A Taste of You

by Jennifer Stevenson

  “Now, watch.”

  While he watches, I turn into a mist as slowly as I can. It’s surprisingly hard. I don’t ever do this when people are watching.

  His eyes widen. He watches my clothes crumple to the floor without me. I’m touching him invisibly now, monitoring his mood.

  At first he seems alarmed. Then, as I rub up on him invisibly, he warms up again. He feels sexier when I’m in a mist. That doesn’t seem fair. Maybe I’m warming up myself.

  I return to physical form quickly. I feel really naked. I am naked, of course, but with Nick dressed, standing before me, sporting wood that I can smell under his clothes, and Beulah’s rumpled Dior sheath and my sneakers lumpy under my feet, I feel extra exposed.

  “So you see,” I say, rushing my confession, “this is how I was able to follow you the second time you took me home. When I wasn’t drunk.”

  “You can only do this when you’re sober?” he says, smiling, his forehead crinkling.

  “I can do it any time, but it’s smart not to drive drunk, right?” I blush. The blush is all over my body. I blush harder because he can see my nipples turning red. “I mean, I didn’t follow you the first time because I was drunk. And too busy crying myself to sleep,” I blurt, before I can stop my mouth.

  Apparently, when I decide to blow a bunch of secrets, I don’t hold back.

  He shifts closer to me, his smile fading. A warm, protective smell comes off him. “You cried yourself to sleep after I left? Oh, Hel—”

  He reaches for me. I tense up, because once he touches me I know my brain will stop — my eyes close — I want — too late—

  No touch comes. “Are you okay?”

  I open my eyes. “I will be when you touch me.” I want to sound sultry, but it comes out whimpery.

  He puts his hand on my shoulder.

  I get the rush of a lifetime.

  He pulls me close and kisses the top of my head. He’s a bonfire of heat and lust and this sweet, tender, hurty longing. I cling to him with both hands.

  The feel of his khakis against my naked belly and thighs is intensely erotic.

  I sniffle a bunch and rub my face dry on his shirt. Muffled against his shirt, I say, “There’s other stuff.”

  It’s all spilling out. I’m terrified. I can’t hold in a gasp. He pulls me closer and rocks me from side to side. This rubs me against the banana in his pocket.

  “Want to tell me?” he says to my scalp.

  “It’d be easier if you were naked,” I mumble to his shirt.

  He stops rocking me.

  Maybe he didn’t hear that.

  Then he bends and picks me up and carries me into the living room and sets me down gently in a sitting position on the couch. While I watch, he strips off his clothes.

  God, he’s a hunk.

  I smile. “You look nice.” He looks amazing. All that thick, lithe, solid muscle is aimed at me. His energy is aimed at me, too. I love it. He sits beside me on the couch, putting a foot or so of space between us, and takes my hand.

  “Hel, if you have more to tell me, you should tell me now.”

  I can feel in his aura that the “or else” involves a lot of body heat. I respect his self-control, even though it drives me crazy.

  I bite my lip.

  I’ve been waiting to tell him.

  “Okay,” I say, not sure I’m ready but it’s too late to hold back any longer. “I can feel your energy. I can feel anybody’s energy,” I add fairly, “only I don’t want to, usually. You’re the only one I always want to be close to.”

  That sounds sappy, but it’s true.

  I watch anxiously for more signs of his condescending you-adorable-teenager thing, but he listens, his eyes fixed on my face, his chest rising and falling a little fast.

  “I can ... taste your mood, too.” I flick a glance over him, looking for signs of fear or the ickies. He seems to be taking it fine. “It’s not like reading thoughts. It’s more like sharing your emotions. If you’re in a bad mood, it’s really not fun.”

  I try not to say this reproachfully. It’s not his fault he has no secrets from me.

  He’s nodding slightly, as if he doesn’t realize it.

  “So when you’re mad at me, I feel it really strongly. When you’re horny — which seems to be a hundred percent of the time—” I smile.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he says. “It’s this magic thing. Probably.”

  “Man, I hope not,” I say. “I don’t think it is. I think when you get horny, I get horny, because I’m near you, and I’m exchanging energy with you.”

  “We’re making each other horny,” he says.

  “Yes. I’m even kind of hoping—” I add, and stop. What I hope is huge and confusing and hard to explain.

  “You want to know if I want to exchange energy with you?” he says slowly.

  Tears fill my eyes. “Well, yes. It’s no fun wanting someone, and knowing all this stuff about them, when they don’t know you know, and they don’t want you to know.”

  “And if they don’t want you back.”

  It amazes me how simply he can put all this. “Yes!” I say, and I’m about to burst into tears when he reaches across the space between us and pulls me into a kiss.

  I feel him opening and closing inside, sending out bursts of hot happiness, like a jellyfish taking in the ocean and letting it out, over and over and over. Am I the ocean, or is he? I can’t tell. His mouth is hot and his tongue plunges into me and my brain turns inside out. I run my tongue over his teeth and discover they’re very sharp in back. He freezes. His body gets super-hard. I pull back and nuzzle him, tasting my own tears on his lips, and he slowly relaxes.

  “Any more secrets?” he pants. I hope we’re almost done talking for now.

  “Kind of. Maybe not. It depends what you know when we do this.”

  “What I know?” He frowns.

  “Yes, yes, I know you have this thing about facts. I’ve spent my life having to trust feelings, Nick. What I know about someone is based on their feelings, their feelings toward me, or their mood, or whatever.”

  He pulls at me as if to say, Shut up and kiss me again, and I want to.

  But I pull away. “Do you want to hear the secrets or not?”

  He sighs. “I suppose I’d better.”

  “When we’re passing energy back and forth, I know things about how you feel — physical things, emotional things. But do you know things about me?”

  He looks sly and the dimples come out in his big meaty face. “That’s my secret, not yours, isn’t it?”

  “Only if you want to keep your hair,” I snap. “C’mon. Full disclosure.”

  His smile fades. He says slowly, “I suppose. If we plan to spend a lot of time together.” I feel doubt in his energy.

  I put my hand on his cheek. “Nick. I’ve lived with guilty pleasure for more than forty-three years. I want some pleasure I don’t have to feel guilty about.” I give his cheek a playful slap. “Even if it comes in this big annoying package.” I smile tremulously.

  “I see.” He’s nodding. “I’ve lived with guilty pleasure only a fraction of that time. I’m sick of it already.”

  I take my courage in both hands. “Do you want to spend a lot of time with me?” I hold my breath.

  “I do, Hel. I don’t really see how we can afford not to.”

  I make a face. “That’s a nice proposal.”

  “I forget, you were born in the romantic fifties.” He gets down on one knee next to the couch.

  “Nineteen-sixty-one,” I say faintly.

  “Whatever.” He takes my hand in his. “Helen Nagazy, will you marry me? Will you put up with my perpetual arousal at random magical phenomena? Will you visit Pittsburgh with me illegally so we can put up a headstone for my family? Will you forgive me for being wrong, and rub it into me when you’re right?”

  My mouth is hanging open.

  He squeezes my hand. “You said, full disclosure.”

  I get a huge s
hiver.

  He lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses my knuckles.

  I scoot a couple of inches closer to his big, hot, naked body.

  He lifts his head. “I’m not done. Will you let me sit in the front row while you get knocked flying by tattooed amazons on wheels?” He sniffs at my knuckles. “Will you mind that I can always tell when you’re faking tough?”

  He opens my fingers and presses his nose against my palm. His eyes close.

  I can feel what he feels. He is totally getting off on the smell of my hand. It’s a pure, sweet kind of getting-off. I can feel a hot spot in his heart that grows bigger and hotter every second.

  A hot spot just like it forms in my heart.

  When he opens his eyes, he says, “Will you always cry on my chest? Will you let me in when you hate the human race?”

  I nod. My throat’s full of lump. I reach for him.

  He lunges over me, and then we’re stretched out on my couch the way I’ve always wanted to be, with me underneath his big burning body and him all over me with his hands.

  “Will you always make fun of my boner?” he says, and gnaws like an animal under my ear, making me squirm and giggle.

  I want to slow things down again so we can feel them, to see if we can practice feeling things together, but I’m too crazed from the day’s adventures, too needy for his naked skin, slicking up with sweat now. I wrap myself around him, arms, legs, holding tight with all my super-strength, and I beg him with everything but words to bang me.

  And bang me he does.

  I have one horrid moment where I remember how this happens right before the guy vanishes in my arms.

  The fear passes.

  I can feel the energy passing between us. It’s got colors, like the colors of our auras, and the colored energy pulses like the thundering pulse in my crotch, where Nick and I are rooted together. I feel the force of his whole body funneling through his cock into me. I feel all the little wheels up my spine locking with his, like gears on a machine, and I get dizzy as we spin around and around each other, spiraling upward, building the ladder as we climb it.

  And at the same time we’re slippery and gasping and moaning and grunting, moving smoothly from bone-jarring fuck to a long, slow, wavy motion that rubs my nipples against the rough, wet hair on his chest, as stinging sweat runs into my eyes and I lick and lick and lick at his collarbone because it’s all I can reach. I feel him wrapped around me as tightly as I’m wrapped around him. He’s pressing his face into my hair, holding on for dear life, just as scared and amazed and carried away as I am.

  Our energy begins to tighten around us, or inside us, I can’t tell. We’re pulling it between us like taffy. Every time his cock slides into me, his pubic bone bangs against my clit, setting off a pop! of excitement. I slam harder against him, squeezing him with muscles I’ve never used like this, which only makes him get bigger somehow. Maybe he’ll get too big and I’ll explode. That could happen. As soon as I think it, all my muscles go slack. Pleasure washes through me. I can’t hold on, I can’t bang back, I can’t squeeze his cock, I’m just a jellyfish in a tide of pleasure.

  He slows. “You all right?”

  “Don’t stop,” I say faintly. My arms lie limply over my head. He settles into a steady rhythm that drags my boneless floating ecstasy-washed senses up a thousand steps, one long sweet step at a time.

  I think this must be the slowest orgasm ever.

  That’s cool.

  Nick is holding on. Not just holding onto my body, but onto himself somehow. Holding back.

  “Nick,” I say, “let go.”

  He feels tight and sweaty all over me. “Can’t,” he squeezes out.

  “You did last night,” I say, trying fuzzily to remember if it was really only last night we did this.

  “Means — too — much—” he gasps.

  “Oh, for—” I say. He’s entering me slower and slower, and his cock is getting thicker and thicker, which feels fabulous for me, but I can tell he’s in distress. He’s got to blow, or he’ll pop a blood vessel in his brain, I can feel it as if it’s my own brain, my own cock.

  I reach inside him, I can’t describe how I know this is happening, but I somehow wriggle in there and wedge myself up against him where he’s tightest and hardest. It’s an energy thing. I realize I’ve found the place inside Nick where his self-control lives.

  “Baby — come along with me,” I gasp, and once again, only deliberately this time, I sync the wheels of my own energy with his wheels.

  “Don’t want to — hurt you,” he grunts.

  “You won’t.”

  “You’re so little!”

  “I could — carry you up a — dozen flights of stairs! Let go, love,” I say. “Can you feel that?”

  His energy has gone dark purple and nearly rigid. The wheel in his solar plexus isn’t moving. I start drawing on it, sucking prana from his wheel there into mine, knowing that the prana will flow through me and return to him at another level.

  Suddenly I feel a surge of pleasure rise in him, clear up to his throat.

  He tries to clamp it down, but it’s rising in me, too, and I let the rush whirl through me, dragging him with me, up, up, like sparks from a campfire.

  I let go of the sparks. They pull me into the sky.

  Nick shudders and shakes in my arms. Inside me, I feel his cock jump. My body responds, convulsing, squeezing him like a second heartbeat.

  His color fades slowly from purple to golden yellow.

  Our bodies have stopped moving, but inside we’re whirling, locked together, spiraling up and fading, like sparks trying to reach the stars.

  If we do this often enough, we might reach them yet.

  o0o

  “You and your self-control,” I say, stroking his head later. “I don’t know how you can do it. I know how horny you always are. Have you always held it in like that?”

  “Only since Pittsburgh. I work in places where there’s no magic for miles and miles and I feel nothing. And then I’ll be somewhere like this, where it’s everywhere.”

  I try to imagine what that must feel like. To be aroused all the time. All the time.

  It must, I suppose, feel just like being a guy.

  I say, “Sorry if I’m being insensitive here, but so what?”

  He touches my hand on his cheek. “I’d be a very different kind of person if I let it control me.”

  “Huh. I guess you would.” I lie still, smelling the sex in the room, feeling immensely satisfied that it came from me and from him. “Will you keep investigating magic — now?”

  I’m being tactful. “Now” means, now that Sageman has turned out to be a big fake, and his agency doesn’t exist.

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” I say, waiting for more.

  “Hel, don’t think I don’t appreciate your self-control, too.”

  “Mine? Joke. I’m a blurter and a hitter.”

  “You haven’t said I-told-you-so yet.”

  “About?”

  “You told me from the beginning that I was doing immoral work, setting people up to get killed or put away.” He’s staring at the ceiling, his head on my shoulder. I stroke the edge of his jaw.

  “I’m in no position to throw stones, Nick.”

  I feel him smile under my hand. “You did when we met.”

  “You were rattling the heck out of me.”

  “You didn’t act rattled,” he says. “You were cool and tough. You’d make a good cop.”

  This makes me shout with laughter.

  “Seriously,” he says. “Maybe we should hang out a shingle. There’s got to be something we can do in this town crammed full of magic.”

  There’s so many things wrong with that idea, I shove him off me so I can look him in the eye. “Dude, we have magic cops here already. Pound of Venus and her boyfriend?”

  “I thought she got fired.”

  “She gets fired about twice a year. It’s just a gesture fo
r the press. Her department always takes her back. Plus, you can’t hang out a shingle about magic here. The Hinky Policy. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Cope. You can’t even tell fortunes.”

  “So we’ll work on referrals, without a shingle. This woman’s got to have restrictions on her that private investigators wouldn’t have.”

  “Great, we’ll be breaking laws even the magic cops can’t ignore.”

  “Now you’re calling me a scofflaw again,” Nick says. He’s smiling that “you know I’ll win” smile. “Consider it. I have the nose for magic. You’re indestructible. You’d be great for legwork in those hard-to-reach areas. You’re sick of the hyper boys, anyway.”

  I pretend to resist him, the way I always do. “I am not sick of the hyper boys.” I think of little Breck, and how Katterfelto was able to help him. Even I felt I made a contribution there, if only by running interference with his dopey mother. I say, “Besides, maybe we can tackle some stuff that’s too sensitive for Venus’s department. There are kids out there who are suffering, and no government body is going to be able to address their problems.”

  “Sure,” Nick says. “Katterfelto can take their picture, and Sageman can talk kid talk to them.”

  “Brrr,” I say. “Let’s do something else.”

  He slides his big hand up my side and cups my breast. “Whatever you say.”

  o0o

  A new Hinky Chicago adventure is planned for 2015. Honk if you want it sooner!

  The Hinky Brass Bed

  Sample Chapter

  The adventure that started them all.

  On a sizzling Monday afternoon in July, Jewel Heiss was serving a ticket on a convenience store owner on Walton Street near Michigan Avenue, watching the smog over Lake Shore Drive turn pink, and trying to stake out The Drake Hotel across the street at the same time. Her boss had sent her to watch his wife, who also happened to be her best friend.

  The Swiftymart owner whined. “Every time you come here, you ticket me. This is persecution. I’m gonna call the city.” He led her out the front door, looking over his shoulder at his Gold Coast customers paying too much for sliced cheese.

  The guilty ones always attacked.

  Jewel smiled sunnily. “Every time, your scale still isn’t fixed. Fix it and keep it fixed.”