Walking on Sunshine

by Jennifer Stevenson

  I hope he likes that.

  The feeling was like music, full of rhythm and reverberation, and his thumbs kept pressing and releasing close to his tongue, laying down a backbeat. The music built and built.

  With music, I was home. My hands slid up his neck and I laced my fingers into his skanky skimpy white-guy dreads and pulled him closer. The backbeat quickened. His tongue quickened. I was panting like a dancer, feeling things tighten inside me.

  Then he did something different and suddenly his face was deeper between my sweating, slippery thighs—I tottered, but his hands steadied me—and he was pushing his tongue inside me, and his thumbs made something pop like a cymbal with brief, light, firm touches, and the beat disintegrated into a conga drum solo, oh lord!

  “Oh, Baz!” I yelled on a rising note, fearing the end of everything.

  My legs gave. He moved under me, and his arms circled my butt. I opened my eyes to see the ceiling swing around as he lifted me up and laid me on the bed. His head was still between my thighs.

  He was still licking into me.

  “Wait,” I whimpered, and he stopped licking. I lifted my head to look at him. “Are you sure—do you like this?”

  I knew for certain that he didn’t move. His arms were locked under my hips and his tongue was still . . . down there . . . oh, now I wanted him to start up again.

  But I heard his voice hoarse at my ear, crooning low enough to send a shiver down my whole side, “Yes. I love it. Let me adore you.”

  That set the front of my body tightening in a strange way. He licked slower now, poking deep into me once, then lightly a few times, establishing a rhythm. I lay back. I felt confused all over, but at the same time absolutely certain. He pummeled me down there with soft, firm touches, a djembe rhythm like the galloping of two horses out of synch. My heart slid into the same beat. Soon I was panting again, pulling at his hair, clawing his head, the djembe rhythm closed in—the hoofbeats fell closer and closer together—his thumbs and his tongue sped up, one two three, one two three, onetwothree. I arched—forward? backward? My legs stiffened and all my muscles begged, but for what, for what?

  This!

  His thumbs hit me simultaneously, boom, boom, badoom, and his tongue thickened and lengthened and pushed into me far deeper than before, filling me, stretching me out even as I squeezed it in pulses in a fist I hadn’t known I had.

  My body roared like an amphitheater full of fans.

  After a while, the shouting inside me softened. I opened my eyes. My fingers relaxed in his hair.

  Baz slid his arms out from under me, groaned against my still-hot, still-slippery private parts, and moved up the bed to lie beside me.

  He grinned that giant grin.

  I felt brand new. “You really liked that?” I blurted.

  He nodded. Not helping with the conversation thing at all.

  I took a breath. Even oxygen sent happy feelings all over me. “So did you use any sex demon stuff on me? That was amazing,” I added politely. “Thank you.”

  He looked smug. “It’s what I do.”

  Right. Thirty pieces of silver and monthly reports to the Regional Office. I bugged my eyes out. “Well, did you use any tricks?”

  “A couple. So we could skip the first-time stuff.”

  “First-time stuff? You mean, because I’m clumsy? Because I’m new at this?” I flushed.

  He rolled his eyes. “No, I mean our first time. Every first time with a new lover, you get some awkwardness—head clonks, sorry, does she like that, ouch, I think my elbow is dislocated, wait, I thought you wanted to oops.”

  I giggled. “How do you oops?” I was looking at his boner.

  He waved a hand. “We’ll get to that.”

  “And meanwhile?” I blurted again. Where were my manners? I wanted more. I was pretty sure he hadn’t used up his repertoire in one go. I softened my voice. “Are you happy?”

  BAZ

  I realized I was grinning so hard my jaws hurt. Well, that could have been the oral sex. I dialed it back to a smile. “Yes. I’m happy.”

  I was more than happy. I was thinking that you should never argue with a goddess. First of all it’s a waste of time, and second, she knows best. She had told me I could have this avatar if I wanted. Consolation prize for losing the big fish.

  I didn’t want the big fish anymore. But I did want this one. Her fresh fish smell was all over my face. I might never shower again.

  “That’s good. I want you to be happy,” she said, and I got a shiver.

  “Did you—did you think about making me happy just now? I mean, with the whatever-it-is you use in a concert?”

  “The mana,” she said, and dimpled. “Did it work?”

  “It did,” I said. I wondered if that cheapened the high. Did I feel less happy because I knew she’d magicked it into me? I didn’t care. I hadn’t been this blissfully content since the first time I tried marijuana.

  “Is this how you do sex demon stuff? Make the women happy with magic? Even if the sex is only so-so?”

  I scowled. Again with the analysis. This was why I never told women I was a sex demon. “Is that a complaint?”

  She slugged me on the arm. “Of course. You ass. It’s my first sex ever, how can I complain?”

  I relaxed. “Most magic is ninety-nine percent perspiration and one percent whammy. Besides, a man’s got his pride.”

  “But can they tell? I sure can’t. I have nothing to compare you to.”

  “I get it, I get it! No! I don’t tell them if I whammy them. I figured it would be like looking at the man behind the curtain. Spoil the high. But,” I said, running a hand down her tawny bare length, “it doesn’t seem to bother me to know you’ve put the fix in. Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time.”

  “Whoa, alert the media. A white guy thinks he might have been wrong.”

  I eyed her, smiling at her smile, taking in her relaxed sprawl on the coverlet, watching her stroke the coverlet—hey—

  “Nice fur,” she said, petting it.

  “Um,” I said.

  She moved her leg, studying the coverlet. “It’s huge. Must be more than one pelt.”

  “Uh,” I said.

  She looked back up at me. “What?”

  “I—I don’t have a fur coverlet. I think you—or we—did that.”

  Swiftly she sat up. “What?” She scrambled off the bed. I joined her to stand on the funky carpet. Together we looked down at what should have been ten dollars’ worth of cheap poly-cotton sheets, kinda stained.

  Instead my big bed was covered, lapping over all four sides, with a thick, creamy blanket of spotted lynx pelts sewn together.

  “Nice,” I said, a little dizzy.

  We sat back down on the bed. I curled around her and pulled the edge of that fabulous fur over her. Much as I wanted to stick it in her, I realized that some analysis was called for after all.

  “Has this happened before?”

  She sighed. “Baz, I brought a cockroach back to life. Two months ago, at an arena, I found this roach in the bathroom of my dressing room and I whacked it with my shoe, squish, and then I felt guilty and I pointed at it and it—it unsquished and ran away. That’s not beautiful. It’s scary.”

  “I bet the cockroach was happy.”

  She fell silent, apparently considering this, or thinking of maybe all the pros and cons of cockroach life, like whether the cockroach had been ready to go, or maybe her shoe had cut it short in its prime. I stifled a laugh.

  She said, “Well it scares the shit out of me. And it doesn’t stop happening. And every day something weirder happens. And every day my family seems to withdraw a little bit. They don’t leave me alone,” she said bitterly. “I never get any time to myself.” She looked up. “But I’m still alone.”

  I nodded.

  “The sick part is, I think they understand all this on some level. They care about me. I love that. I need that. On my cynical days I think they’re just protecting their investment. But the
y do still love me and they do still treat me like a person most of the time. You’ve been chasing them off for me and I’m grateful for a little stolen time here and there. But when Aunt Maybellyne treats me like a child, or Uncle Chester scolds me, or my cousin yells at me or slaps my ass, they’re still seeing a human being. The day they have too much respect to dis me like that, I—I might kill myself,” she said quietly.

  That chilled me. “You can get better love than that.”

  “I’m not so sure.” She looked troubled. “I can’t do booze or drugs. I can’t screw around. Everything depends on me. Lately I’ve even wondered if I can die. That terrifies me even more.”

  I said awkwardly, “Oh, you can die, if it comforts you to know that.”

  “Not really. That’s why—”

  “Why you half-kill yourself in your workout.”

  She looked at me with wet, grateful eyes. “You do understand.” She said simply, “I want to survive the fear.”

  I cupped her face. “Oh, baby.” The poor kid.

  She was getting upset. She said, “No matter how big the fear gets, I have to be strong enough. It gets bigger? Fine. I’ll get stronger. Only lately,” she gulped, “lately I’m afraid I am getting stronger. The power doesn’t seem to fade away after a performance. It keeps building.”

  I nodded slowly. “Okay, I get it. That’s why I’m here. You can’t stop becoming a goddess. You’re too popular. You’ve worked so many miracles already that your legend can’t die. But you also need to survive becoming a goddess.”

  “Why?”

  I blinked. “Why do you have to survive?”

  “If I’ve done it all already, I can die now, like Whitney and Marilyn and Janis and Amy, and my legend lives on, all those videos and recordings. Right? They’ve had enough of me, haven’t they?” she whispered, pleading. “I don’t have to be twenty-seven hundred years old like you, knocking around the world doing sex demon work because I can’t die?”

  With a sigh, I patted her face and then lay back on the lynx pelt blanket. I felt sorrier for her than I’d thought possible, and weirded out beyond belief.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said to the ceiling. “You’ve done everything I did, only better. You’ve laid out in black and white all the fucked-up reasons I’ve ever done anything. Why I tried to rule the world and damn near succeeded. Why I lived in the shadows. Why I came out of the shadows and made a mess of the band and slunk back under my rock again. You understand what scares me about immortality. And unlike me, you look straight at it.” I glanced at her under my eyelashes. “Why survive, you ask? Fuck, I dunno. Because somebody loves you?”

  She shot me a sharp look at that. I pretended not to see it. “And because I’m only twenty-seven,” she said.

  “A hundred times younger than I am. Neat.”

  “You’ve done everything you can think of doing, I imagine.”

  “Just about,” I admitted.

  “Well, I haven’t.”

  I puzzled my way through her train of thought. If she tried to die, I would definitely fail my mission.

  I thought I knew what she meant. “So you’d be willing to keep on living, in spite of the pain in the ass of being a goddess, if you could get more out of it. More R&R. Some fun. Time to yourself. In a word, more carrot and less stick?”

  Slowly she smiled. Her eyelids drooped. “Stick, carrot, call it what you want,” she said, looking at my lap.

  VEEK

  I watched Sophie climb up the hotel facade like a monkey.

  This was no moment for hesitation. I thought of the scent of the hairs which I had stolen from her hairbrush.

  Instantly, invisibly, I sent myself to her.

  I materialized on the roof just as Sophie clambered nimbly over the parapet, slipping out of her climbing shoes as she came.

  “Veek!” She threw her arms around my neck. “I have pulled off l’escapade merveilleuse!” She hugged me, swaying as if to pull my head off.

  “Slowly, lentement.” I disengaged. “Your father is on our heels.”

  She gave another squeak. “I promised I wouldn’t get arrested. Let’s go!” She took some sandals out of a backpack on the roof and stuffed her harness, ropes, and climbing shoes into the backpack. Then she slipped on the sandals.

  I rolled my eyes. She was as bad as Jake. Anything for a joke, and then let Veek fix it. “Come on.”

  We left the way she had come, through a roof access elevator, and passed all the way down to the ground floor by way of smelly, disused emergency stairs. When we had gained the street at last, she told me about her evening’s triumph. She finished, “And the room was filled with rose petals!”

  “Very fancy,” I said, leading her down into the subway. That should be safe. Her father would surely eat french fries with ketchup before he would enter the common subway.

  “I think they were magical.” Sophie dove a hand into the pocket of her cargo shorts and pulled out a fistful of crumpled rose petals.

  “How would you know?”

  “Oh, we have lots and lots of magic in Europe. Here you have not so much.”

  This I had been aware of. It was one reason I had hope of taking possession of my title and my birthright properties.

  As if she heard this thought she said, “Only last year an Englishwoman turned up at her own funeral. She had been lost while bathing in the sea. She said she had—”

  “—Turned into a turtle for two years.”

  “You know?”

  “I follow such things. There was a small inheritance at stake.”

  The courts had decided in the turtle-woman’s favor. She was poor and English, two matters that might not weigh with the Bureau, but it was legal precedent of a sort. I considered the wisdom of discussing it with Sophie—she might know what cases her father knew of, or planned to cite in his suit.

  Then a face at the other end of the subway car caught my eye.

  “Wait, Sophie—do you know that young man back there, by the other door?”

  She turned her head full around, unconcerned. A scruffy youth was putting his hand into his shirt pocket, looking down.

  “He was watching us,” I said, lowering my voice.

  “Oh, him. He’s one of those paparazzi who follow Yoni.” She twisted back to look up into my face, swaying disturbingly against my body. “You worry about everything.”

  “I thought he might have followed us from the hotel. Maybe he is in your father’s pay.”

  She put her white hand up to my cheek. “Poor Veek. Never a quiet moment.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. She smiled blindingly back.

  I wondered at my own behavior. If I had delayed her out on the street in front of the hotel, her father would have caught up with her and then I would have been rid of her.

  But when I saw her on a window ledge, while her father crossed the street, I’d thought only to protect her.

  It must have been the power of the love philtre working on me. Or perhaps the navel string Jake had hidden among Sophie’s effects.

  In the subway, as we clung to a pole and swayed with the train, I eyed her energetic person, looking for places where she might be hiding something as small as a hundred-year-old umbilical cord. Her backpack. Her dark green cargo pants with plenty of pockets.

  She was explaining her coup, how she had invaded Yoni’s hotel suite via the window. “I didn’t bribe anybody this time! Where are we going?”

  “To my place in Ravenswood Manor.”

  With her crazy vibe, Sophie might enjoy the Lair. It should appeal to her fascination with adventure and the counterculture.

  I prayed that she might be fascinated with me.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  Her upper lip curved up, inviting a kiss. She looked wide-eyed into my face.

  The subway door opened. A dozen more people got on, shoving us as close as anchovies in a jar. Sophie pressed against me, breast and thigh. I sank into her as if into quicksand.r />
  For the rest of the ride, I let myself wallow in her nearness.

  A long time later, we forced our way to the door and got out.

  At the street door to the Lair, she waited for me to use my key, chattering the whole time.

  “I got a cramp in my leg on the train. How can you sleep here, with the trains going by all night long? Wow! There’s a garden on the train embankment! This is industrial chic noir, no? The windows have rusted wire in the glass.”

  “It’s called chicken wire.”

  “I will remember. Oh, look, there’s that paparazzo from the train. I suppose he lives in a loft, too. They don’t need darkrooms anymore, you know. I read all about paparazzi when I began following Yoni, to learn their stalking techniques. Before, they had to have secret places where they could work in every city, because they were known, and the smell of the processing chemicals was hard to hide.”

  That was when I took her by the wrist and yanked her inside.

  “Dieu, you talk, child,” I muttered, towing her across the basketball floor, away from the chicken-wire window in the front door. I glanced up at the overseer’s window, the one that looked down on us from the second floor offices, where we slept.

  The window was lighted. Baz was home. Straining, I thought I heard voices: his and a woman’s.

  Baz never brought women home.

  I stretched my hearing, trying to identify the woman, but Sophie was pattering noisily about the wooden basketball court floor, cooing at everything she saw.

  I put my hand out. “Sh!”

  Of course she ignored me. She seized a basketball out of the drum by the door and dribbled up to me.

  “What have you got? Come on! Let’s rumble!”

  I snatched the ball from her and set it between my feet. “Silence!”

  “But why? This is a wonderful room! Do you own the whole building? Are those motorcycles over there?”

  I pulled her to me and wrapped one arm around her and put the other hand over her mouth. “Can’t you be quiet for one moment?” She wriggled violently in my grip, but she was silent. Straining, I distinctly heard Baz address his companion as Yoni.

  Then Sophie bit my hand.