by Alison Tyler
“Don’t mention it,” I say, and squeeze her waist.
She kisses me again. And again. Her mouth strays from my lips and wanders to my neck. Her hair, with its gently curving tips, like the petals of princess tulips, caresses my skin as she sucks and strokes, leaving damp, salty streaks on my skin.
“Hey, Kenny?” I murmur, already traveling toward delirium. “Fairy-tale tradition dictates that the prince and the princess live happily ever after. Do those same rules apply to us?”
Kendall lifts her lips from my breast and looks up at me. “Well, we’re already…subverting convention, if you will, so maybe we shouldn’t tamper with tradition any further.”
Nodding in agreement, I pucker my lips, then press them to her forehead, just like Snow White kissing the dwarfs.
The saying’s true, you know. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your princess. And now that I’ve found her, I can kiss those frogs goodbye.
Unveiling His Muse
Portia Da Costa
“No! Not again! I’m not having this!”
Charlie Glenister slid off his stool and adjusted the fit of his jeans. Somehow he’d managed to get an erection for what must have been the tenth time in an hour, and it was getting ridiculous.
Why was this happening? Didn’t he have any self-control at all? He was bloody miles behind with a zillion deadlines and all he kept doing was getting hard-ons and frittering his days away fantasizing and tossing himself off. There were already three publishers and a magazine editor breathing hard down his neck for illustrations and cover designs he owed them, and he was going to fuck up his reputation beyond repair if he didn’t get his act together.
Bills didn’t pay themselves, and there was no magic fairy godmother to cover his rent, so he was going to have to move on, squelch this fixation and stop getting the horn every time he tackled one single piece of work.
Fairy godmother…huh, that was ironic.
It’d started out as one drawing for a fantasy book cover but it had turned into an obsession.
It’s all your fault, you bitch!
He strode up and down the best he could in his small studio, and with a raging erection. He tried not to think of her, but failed. Astronomically.
Her. She. The Queen of the Fairies.
“She” was an “it” in actuality, begun as bold ink lines and washes of color on a commonplace sheet of art paper. Nothing more.
At least it’d started that way, once upon a time that felt like a hundred years ago but which had actually been just a couple of weeks. A commission for an urban fantasy book cover that’d somehow grabbed him by the balls and libido and made it impossible to work on anything else. It was all so bizarre and ludicrous, and the powerlessness he felt would have unmanned him if it hadn’t turned him on so much. He’d always fancied slightly dominant women and even now when he glanced at his drawing board out of the corner of his eye, his cock lurched so hard in his jeans it made him gasp.
No way! No fucking way! I’m going to do something else if it kills me!
Stalking back to the board, he lifted his pen like a dagger, ready to slash it across the paper and “kill” her.
But how could he destroy the best piece of work he’d ever created? How could he kill the Queen of the Fairies? She was his muse. He adored her.
Shit, man, I’m done for.
The Fairy Queen had begun innocuously enough as a seven-ink full-color cover commission, but now she was there every time he picked up a pen or a pencil or the stylus of his drawing tablet. Each time, she looked even more exotic, more lush, more totally and completely shagable. Each time he tumbled deeper into love-hate.
His pen hand shook and his knuckles whitened. What if he could hack this drawing apart? Would he be free then? Would all the other images of her he’d created lose their hold over him, too?
What would it be like to just get on with his life and draw something else?
But he couldn’t do it. Letting out an indrawn breath, he set aside his pen with infinite care, with awe. She was the source of all his trouble and all his pleasure, too, nowadays. Applying his fingertip to the periphery of one area of color, he discovered she was still wet.
In more ways than one, judging by the sultry knowing look on her face. Oh God…
Charlie’s own arousal gouged at him. His belly felt as if it were filled with lead, and he had an urgent desire to double over and clutch at his cock. He was already moving, already halfway to flinging himself down on his studio carpet and wanking himself senseless while he sobbed and groaned and praised her imaginary name.
Clenching his fists, he straightened up again, fighting her hold on him.
The Fairy Queen was adorable, though. An unabashed temptress, the archetype of a high-fantasy heroine in the Boris Vallejo style, but so much more. Nobody would believe how much more.
Her figure was slim and graceful, nymphlike even. But he’d also made her deliciously large breasted. Far more so, in fact, than the brief had specified. The book she was to adorn was pretty much intended for a female readership, and such overtly man-pleasing opulence might not go down too well with the publisher’s art department. But when he’d first taken up his pen to sketch out the character, those full, high, rounded breasts had almost seemed to draw themselves and his loins had roused immediately to salute their spectacular splendor.
The Queen of the Fairies had other clichéd sex-bomb attributes, too. A wild mane of brilliant titian hair, slumberous almond eyes and a wide ruddy mouth with a plush lower lip. Her skin was the color of cream poured over alabaster, her teeth were pearl-white, and she had the sweetest, cutest snub nose, too. Tonight, he’d dressed her more conservatively than usual, although the neckline of her gauzy, drifting blue gown did plunge to the vicinity of her navel, and display the milky, rounded slopes of her majestic bosom. She was wearing a complicated necklace, too, but the jewels didn’t hide anything. The filigree network of twinkling stars and silver chains only drew attention to her almost overspilling cleavage.
Charlie moaned as his swollen cock leaped and stiffened even harder.
And he frowned at the same time, though not from frustration, strangely. He had that creeping, lurking feeling again that despite the Fairy Queen being his best work, he couldn’t really take all the credit for her.
There’d been no working out what she was to look like, no trial and error, no rubbing out and starting again as there usually was with any project. She’d just swanned like a goddess into his imagination, bringing every single detail with her onto the page, no creative angst required on his part.
And see her, want her, that’d been it. Done deal. It was a good job he had his own studio or he’d have been hiding in the bathroom all the time to conceal his constant erections.
“Shit! Fuckety-fuck-fuck!”
He picked up his pen. He put his pen down. He sighed. Around the room there were scores of Fairy Queens taped to, pinned to and propped against every available surface in his studio. He was pretty good in most media, and she’d made him good in ones he didn’t usually excel in. There was an entire gallery of her in an array of abbreviated, figure-hugging outfits, most little more than a loosely assembled arrangement of transparent veils.
And there were nude studies, too. Lots of them. He wasn’t sure his cock could get any harder, but it seemed to when he looked at the unveiled versions of his muse.
Lounging with her sleek legs open, she looked ripe for sex, or fresh from it, languid and satiated. He’d even done one drawing just of her pussy. And without benefit of a face or the rest of her body he still knew it was her. She was wet and wanton in shades of red, hot pink and peachy amber. He wanted to kiss her plump clitoris, and sup from her mysterious shadowy cleft.
And that was the picture that had lost him his latest girlfriend, not that they’d been getting along all that well anyway. Karen hadn’t been keen on his normal workaholic ways, but she’d hit the roof when she’d seen his drawing of the Fairy Queen’s
sex.
“That’s gross! You’re sick… I’ve had enough of this,” she’d said in a cold angry voice. Unfortunately, she’d been sort of halfway to having sex with him in the studio at the time she’d spotted the drawing. He’d been eager to distract himself from his obsession and let off the steam of his arousal.
“It’s just a drawing… A commission,” he’d lied, trying to distract her. But she wasn’t having any of that.
“You’re a liar… It’s her, isn’t it?” She’d rifled through some other drawings, and Charlie had felt like kicking himself for leaving them lying around. So much for at least trying to be partially honest as a boyfriend. It’d turned around and bitten him in the ass.
You’d understand, though, wouldn’t you?
What an extraordinary thing to think. He stared down at his latest Fairy Queen, and squinted. Was he imagining things? She was as sexy as hell, but there was a gentler look in her eyes somehow. A softer expression. He rubbed his head for once, instead of his groin, wondering if he was losing it even more than he thought he was already losing it.
After flinging aside the pussy drawing in disgust, Karen had thrown on her clothes and stormed out without giving Charlie any further chance to vindicate himself. Not that he could have done that anyway.
Where was that drawing now? Sifting through the dozens of illustrations on show, Charlie assured himself it was tucked safely away. He was expecting another female visitor tomorrow, and he didn’t want to piss her off with it, too. Tania Richards was a fellow artist he’d hooked up with online, someone he was hoping to collaborate with on a few projects. He’d never met her, just exchanged e-mails and IMs, but she sounded smart and interesting and on his wavelength, and the examples of her work she’d sent him were startlingly good. Some similar in style to his, others quite different. They’d make a good team, he was convinced.
Tania was dropping by tomorrow morning and no matter how smart and interesting she was, it probably wasn’t wise to leave a Technicolor image of another woman’s pussy lying around at their very first meeting.
Back at his board, he added more red to the Fairy Queen’s tempting slightly parted lips, a feature as erotic in his opinion as her sex was. They were full, and somehow had the look that they’d been thoroughly and hungrily kissed, although all Charlie could think about at the moment was sliding his cock between them and into the hot haven of her mouth.
His erection throbbed slowly, like the beat of a heart, as he imagined her caressing him with her lips and her tongue. It’d be like being gloved by heat and wetness, teased and tormented in a deep, sweet vortex of pleasure. His semen lay heavy, heavy, heavy in his balls, and seemed to drag on his belly. He’d have to attend to himself tonight, maybe several times, or he’d be walking hunched over when his new friend Tania arrived.
God, if only you were real, my Fairy Queen!
If she could rise from the page, become a living, loving woman, he wouldn’t have to resort to lonely masturbation. She’d do it for him, as well as fucking him senseless. She’d take his tormented length between her long, dainty, lacquer-tipped fingers, and play him like an instrument, and then she’d offer him her alabaster-white body for his ease. Sighing resignedly, he pressed his hand to his aggravated crotch. It was looking depressingly like another night of very little work achieved, and he’d so wanted to have a few non–Fairy Queen drawings to show Tania in the morning.
But it was the old familiar story, he suspected. A night of furious wanking then a collapse into exhausted and troubled sleep afterward.
With a sigh, he threw himself into his favorite armchair and focused on the nearest image of his tantalizing muse—a marker-pen sketch he’d been particularly pleased with. It showed her topless and with just a wisp of silky folded fabric around her hips. Imagining her unwinding it in a private show for him, he slid down the zip of his jeans, then reached inside. He cursed when the ink on his fingers smudged the white cotton of his shorts, then thought, fuck it, who the hell cared. When he pushed down the shorts, his aching, rock-hard flesh bounded up eagerly.
Even with his eyes now closed, he could still see her. She was burned into his heart, into his soul. He closed his inky fingers around his shaft and launched into the oh-so-familiar up-and-down rhythm.
Pleasure gathered quickly and he paraded his best-loved scenarios through his mind.
The Fairy Queen doing to him what he was doing to himself.
Him pushing down her head, hand buried in her curls as he urged her to suck him.
Her making him do the same to her, commanding him to sup at her divine pussy until she howled and cursed in ecstasy.
Him fucking her and possessing her in every position he could think of and some that were pushing at the boundaries of anatomical impossibility.
He was making her do the things that he wanted in these fantasies, yet somehow she seemed to relish everything with increasing enthusiasm and vigor. She wanted him. She wanted to please him. And that made every move, every nuance of her supple, athletic body multiply his pleasure. She gave back ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand times what he gave to her, and praised his performance in a voice that was a sensuous, drawling purr.
She was just urging him to “Fuck me, lover! Fuck me! Fill me with your beautiful cock!”—or something like that—when two different things happened simultaneously.
The first was his orgasm, a breath-grabbing, heart-wrenching rush that sent a long jet of semen spurting heavily onto the carpet. The second was the strident bing-bong of someone ringing his doorbell.
It took him half a minute to be in a state to even move, and in those gasping, shagged-out moments of descending back to earth the doorbell chimed several times more.
“Won’t be a minute! Don’t go ballistic!” he called, his voice coming out strangled and squeaky. As he lurched to his feet, his jeans slid down around his knees, and he had to spend more precious seconds grappling with them and stuffing his limp and sticky penis inside his shorts.
The doorbell bonged again imperiously as he was rubbing the carpet with his bare foot, trying to work the semen into it. “All right already!” he shouted. Hopefully, the tang of semen would be lost in the pungent, solvent-laden fug that always pervaded the room when he was working.
Snatching a couple more seconds, he checked himself out in the mirror. Ack, what a mess. His hair was wild, his eyes were guilty and he looked like a hobo. A hobo who’d just been wanking. He was scratching at a patch of what looked suspiciously like dried semen on his jeans, when his visitor lost patience and the door swung open.
Charlie’s jaw dropped and he lost the power of logical thought. His hands felt as if they were flapping at his sides, disconnected from his brain and all nerve control.
For a full half minute, he just gawked at the figure who stood waiting on his threshold.
“Well, are you not going to invite me in?” remarked the Queen of the Fairies, gliding forward and compelling Charlie to back up and back up so as not to impede her regal progress. “I thought that you would be pleased to see me!”
“But—” was all Charlie could utter. His mouth still seemed to want to hang wide-open in flabbergasted amazement. The door behind his visitor closed without benefit of her hand or his own and he was faced with his imagination made flesh.
She was exactly how he had drawn her. Every line. Every detail. And yet much, much more. Her body was lusher and more full than the paper version, and the gossamer-like dress that approximated the gown he’d drawn for her was barely more than a film of heavenly blue pigment that floated translucently on the surface of her skin. She even wore the complicated necklace of pearlescent stars he’d created.
Her face was perfection. An overused word, but he couldn’t think of another. A beautiful, pure, immaculate heart shape, with skin that was as white as a dove’s wing, yet dewy and all a-sheen with vibrant life. Thick glossy hair seemed to hover and float around her head in a fiery mass of many different shades of crimson, auburn and terra-c
otta. While her lips gleamed with precisely the same singing rose-red he’d painted on them just minutes ago.
But it was her eyes, her eyes that froze him to the spot. Huge, slightly uptilted, lined with kohl and sparkling with all the shades he’d used to portray them. Ultramarine, Prussian blue, twinkling flecks of mica-flecked cerulean.
“What are you staring at, Charlie?” she inquired with a sultry smile that was so familiar it made him want to swoon like a girl. “Did I not get it all right?” She paused, then slowly ran both her hands upward over her sumptuous curves until they reached her flawless face. Once there, she delicately touched her pretty jawline, her high cheekbones and her luscious lips. “It is all here, is it not? Everything you wanted?”
“Ye-yes… But…”
“I could explain it to you, Charlie—” she closed the small distance between them “—but it would take an age, my dearest boy, and there are so many nicer things we could be doing with the time.”
Even as she was reaching for him, Charlie’s scanty courage reemerged and he lifted a trembling hand to touch her.
The first place he made contact with was a full, sweetly rounded breast.
“Yes, my Charlie, that is right!” Encouragingly, she cupped the firm yet soft orb herself and seemed to push it into his grip. He felt her nipple peak through silk as he held her.
This can’t be happening. I designed you. What are you doing here? There is no such person…or thing…as the Queen of the Fairies.
And yet she was here. Her body was responding to his, real and living and utterly sensual.
“Why not try both?” Purring, she took his free hand and closed it around her other breast. “Caress me. I am what you want. What you need… You are nothing without me.” With her head tipped back, her throat was a long ribbon of alabaster. “Have me, Charlie, and free yourself from torment. You will be able to work again…and better and more successfully than you have ever worked before.”