frog said. “Not sweet at all.”
“Tell me about it,” she said.
After three busy days where both she and Kelly were cranking at the shop, Lire did as she’d promised herself and took a day off. She left Kelly and Margipe—the frog had been surprisingly quiet—in charge of the bakery and headed off for supplies. She didn’t think of Thadeous for the whole day, except for maybe once or twice when she saw someone with dark eyes or dark curly hair, or when she ran into a gaggle of pint-sized fairies while buying sugar.
“How’d it go?” Kelly asked when she got back.
“Perfect,” Lire said. She didn’t mention the fairies, how they’d swarmed around her, sniffing at her arms and hands, jabbering on about “big fairy boys” while they sighed longingly and fanned their wings at her.
“Some man came by for you,” Kelly said. “Well, not a man. He might have been one of the lesser gods?”
Lesser demon is more like it, Lire thought. “Blackish eyes?”
“Yeah, really nice blackish eyes. Intense.”
“Great,” Lire said.
Kelly shrugged. “Margipe seemed to like him.”
“Margipe likes everyone,” Lire said. “Did the guy pass out and then scam free cookies off you?”
Kelly laid down the rest of the supplies on the baking counter. “What?”
“Never mind,” Lire said. She looked at the supplies, at the tiny spots of dirt in the kitchen, and decided that a cleaning party was just what she needed. Alone. Maybe a little “Devil Went Down to Georgia,” to clear her head. “Go ahead and go on home, Kel,” she said. “I’ll close up.”
“Are you sure? There’s—”
“Yeah,” Lire said. “I got it.”
Lire threw on her cleaning apron as soon as Kelly got out the door, tied her hair up in a loose bun, threw on some music, and set to scrubbing. She kept a clean bakery, really. Cleaning wasn’t necessary, but it made her feel better. Stupid fey, getting in her brain like that.
She was singing along, loudly, by the time she got out the Windex and newspapers to wipe the front bakery cases. As she stepped through the swinging doors into the front of the bakery, she heard Margipe say, “Lire, Lire, Lire! Big man! Big man!”
“I know,” she said, as she headed toward the pastry cases. “I heard.”
“What did you hear?” The voice wasn’t Margipe’s at all. It was his. Thadeous.
“Shit,” Lire said as she saw him sitting at one of the tables. The hum she’d noticed last time was absent, which had to be why she hadn’t noticed him. “You scared the fuck out of me.”
“Good thing that blue stuff won’t kill fairies,” Thad said. “Or I have a feeling I’d be halfway to dead.”
Lire realized she was holding the bottle of Windex in her hand like a weapon. “Shit,” she said again. Trying to recover, she stayed where she was, keeping distance between them. “I suppose you’re in need of another sugar fix?” she asked. Her voice wasn’t nearly as hard-edged as she’d hoped it would be.
“Yes,” he said as he stood. “And no.”
“Also, how long have you been here? Kelly closed up the shop hours ago. How did you get—”
He smiled at her, a slow, languorous smile that made her insides turn over. “Oh,” she said. “You’ve been here the whole time.”
“Long enough to hear you sing at least four songs, all of which, I can’t help but noticing, were either about broken hearts or devils. Got something you’re working out?”
Lire’s face went hot again. Goddamn these non-mortals and their ability to make her blush. She had an instant where she remembered a movie where the lead character had yelled, “I just want a normal boyfriend!” which was sort of how she felt right now. Except she didn’t have a boyfriend at all. And normal was apparently beyond her. What she had was a bakery in a paranormal hot spot, a talking frog and the world’s biggest, sexiest, most insulin-dependent fairy who wanted nothing more from her than her baked goods.
Thadeous stepped toward her, and as he did so, she felt his body hum. Like before, the motion rattled her, made her hips shimmy slightly, made her very atoms feel like they were dancing. Awesome, she thought. More vibrations. And here she was in her dirtiest apron, her hair cockeyed on her head, probably with who-knew-what on her mouth.
“What do you want?” she asked.
He lined himself up in front of her, not touching her; not a single bit of him was touching her, and yet she could feel his skin somehow, the heat and hum of it.
“One of those to-die-for Devil’s Food Cakes,” he said. “And the woman who made it. Not in that order.”
As he finished his words, he did touch her, pressing his body, the full length of it, against her. In the places where their skin met, Lire’s own skin seem to buzz slightly, like it was being brushed by honeybee wings. His lips did the same thing to hers, sending small shivers against her mouth and down through her body.
Still touching, still kissing, she realized he was also speaking. She could barely hear him over the hum. “I did come in for sugar. And then there was you. Something wicked in your eyes, your lips all coated in sweetness. I wanted to eat you up instead.”
Lire had to pull back, away from the velvet vibration of touch that his lips gave her, one of the hardest things she’d ever done. But she couldn’t help herself. “Why did you go then? I thought—”
Even as he released her lips, his hips pressed more fully against hers. He was tall, taller than she’d realized even, and broad. His big hands on her hips pulled her tight, held her there so that she could feel him. It was both constraining and freeing, all at once.
“Shush,” he said, and she did. His mouth was on her again, his tongue probing her, his teeth nibbling her as though she was the sweet dessert. The song of his skin made her head feel light, so that she was noise
and music, the soft beat of heart and want. “I know what I want when I see it, Sugarspinner.”
“You’ve not seen me,” she said.
“I will now.” He knelt in front of her, untying the apron from around her waist, his fingers deft and sure. His head was so close to her thighs. She wanted to grab it, to pull it into her, to see if his vibrations alone would be enough to set her body humming. She had a feeling that they would be.
He undressed her quickly, somehow taking every opportunity to put his fingers to her skin as he removed the fabric. When his fingertips brushed her between her thighs, she released a small, quiet cry of want.
“Oh, hell,” she said and covered her mouth.
He rose and took her hand away, covering her lips with his own for a moment before he pulled back, that lazy grin of his returning. “I like to hear you,” he said. “The first time I heard you laugh, that’s when I knew I wanted you. Fairy women are quiet. Silent. I like to listen. I like to hear what I’m doing to a woman’s body. Yes?”
She nodded. He still had her wrist in his hand, and he tightened his grip on it slightly, those black, black eyes on hers.
“Yes?” he asked again.
“Yes,” she said.
“That’s more like it.”
Lire realized she’d never stood naked before a fully clothed man before with this level of comfort. She didn’t feel shy about her body at all. All she felt was want and need. Her fingers peeled away his clothes, revealing his body. Pale white, so pale he was almost glowing, with muscles that looked both hard and deliciously soft all at the same time. His cock rose in a soft curve at the base of dark, curled hairs, its length matching Thadeous’s tall stature. Lire wanted to eat him, every inch.
A second later, she realized she wasn’t the only one with her gaze on his cock. “Oh, really big man! Veeery big!” Margipe croaked from the doorway, leapfrogging from spot to spot. “Big! Big!”
“Oh, for the gods, can’t you shut him up?” Thadeous asked her, grinning. Despite his tone, it was obvious that he didn’t mind the frog’s comment on his size.
“I can do one better,” Lire said. Stepping away from Thadeous, she scooped Margipe up and dumped him unceremoniously into one of the clean trash cans. A small burrp echoed inside, and then it went silent.
She returned to him, settling the heat of her body against his, their laughter quickly giving way to quiet sounds of lust as their hands explored each other.
“Can I have this?” Lire asked, tracing her fingers along the underside of his cock. The length jumped and pulsed against her touch, the head already growing wet with droplets of desire. It looked like sugar water, and her tongue watered at the thought of tasting him.
“Only if I can have this,” he said, his own fingers dipping again between her thighs.
They made it down to the floor before their mouths found each other, Lire taking his length against her tongue like a honey stick, suckling from him. He tasted of sweet and tang, like the dark chocolate cookies she sometimes dipped in a bit of salt. She would have lain there and suckled from him for days, except that his mouth was tasting her at the same time, making her arch her hips up and buck against him.
He pulled away from her and she felt a loss as he left. “Can’t hear you from down there,” he said as he positioned her over him. Lire straddled him, her thighs parting easily to let him in. He leaned up and kissed her mouth, hard, as he arched his body, his hips making a slow slide upward, entering her and then splitting her. He did vibrate, the whole of his cock, shuddering her insides softly, making her want to grind down against him even harder.
“More, please,” she said. At her words, a soft groan left his mouth, a sound that fed her shudders, forcing them higher.
Her nails dug small furrows in his pale chest, but he didn’t seem to mind, only bucked beneath her harder. One hand reached up and touched the very center of her clit, thrumming against it. Between the thrusting and the vibrations, she wasn’t going to last very long.
“Slow,” she said. “Slow.”
“Trying,” he said. And she could tell he was. His teeth were tight against each other, the muscles in his neck strained. “You just feel…”
“I know,” she said. “I know. I know.” The words morphed as he drove up into her, becoming “No,” and then “Yes,” and then little more than scattered groans and moans as she came around him, thinking of nothing but how it was like song, rising up through her body in the hum and breath of a hundred notes, a thousand voices. And when he joined her, just as she was winding down, it was an aria, birdsong and butterfly wing and the scent of fresh-baked cinnamon rolls and pleasure, bars and bars of pleasure.
When they were done, Lire folded herself down on top of him without letting his cock slide out of her. “So, why did you? Go, I mean,” she asked.
“Little late now, no?” he teased.
She nipped at the side of his chest.
“Would you believe family?” he asked.
“I might,” she said. She thought she might believe anything right now, caught up in the rise and fall of his chest, in the winged vibrations that still shuddered through her softly.
“My mother,” he said. “She’s one of the queens. I have to ask her permission before I bring someone into the fairy realm for a visit. Especially a human someone.”
It took a second for what he was saying to make it through Lire’s sex-addled brain. “Are you trying to tell me you ran away so that you can invite me over to meet your parents? After knowing me for five minutes? I’m so not buying that.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you,” he said. “There was something about you that called to my blood.”
“The sugar, probably.”
“Probably,” he said. And then he bent to kiss her again.
“Go to fairyland?” Margipe asked from within the garbage can, his little voice echoing, making them both jump.
“No,” they both said at once.
“Get out of can?”
“Not quite yet,” Thadeous said. And then he bent to kiss her again, and in the honeyed draw of his mouth, Lire tasted the possible sweetness of her future.
RAINMAKER
A. D. R. Forte
Faith woke up when her ass hit the floor, which was a good thing. The nightmare hadn’t been exactly fun. Panting, she looked around: just her apartment bedroom, no thunderclouds or vicious, not-quite-human skeletal remains; no floating images of faces like ghosts with staring, sightless eyes. She sat up and peered over the edge of her bed, then gingerly crawled back into it and huddled against her pillows. That didn’t work, so she scrunched her knees up to her chest and dug her chin into them. Had she ever been scared like this in her life? She didn’t think so.
And all over a nightmare. It was just a nightmare, right? Just some crazy, random shit her brain had dredged up from too many weird movies. It was probably caused by the heat, except she was shivering her ass off. Faith rolled over and turned on her bedside light. Once its glow pooled across the room, she crawled out of the bed again and went to turn on the overhead light. She went around turning on every light she could find and the TV sets in the bedroom and in the living room even though the air conditioner was already chugging and wheezing like a smoker with COPD. She made herself a cup of instant cocoa, loaded it up with extra sugar and tossed a couple of ice cubes in.
Outside, the strong wind was rattling and tearing around like a hooligan kid on roller skates. Despite the heat of the apartment and the half-warm cocoa, Faith started shivering again.
This was craziness. She was scaring herself over nothing. Droughts happened. She only had to go to the library; fuck, she just had to pull up the Internet and read about the Dust Bowl. Whether it rained or it didn’t had shit-all to do with her. The face in the clouds—the face she thought she’d seen—had been imagination, a fantasy.
She’d been at her grandmother’s weeks before, trying to get the laundry in before the rain they’d thought, hoped,
was going to start. It hadn’t, of course. But she’d been on the last sheet, tugging it off the line, when she looked up. As if a screen had suddenly been drawn back, she’d seen the face: dark eyes, saddle-leather skin.
She couldn’t visualize his hair now, only that she’d wanted to run her fingers through it, and while she could picture the shape of his lips or his nose, she couldn’t think of how they fit together. They were like pieces of scattered glass in one of those cardboard kaleidoscopes the kids got at the dollar store, except that the pattern never fell quite right.
Maybe it was not a fantasy. She could picture her grandmother, Linda Jade Brewer, standing with her hand on a hip and her lips pursed, disapproving of Faith’s lack of faith.
Rubbing her arms, Faith paced around the living room, parting the vinyl shades to look out into the flashing lightning before letting them fall back and going on to the next window.
“Not a fantasy,” she said aloud. “Not a crazy, cockamamie… son of a bitch!” She jumped as the lights in the apartment flickered and then resumed while thunder boomed outside and the refrigerator gave a loud belching hum.
“Okay!” she yelled. “Okay, I believe it! I believe it! But what the hell am I supposed to know? What am I supposed to do?”
She didn’t get an answer. The wind just kept on howling, the lightning and thunder kept on raging, and through it all there wasn’t a single drop of rain.
Faith tasted the ozone tang of the thunderstorm in the air for days. It lingered like smoke even after the sun came out and the air turned dry and cool. She knew that somewhere, just out of reach, the storm wasn’t over. Because she dreamed it.
Skeletons parched under sun. Strange hollow faces wove through her subconscious like wraiths. They called to her, but she couldn’t answer, and she woke up crying.
Then he came to her, dark eyes and leather skin. He squatted down and held his hands out and she held her hands out through wind that moved like cold water over their fingers.
Dream Lover Page 5