As if she could sense his hesitation, she grasped his elbow. “It is time.”
Upon entering the dark room, he lit a candle that stood on a small table. His apartment was modest and severe. It consisted of one large room and a small bathroom. There were no windows, the walls were painted white and a low beige carpet extended across the hardwood floor. There was no other furniture except for a bed.
“You don’t really live here do you?” she said. “I like it better this way.” She stood before him. He closed his eyes.
“Take off your dress,” he said.
He knelt before her and opened her legs. Raising his face toward her shaved pubis, he began to taste her sex. She tensed her body and lifted her chin, releasing a deep sigh. His tongue thrust into her as he grasped her hips. He sucked her hard, running his hands up past her waist to her breasts. Her nipples were erect and he squeezed them tightly with his thumbs and forefingers. She moaned softly. He began to come upward, licking her stomach and then her chest. He took each breast into his mouth ravenously and bit her nipples, moving his hand between her legs, his fingers working her breath into a rasp, and then stopped.
“Do you know what I am?” His eyes bore into hers, allowing her to explore the depth of his need, his ambivalence, his desire. She met his gaze. He felt no fear from her.
“Why do you think I followed you outside and kissed you? I have waited for you, you without face or name. Of course I know you. I prayed for the universe to conspire with me to find you.”
He moved away from her and watched her close her eyes. He knew he could do anything he wanted with her. He felt his own fever rising with the thought of her willful submission and his rising potency. This was the only way he could save her; he could restore her. He would open the pathway to the world’s dream. He would release her.
“I want your body,” he said.
“And I want yours,” she answered.
“You can’t have mine,” he said, teasingly.
She smiled and began to unbutton his shirt. She ran her fingers along his lean and smooth chest, his hardness with a hint of musculature. Her mouth found his shoulder and neck and began to suck and bite his dark skin. She unbuckled his belt and liberated it from the loops of his pants, then she eased his hands behind him and tightened the belt across his wrists.
“My turn,” she said as she went down on him, holding his smooth balls with her hands and penetrating her mouth with his penis. He was long and thick and hard, and she felt the pure pleasure of his maleness, desperately wanting him inside her. One hand stroked his perineum while the other circled his anus; then she pressed her fingertips against him, sliding within as she sucked him, teeth and tongue and breath.
He freed himself from his loose restraints and grabbed her hair, gently. She withdrew as he pulled her to standing and crushed his body against hers. He entered her standing, her pussy throbbing and wet with desire, his penis swollen and rigid. He tore into her and she moaned with pleasure. He pulled her legs upward as she tightened around him; he held her full weight in the air, pushing slowly, mercilessly inside her.
“Harder,” she said, lowering her head and torso backward and reaching toward the floor with her hands.
Driving within her, he fucked her harder, faster, until she weakened.
“Don’t come,” he instructed, and lowered himself toward the ground, pulling her toward him, still thrusting into her deeply, as she positioned herself on top of him. He lay backward on the floor, urging her closer, as he kissed her roughly. She slowed her movements, feeling his penis erect and full, closer and closer to the edge of orgasm, that rising place she wanted more than anything to succumb to.
“Please…” she whispered, begging seductively.
Still rocking inside of her, he reached for the belt. She maneuvered her body astride him so that her back was to him, while reaching for his cock with her hands. She massaged her anus with her wetness and pressed herself against the head of his penis. He tied her hands behind her back, pulling the belt through the buckle so that it secured her wrists. He pulled it tightly and she moaned, “Yes,” falling onto all fours as he entered her from behind, gently at first, as the opening made way for him, then more steadily. She raised her buttocks into the air as he swung inside her, rubbing her clitoris with his thumb and smoothing in and out of her pussy with his fingers. “Don’t come.” he said, and she cried out. But she could not refuse him.
“You like it?” he asked, breathing the words, dripping with heat and sweat.
She could barely speak, she moaned, “Yes, yes.”
“You want to come, don’t you? It will be sweet, so, so sweet. Tell me I can have your body. I will release you into a pleasure so deep and complete you will leave this mortal plane.”
She moaned and sighed, closer.
Danae was once a child of light, a beauty stripped, locked in a bare room. Mother died, leaving her father steeped in whiskey and smoke, crawling in the shadows of night. Perhaps there would be one to replace the wound, but she had learned some secrets from the forest; she knew it would never heal. So she ran. She dyed her spun-gold hair red as flame, she carved her story into her skin, she forgot the language of the wind and sky, and then she forgot the words, spelled in ways she could barely whisper.
“Say ‘you can have my body.’”
Images of a painting destroyed in fire, awash with the golden hue of the sun. Body upon body, flesh upon bone, and a single blessed space. Skull, fur, skin. Hygeia holding a snake and a cup from the river Lethe. Time, torment, bliss.
“You can have my body,” she moaned, twisting, panting, aching under his enchantment and then released into climax, a pleasure so pure that her whole body shook with it, enraptured, free, falling. He caught her in his embrace and held her so close, so completely, their bodies entwined in glistening gold. There was only a moment; he reached for her tranquil face, upturned and angled, and strained his neck and shoulder to place upon her cheek a kiss.
The kiss, and then he was alone, slick with sex and transformation. Her body his, once upon a time.
THE RETURN
Charlotte Stein
I panic when I hear he’s coming back. Of course I do. All I can see is the heavy dull shape of him in the corner of our bedroom, waiting for me to die of boredom. Those stultifying hours together, filling time up with nothing; meals I’d made that went uneaten, silence thick as treacle.
I don’t know why things aren’t boring anymore. I guess being alone should have made things worse, but in many ways it hasn’t. I always eat my own meals, and I never stand in the corner of my bedroom, waiting, and every single day I get to watch whatever I want on the television. If I choose, I can read a book. There’s no one here to say anything about it.
Sometimes I just sit out on the deck and watch the waves with a glass of something I shouldn’t drink in my hands. I do it until the sunset is bloody and loaded on the horizon, and night comes in like Roland returning.
It wasn’t that Roland was cruel. He didn’t beat me or stop me from doing anything. It’s just that everything he wanted lay like a blanket over our lives—the scratchy, heavy sort of blanket that you fall asleep under by accident and then can’t seem to escape from—half awake, limbs flailing, everything seeming too hot and sweaty.
That was my life with Roland, and now he’s back from business in Japan after what seems like years, and I don’t want to go back under the covers. I don’t want to, no matter how terrible and ungrateful that is. He pays for this house, this lifestyle, this everything for god’s sake.
Pull yourself together, Margot.
I pull myself together all right. I lace myself up so tight I can hear my joints squeak when I move. I greet him at the door with an immobilized face, lumbering like Frankenstein’s monster because my feet don’t seem to want to get away from each other. If I barely move, then I don’t have to answer the door or say hello or worse yet—hug him.
But he’s here, now, and I have to. My stiff robo
t’s arms, laced tight at the elbows, reach out for him. My mouth stretches into a smile.
When he clasps me to him, I feel the blanket descend.
But then things don’t seem quite right for my blanket-living life. At first I try to pretend they are, until I get to a certain point and I know that I have to stop. Pretending, I mean. I’ve pretended so hard that I’ve missed things that seem very obvious, when I look back on them with new eyes.
Like the way he smelled, at the door. Not of something bland and gray, but spicy instead. Even in that robotic hug and with all my senses trying to close off, I could almost taste that smell. It had stayed with me all the way up to the bathtub, where I’d soaked long and hard to get him off of me.
Now I wonder why I let it go so easily. I can hardly remember what that new smell was like, or even if it was real, and it’s not like I can just go up to him and hug him to show myself how real it was. But without the hug it’s hard to catch that scent. That scent of someone new.
And then there’s the way he looked at the door—and still looks now. There’s something about it…something too put together. Roland was always neat, always be-suited and tied, but this is different somehow. It’s too…careful.
He looks at me sly eyed from across the dinner table, in his too careful clothes and with that too careful hair. I’m sure Roland never used to side-part it in quite that way—severely, but without the Brylcreem.
And there’s another thing about this new Roland that he doesn’t think I know: he smokes.
I suppose I should be concerned by these developments. Smoking makes a person worse, not better, right? Especially secret smoking that he thinks I don’t know about. Especially when Roland was never the kind of person to smoke. He hates smokers. Smokers put unnecessary pressure on the economy and do not care about their own physical well-being. Smokers should do more yoga.
But this new Roland doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass what smokers should and should not do. Instead he chews a lot of spearmint gum and gargles a lot of mouthwash, and pretends he doesn’t smoke.
But I know, because I’m watching him. I watch him getting ready for bed. He’s skinnier than he used to be—just as perfectly muscled and poised, of course, but noticeably skinnier. The thick bones of his shoulders stand out like a gleaming round newel post. I can see the heavy rails of his ribs when he bends over.
And then he turns and asks, “Why are you staring?”
I’m staring, I think, because you are not Roland.
It has taken me a while to come to this conclusion, but now that I’m there it’s more of a relief than I would have guessed. I don’t feel insane. It’s just a fact, like washing on Wednesdays and red going with black. He doesn’t act like Roland, he doesn’t smell like Roland, he’s like a ghost in his own house. He hasn’t even tried to fuck me yet, and I know Roland would have.
Flat on my back, thirty seconds of missionary: I was almost looking forward to it.
“I wasn’t,” I say, but I suppose we both know differently. I think he definitely knows differently, because now he’s stood half in and out of the dim light from the bathroom, gazing at me darkly with eyes that are not Roland’s.
He could just cross that small space and get his hands around my throat, quickly, before anyone else realizes he is an impostor. I shiver, thinking of those big strange hands on me. I shiver in my little cotton nightgown, wondering how I look to this stranger. Soft, do I look soft? Do I look like a sweetly appealing wife, ready to give in to her fake husband’s needs?
Or is he just waiting for me to attack? Struggle, spit, try to escape?
He is vaguely stroking one too-long sideburn, but then he lets his hand drop. He walks toward me, slow and rolling—like a predator might.
I don’t move from the corner of the bed. I don’t even plant my feet down on the carpet, as though I’m about to run. I can feel my chest trying to heave with the pressure my lungs and heart are putting on it, but I resist. It’s just my husband, crossing the carpet to his wife. It’s nothing.
He puts a hand on my shoulder and I press my lips together hard enough to hurt. I can’t look at him. I keep my eyes trained on his navel, while he strokes said hand over the strap of my nightgown. He strokes until it falls—almost exposing my right breast—and then he runs his fingers over the skin of my shoulder. Nothing more. Just there, with his thick rough thumb coming close to pushing at my throat.
He almost gets a grip on me, but not quite. And then he whispers, soft as rain on grass, “So…smooth…”
As though he’s never felt my skin before. I suppose he hasn’t. I’ve certainly never felt him touch me like this. Never felt roughness on the pad of his thumb, never had to submit to such a slow and exploratory caress.
I moan inside.
“You’re very beautiful, Margie,” he says.
I don’t tell him that Roland hasn’t called me Margie for years. Instead I let him slide that huge hand up over my throat, and then over my jaw. He cups my face as though I’m made of gold.
I would weep, if it wasn’t for all the shaking and the hormones sizzling through my veins with the rushing blood, and the one thought that is in my head: I haven’t had sex for two years. My legs are weak. I can feel a second heart beating between my legs, and I don’t care who it’s beating for.
I turn my face into his hand without a lick of shame. Why would I feel shame when these prickles of electricity are all over me, and his other hand is now finding its way to my shoulder?
He threads his fingers through my hair and I’m sure he’s going to pull, but instead he strokes. He draws lines over my scalp and uncovers the jut of bone just below my shoulder. I think about closing my eyes and pretending that he looks different, too.
Even if that’s impossible. He’s just as handsome as my real husband was, chocolate eyed and firm, intent on me in the same way he used to focus on health and fitness magazines and economic reports. That line is bisecting his forehead, though he isn’t frowning. He looks at me with new and wondering eyes, touching me as though I’m unfamiliar.
It isn’t hard to touch him back in the same way.
I run my fingers over the taut skin of his stomach, pushing slightly to feel the shape of the muscles beneath. He feels good and new, soft as well as hard, and he murmurs some faint sound for me.
I press my mouth to the well of his navel to make him speak again. Roland never used to speak, but this stranger does. He whispers to me when I poke my tongue in and whispers more as I slide up his body with my mouth leading the way.
Any second he’s going to push me down on the bed, any second now. I can feel his erection stiff and insistent against various parts of me, hotter than I feel inside. I’d forgotten how big he is there but I remember now, as my pussy clenches around nothing and I grow slick and desperate for him.
But he makes no real move. His hands pretend that there is no urgency in him, even when I know there is. His cock has twisted out the material of his underwear, and when I turn my head and press my cheek against his hip bone, I can feel the heavy thickness of him like a metal bar laid across the hollow of my throat.
He keeps making those faint noises as he spreads his big hands over my back, never pushing me or bending me into places I don’t want to go. With my face turned away I tug at the elastic of his jockeys, not quite getting them down but saying enough with that motion, I think.
I want to kiss his cock. I want to see if he is so different everywhere—if those sounds will become something louder, if he’ll buck into my mouth and twist on the bed. Will he be hard and forceful, or as tender and teasing as he is now? I feel as though the near nerveless expanse of my back is connected to my cunt, my clit, the tips of my tits. I am aroused by nothing, creaming for his strange evasive touch.
“What do you want, my Margie?” he asks.
I’ll beg him, if that’s what he’d like. He seems the type to want a little begging, a little squirming. Does he know that I’m squirming inside?
“Are you sure this is what you want?”
I look up at him, hair half in my eyes and my chin to his stomach. I feel the twist of his stiff cock press against my throat again. He looks amused, I think, but darkly intent at the same time. He’s just pushing and pushing and waiting for me to—
“Of course this is what I want,” I tell him. “You’re my husband.”
He seems to like that. Those words make his mouth quirk up at the corner, that perfect pink bow of a mouth that I want to kiss more than I ever did back when he was that other Roland. I lick my lips to force him into action but I don’t think he’s quite ready to give in—not just yet.
Instead he tells me to lie back on the bed—just to see if I will do it, I think.
I do. I do more than that—I spread my legs, too, and show him all of my eagerness. I rifle my nightgown up over my thighs, getting it as high as it will go without it being off altogether. My scent fills the room, musky and sweet and good. Even without that feeling between my legs, of slippery, nerve-rich flesh sliding against even sweeter places, I’d know that I was aroused.
It’s in my smell, and in my belly, hot and deep.
I wonder how hot and deep it is in him. He burns more than Roland, I’m certain. He looks calm but he reaches down and grips my thigh so tightly it hurts, but not enough to make me stop this. And when he tugs me down the bed, he puts some effort into getting my thighs as far apart as they will go.
So that he can see the juicy split of my sex, I’m sure. So he can look right down into it as though he’s allowed to.
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