I hadn’t bargained for natural talent.
She wrapped her lips around my dick like a pro.
My brain sailed off on a wave of excitement. She was sucking away my self-control. I took a few dizzy, girl-flavored breaths and pulled it together enough to remember my job.
After that things got a little hazy. I remember her sucking and licking and even, yikes, biting once in a while, ever so gently. I remember growling her out with every trick I knew. She drew my dick down into her throat, pulling me into her by wrapping her arms around my butt and hugging, and the world tilted, and she was hot and tight and apparently she didn’t need to breathe. I gave up and let her milk me helpless.
And right away my strength returned, holy shit.
Now I could focus on pulling her legs wider apart while I licked, thumbing her, making her stretch and scream against my dick, that felt weird, weird but good. I reached all the way under her butt and finger-fucked her ass with one finger while I thumbed her at the same time, and I made my tongue longer, thicker, harder, until I could really give it to her all the way to the back wall, bang, bang, bang, bang! She liked that. She sucked me deep into her throat and squeezed like a milkmaid until I was bucking crazily, unable to pull out, spending and spending, hopefully not into her lungs.
Something bumped the small of my back, then clonked the back of my head.
I lifted my face and tried to retract my tongue. “Thit!”
She just kept sucking.
I relaxed and got back to work. Soon we were bucking against each other again.
Clonk! on the back of my head again, harder. This time, I saw stars.
I pulled away completely and turned to look behind me. “What the fuck?”
We weren’t in my bedroom anymore.
My dick was cold suddenly. No Yoni lips to keep me warm.
“Baz?”
I coughed and spat out a hair. “Apparently, we floated out of the bedroom.”
I didn’t let go of her. No point letting her look down and scaring her.
Instead, I looked down—and scared myself.
We had floated down the hall and through the overseer’s door that let out onto the main factory floor, and now we were floating over the basketball court and grilling area.
The thing that had clonked the back of my head was a support beam for the ceiling.
Which was thirty-two feet off the floor.
She shifted under me. I looked at her. She peered up at me. “Did I do it?”
“Uh, do what?”
“Are we flying?”
“Yes,” I squeaked. “We are flying.”
“I want to see!”
With that she grappled my butt and did something with her waist and hips and whoops! We reversed in the air, with her on top, and me under her, clinging for dear life, with her hot wet pussy in my face.
She let loose a yippee. “I’m flying! Look, Baz, I’m flying! Yeee-ow!”
She wriggled in my arms, sending me panicking, and then we were swooping around the big empty space, making the walls echo with her triumphant yodels and my screams.
We swooped to a sudden halt in mid-air. “I just remembered,” she said, sounding stricken.
“Shouldn’t you be concentrating on staying up here?”
“I promised to bless the Lair!”
“Can we do that from the ground?”
“No! This is way more fun!”
And off we went again.
I found it helped to shut my eyes.
The air filled with the scent of roses.
A hundred years later she got tired of that and set us down on the cold plywood basketball deck.
I scrambled to my feet. I noticed now that the basketball deck was sprinkled all over with red rose petals.
Yoni sat on the floor, her knees propped up like a bimbo on a tractor-trailer mud flap, laughing at me.
I wiped my face with my dreads. “Now, was that nice?”
“Yes. It was glorious! I loved it.” She stopped laughing, but I could see she couldn’t really keep a straight face. “I’m sorry. Did I scare you?”
“Shit, yes.”
“I thought you could fly already. That time at the hotel yesterday.”
“Yeah, when I decide to fly. When I know it’s me doing it. Without kibbitzers.”
Her grin broke out again. “I think we’re gonna have some fun figuring out who’s in control.”
I looked her in the eye. I was still panting, and I needed to pee like a racehorse. I couldn’t help grinning either. “I think we’ll have to take turns.”
VEEK
In the taxi, on the way back to our hotel, Sophie argued with me: about whether I would marry a minor (I wouldn’t, but she wasn’t anymore), about my giving her father so much of the estate income (I had), about whether she could accompany me on the consecration pilgrimage Baron Samedi had laid on me (I couldn’t stop her), and, if she did, whether she might travel by freight train, riding the box cars the way we used to do.
She seemed astonished. “You’re more fun when we disagree!” she said in a voice of discovery.
“I’m glad you think so. I find it fatiguing.”
Immediately she was quiet. “I don’t want to be a bore.”
I lifted her hand from her lap. “I have missed contending with you, this past month.”
“Did you really?” Her eyes were huge. “You must never leave me again, Veek. You are very, very lucky I didn’t take the first plane back to finishing school, that night when you vanished.”
Would she really have left me? I swallowed. “So your father warned me.”
She gave a shout of laughter. “Has Papa been advising you how to control me? And he such an expert!”
“Don’t go back to school, Sophie,” I begged her. The night streets of Chicago flashed by the taxi windows.
She looked long at me. “Do you mean, don’t give up on you? I never did.”
“Then don’t threaten it. It—it makes my heart shrivel inside me.”
“I’ll make you a bargain,” she said, leaning toward me so that her young breasts bulged up out of her torn black lace.
My heart thumped. Henri had warned me about her bargains. “What?”
“You promise you will never disappear without telling me where you are going. If not before, then within a day.”
“And what do I get?”
“Then I will wait for you to come back, always.”
Henri had said, too, that she would never tell me what the bargain was. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he had never asked her, or listened to her.
I reflected. “That doesn’t seem fair to you. You are bound to ‘always,’ while I only have to worry about the first twenty-four hours.”
She shook her head. “It’s not fair to you, because, whatever makes you disappear, it must be very urgent, and sometimes you may not have a choice. Even then, you must find a way to get me a message in so short a time, or risk losing me.”
I had to concede her point.
“Besides,” she said buoyantly, “Yoni is going to teach me to summon you when I need you. Only it will be better if I do not interrupt your business. So you will always tell me, yes?”
“Yes.” I bowed my head. “You have a very practical mind.”
“And you’re a dreamer. I love that about you.”
“Let’s go inside,” she said, as the taxi halted and she got out. “Wait, this isn’t the Four Seasons.”
I paid the taxi, and handed over her shoes, which she had discarded on the floor. “I thought we might try spending the night several miles away from your father.”
She smiled.
We went inside.
The Ambassador West was an older hotel, like the Hilton, full of old world elegances. The lobby was a cathedral, the elevator a gold-and-enamel jewel box, and the room I had chosen reminded me a little of home, with its crown moldings and subdued brocade draperies. I had ordered a pastry tray and some champagne and blackberries.
“I knew you’d find me.” I turned to her. She looked as happy as I had ever seen her. She had no business trusting in me. It was her youth, her belief in her own immortality, like all young girls, that led her to promise too much, hope too much, trust too much, risk too much.
She was already dropping her purse inside the door, throwing her shoes over the bed, and biting a petit four in half. “Are your clothes off yet?”
“Sophie?”
“What?” she mumbled, wriggling out of her black dress.
Words died on my lips. I hadn’t turned on the lamps. Moonlight fell through the open drapes and lit her pale little womanly body, and the sight struck me dumb. I shook my head and tore off my own clothes.
SOPHIE
“May I make a request?” I said carefully as we climbed, decorous as any old married couple, into bed.
“So civil,” Veek said, smiling.
“Well, you got all ombrageux with me last time I asked for—for something,” I reminded him.
“I apologize for that. A sex demon has no business refusing service to a lady.”
“You see, we never did work it out, how that happened. The first time I dreamed of you—I knew it was really you. Not just a dream. We did those things. You touched me in such extraordinary ways. But I was asleep!”
“That was disrespectful of me,” he said seriously.
Puzzled, I said, “I thought that was how you serviced all Jake’s clients.”
“It was. But they paid for that disrespect. They were overworked, desperately trying to make their families’ lives perfect, exhausted with the struggle for control. They paid to be swept away, willy-nilly.”
“I see.” I thought about this. “I didn’t mind being swept away.”
“It was wrong.” He touched my hand diffidently. “I did it in a desperate attempt to get control of you. You carried me away the moment we met. I blamed Jake. I blamed the false navel string made of beef liver. I blamed Samedi, thinking he had joined our hands and fused us together somehow. I suspected Yoni’s music of casting a spell to make me susceptible to you. I even tried to feed you a love philtre—and then I drank it myself by accident.”
My jaw dropped. “What?”
“In the restaurant. Your vodka tonic. It served me right.” He waved it away. “What matters is that nothing I could do worked to keep you at bay. I felt—” He shook his head slowly.
“Caught,” I suggested.
“Yes.”
“You said that before. And from the moment we met, Veek, I felt that I belonged to you.” My breath was hot in my chest. Why did he fight me so? Didn’t he like being in love?
“That doesn’t excuse what I did. In your dream.”
“What I am trying to say, Veek, is that I loved it, but I wished we could have done it when I was awake. And you could explain to me what was happening. Can I have it again?” I begged, with both my hands on his arm. “Please?”
His smile became a head-shake. “You look behind the curtain at the theater, don’t you? I’ll bet you take music boxes apart.”
“And I meet rock stars in their dressing rooms to find the human being behind the illusion. So? Don’t you want to be a human being to me?”
“Don’t blame me if you are disappointed when you find it’s all tricks.”
I smiled. “You never disappoint me.”
Then he wanted to shower—separately, to my disappointment. “Just the way it was in your dream,” he reminded me.
I rolled my eyes.
We crept into bed, I feeling a little trembly, he looking worried.
“Don’t you remember what you did?” I said.
“I do. But will you?”
“You can remind me.” I flopped back on the pillows. I was possibly happier at this moment than I had ever been in my life.
“That’s not how I found you.”
“No. No, don’t tell me.” I closed my eyes, remembering. Then I turned over on my side. I pulled my knees up. I tucked my arms against my chest like a sleeping hare.
“No, more like this.” He moved my hands, gently, one at a time, closing them loosely and positioning them at my mouth as if I were sucking my thumb.
“I want to open my eyes.”
He sighed. “Open, then. But then we can’t be as true to the dream as you wish. In the dream, we were at Montmorency.”
I bit my lip. “You were in my mind.”
“I was, yes. It’s one of my gifts.”
“If I imagine it, can you join me in my imagined place?”
“I don’t know.” He mused. “I’ve never done it with someone who was awake.” He shrugged. “Oh, well. We’ll try.”
“Now I close my eyes and imagine the place. Montmorency.”
“The maze,” he murmured.
“The grotto,” I whispered.
“Afternoon—sunshine—the marais full of singing birds and insects.”
“The scent of salsapareille,” I remembered, and then I was there. It was warm there, and I smelled more than the flowers over the grotto. There was new-mown grass, too, and the smell of sunbaked moon carrot flowers and bedstraw. I whispered, “You approached. I heard the chuckling of kingfishers. I heard your footsteps in the maze.”
And then I heard them. I opened my eyes. I was in the grotto, just a space between the stones that made the maze wall, really, but dug out by generations of Montmorency children, lined with sand, then cushioned with fragrant dried plants. Sunlight fell through gaps in the stone cave. Veek’s feet made hardly any sound on the grass outside, but I could feel him approaching.
His intention toward me hummed in the air. My blood quickened. The light from the grotto’s opening flickered and went dark.
He knelt there, looking in. He was naked. His eyes were wild. “Is this like your dream?”
“This is just how I remember it.”
He looked at me a long time. Then he reached past the cave opening and plucked—yes, I remembered, the salsapareille bush grew just outside, hiding the cave. He sprinkled the flowers on me. My head filled with their scent.
“The smell of home,” I sighed.
“And now,” he whispered.
“Oh, yes.” I rolled onto my back and offered him my body, propping my foot against the cave wall.
“It’s very disconcerting, having your eyes on me,” he murmured.
“It’s very satisfying, seeing how disconcerted you are,” I said, eyeing his erection.
“Mon petit choux,” he whispered, “I am going to disappear now. But I won’t go away. I’ll be right here.”
I tightened. I couldn’t help it. “You’ll be here?”
“If I’m to make love to you the way I did that day, I must become vapor. Try, if you can, to sense my presence.” Indeed he faded from sight. His voice got fainter and fainter. Yet his warmth drew near me—and nearer yet. He must be between my legs now. My sex gave off its own scent. I was ready for his visitation. I let my head fall back on the cave floor and drowned in the smell of salsapareille.
Slowly, imperceptibly, I became aware of a hot spot on my sex. Then, gentle pressure.
Then I heard Veek’s voice in my ear, warm and reassuring. “I become the scent of the flowers. I hover. You are very beautiful. Your blood beats under your skin like the sea. You barely feel my cock at your portal.”
I wanted to squeeze, but the smell of grass and flowers had got into my brain. His cock slid an inch inside me. I felt drugged. “Are you doing that? Are you drugging me?”
“You are drugging yourself with sensations of home.” He breathed in against my ear and sent a shiver down my side. “And you drug me also. I feel the intoxication of your skin, how your limbs open to me. And here—do you remember this?”
A light breeze stirred. My nipple crinkled suddenly. I gasped, and in my ear, he gasped also.
“That,” I murmured, “what is it
? I feel it like—like an echo of pleasure that fades but never stops.”
His voice came soft and low, as if his lips brushed my ear. “I’ve entered your body through your senses. You construct all this beauty from memory—the heat, the birdsong, the smells, the caressing marsh breeze—and you share it with me.”
“Yes.” I was hypnotized by his murmuring voice.
“I dwell in your flesh, your nerves. I share your senses. When I am inside you, I feel it with my own nerves, and also with your nerves. I feel it the way you feel it. I tickle your nipple with a blossom and we both feel the frisson. Your sheath opens reluctantly to me, but I can make myself so smooth that when I enter, my excitement becomes your excitement. Your slipperiness welcomes me. You stretch.”
I stretched. We stretched. He was deeper inside me this time than before. He was an invisible companion who knew my heart and shared it. “Now,” I gasped. “The thing. The tease. You drove me mad.”
He chuckled. I felt the palms of his hands on mine, brushing them, electrifying them until I could feel his, even if our hands were inches apart. We played with that feeling of energy between our hands, rolling it, squishing it, letting it balloon and then sink.
And then he did the thing. “What am I doing, Sophie? Can you feel my body as I feel yours?”
I shut my eyes. He was invisible anyway, but I couldn’t picture him without retreating into the featurelessness behind my sunlit eyelids—his hands are here—his cock is here—and he pulled out. I gasped and whined. He chuckled again and pushed back into me, but so slightly! The tip of his cock became the tip of my cock, and I could tell how strongly I was controlling myself, holding back from diving into this woman and drowning myself in her. We pushed just the tip inside, then pulled out, over and over, while we tightened around it, making pleasure echo back and forth between us. We whimpered. Our vulva grew more slippery, and a scent like a wild animal came out of it, rank and roaring, making us want to fuck like sledgehammers. Who was I? Veek or Sophie? We breathed slowly, deeply, sucking in air as if for a scream, but instead the scream was in our bodies, demanding release.
“Veek?” My trembling voice echoed in my ears, Veek, Veek, Veek . . .
“Sh.” Sh, sh, sh . . .
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