Bump in the Night

by Heidi Belleau;Ally Blue;Kari Gregg;Peter Hansen;Laylah Hunter;Brien Michaels;Sam Schooler

  Logically, he knew he shouldn’t. He ran a huge risk of becoming lost in the dense press of trees, vines, and undergrowth. But the voice drew him like a compass to true north. He needed to learn what sort of being spoke with music, and what it meant.

  The call grew stronger and more captivating as he went. Desperation pushed his body harder, made his pulse rush in his ears and his breath come in great gulps as he ran, faster, faster in search of the source of the sound. He’d die if he didn’t find it.

  He crashed into a clearing so suddenly he almost fell over a rocky ledge into the wide blue pool only steps away. He might have, only his feet halted of their own accord when he saw the man standing beneath the little waterfall that fed the pool.

  Even with the binoculars, the figure he’d seen on the beach had been indistinct with distance, but Noah would bet his fortune this was the same man—the same dark, glistening skin; the same black hair falling in wet curls to wide, muscular shoulders; the same tall, lean, perfect body bared to the elements. The stranger’s cock sprang from its nest of black hair to swing long, thick, and heavy between his hard thighs.

  “Oh, my God.” Noah’s voice emerged soft as a prayer. He hadn’t intended to sound like a worshiper, but could he truly say he wouldn’t fall to his knees to glorify that body?

  Across the pool, the man stepped from the waterfall’s flow and met Noah’s gaze with a bright, guileless smile. Stretching a hand toward Noah, the stranger spoke.

  Noah leapt into the water—clothes, shoes, and all—and started swimming toward the man before he realized what he was doing. He was halfway across the pool before reason reasserted itself and he wondered, with a spark of panic, just what in the hell had come over him. He slowed, still staring into the beautiful stranger’s eyes—huge eyes black as midnight, black as sin, black as oblivion . . .

  His feet hit rock. Long, graceful hands grasped his elbows and hauled him upright, pulling him flush against a naked body whose heat seeped through the cold wetness of his clothes and made him feel warm and safe.

  Tilting his head back, he peered up into the stranger’s face. God, such a face. No one could be that exquisite. It wasn’t natural. His mad rush to get to this man wasn’t natural either. What the hell was happening to him?

  The fear he’d always scoffed at when the old men warned him of the island’s dangers rose to clog his throat. He planted his palms on the man’s chest—warm, firm, the bare skin silky soft—meaning to push him away.

  Those sweet, sensual lips curved into a smile that shook Noah deep inside. One strong arm tightened around his waist. The other hand slid into his hair, the man’s thumb rubbing circles on the angle of Noah’s jaw. Then the stranger spoke again, the words like bells and nightingales, calling up tantalizing shades of meaning in Noah’s mind and making his heart race with a need he didn’t understand. His burgeoning fear melted like butter in the sun.

  Burying both hands in the man’s thick hair, Noah lifted his face and opened for his god’s kiss. The island god let out a sweet trill. Noah moaned in response, pressed closer, plunged his tongue deeper, chasing more of the rich, savage flavor that made his prick swell and his skin burn.

  As his clothes fell into the water and floated away—how, he didn’t know and didn’t care—the logical portion of his brain rallied long enough to tell him he’d found the island’s secret. Then strong fingers closed around his erection, squeezed and stroked in time with the rhythm of that weird, musical language. The urge to follow its gentle command wormed through him like capillaries and he forgot why he’d come here, what he wanted, all his ambitions. All he cared about was more—more of this unearthly creature’s kiss, more of his touch, more of the intoxicating song-words Noah didn’t understand but already needed the way he needed air and water.

  He didn’t remember being carried across the pool, or laid out like an offering on the cold wet rocks of the shallows on the other side. Awareness snapped into focus in time for him to feel his god’s long fingers push inside him, rubbing magic circles on his gland and tearing a helpless cry from him. He pulled his legs up and further apart, digging finger-shaped bruises into his thighs, his gaze locked to his deity’s bottomless black eyes. The smooth summer scent of coconut rolled up from between his legs, and he laughed. He’d half expected a wild island god to lube him with magic. Coconut oil came as an unexpected surprise.

  The grin he got from the being between his legs made his heart thump like a kettle drum. No lover had ever looked at him like that. Like he was special. Precious. One of a kind.

  Certainly he’d never looked at anyone else like that. He had an uncomfortable feeling that his face was wearing that expression right now.

  By the time his god penetrated him, Noah was hooked worse than any junkie ever conceived.

  Winding arms and legs around his personal miracle, Noah dug his heels into the hard muscles in the creature’s back, clung to his shoulders and rose to meet him in another claiming kiss. The god trilled low in his throat, almost like a purr, while he fucked Noah hard and deep. With each thrust, electric heat shot through Noah’s veins and colors burst behind his closed eyelids. He felt drugged, dazed, lost in a psychedelic web of sensation. His skin sparked and buzzed with every press of the god’s tongue, every glide of his fingers over Noah’s prick, every shove of his iron-hard cock up Noah’s ass.

  Noah’s hole clamped down on his god’s cock, huge and swollen and searing hot inside him, fucking him like a machine, like a taskmaster, fast and forceful and merciless. He felt the hot spurt of semen deep in his body through the red haze of his own orgasm. His limbs shook. His prick shot ropes of spunk over his belly and his lover’s hand. His god kissed him again, sending him soaring to the stars just beginning to spark in the sunset sky.

  Sunset. It would be dark soon.

  That ought to matter to him. It ought to make a difference. But for the life of him, Noah couldn’t remember why.

  Noah rose from a dream of drowning to the orange-gold shine of the full moon through the branches and his god kneeling between his open legs, luscious lips stretched wide around his cock.

  He pushed up on his elbows to watch, shifting the bed of grass and palm fronds underneath him. Black eyes rolled to meet his, and he came with an echoing shout, startling some animal into motion in the trees behind him.

  His god rose with a smile. Noah got to his knees, knowing exactly what was required of him and aching for it. He took his god’s erection into his mouth, pushed his tongue against the warm, living length of it, grabbed a double handful of his lover’s bare ass and squeezed until he got the low, thrumming trill he wanted. He opened his throat and took his man deep, sucking hard on the backstroke, moaning his pleasure every time he got enough breath.

  When his god threaded his long fingers into Noah’s hair, held him in place and shot down his throat with a low, musical cry, Noah shuddered through a second climax of his own, shooting his spunk onto the ground. He hadn’t even noticed he’d gotten hard again.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the smooth naked body beneath his hands, the semen that tasted like wild honey, the earthy smell of skin and sweat, sex and the sea. All the things that made Noah’s new addiction both man and god, natural and . . . not.

  Pushing Noah’s head away from his crotch at last, his god dropped to the makeshift bed beside Noah, stretched out, and gathered Noah close to him, his chest to Noah’s back. Noah thought he ought not to feel so safe like this, with a creature whose true nature he didn’t understand at all curled protectively around him, but he couldn’t deny that he did.

  His lover sang to him at night, stroked his hair and soothed him into his increasingly troubled bouts of sleep, and he knew for a fact that nothing could hurt him as long as this impossible god stayed with him.

  When he thought about it, he knew that his lover staying with him was hardly a certainty. In his rare lucid moments, he’d begun to suspect that that particular unknown lay at the root of the nightmares
he never remembered, not to mention all the things his waking mind seemed to skip.

  He knew he’d been here for a while. He’d grown a beard, he’d tanned over the spots his shorts had once protected, and his hair now curled down to his shoulders, the better for his partner to grab during sex. But he couldn’t remember much of it. Scraps of faded memory drifted through his brain like bits of a beloved childhood blanket washed to pieces. Most of those memories involved sex—the unexpected island god fucking him in the waterfall pool, over a fallen tree deep in the jungle, atop the ridge at the island’s highest point, even on the beach within sight of Noah’s first love, Ligia.

  A hot, steely pain pierced his heart at the thought of his sloop, lying anchored offshore all this time, alone and neglected. She’d opened up an entire universe for him when he’d first set her prow for the open sea. She’d given him everything. Given him a life. How could he leave her, even for the attentions of a god?

  As if sensing his unrest, the being at Noah’s side stirred, woke, and turned Noah’s head with a gentle hand. Their gazes met and locked. The god spoke sweet musical words that Noah didn’t understand—he never did—but their half-formed meanings sank spreading roots deep into Noah’s psyche. Ligia slipped once again into the backwaters of his mind.

  Soft, smiling lips sealed over his, kissed him with a passion no mortal man could ever match, and Noah tumbled into it with a sense of fate.

  How long had he been here? He didn’t know. Time had no meaning here. Nothing did, except the god who’d become Noah’s universe. He’d fallen through an invisible doorway into this hopeless paradise, where he’d become a willing captive, held by chains of flesh and song.

  Noah and his god lay on the beach on the thin pad they’d fashioned of moss, grass, and leaves so they could fuck without getting sand in tender areas. The sun rising over the horizon turned the bay to gold fire. Noah shut his eyes against the glare and let his consciousness drift. He’d spent the better part of the night on his hands and knees, or on his back with his legs slung over his god’s powerful shoulders, getting fucked like he’d been created for that purpose and nothing else. He was worn out.

  Even keeping Ligia upright and whole through the Caribbean’s days-long tropical storms had never left him as bone tired as a single sex marathon with his tireless god.

  Noah realized with a drowsy, distant surprise that the stab of fear and yearning that had always come with thoughts of Ligia had gradually eased until he no longer felt it. Hauling his eyelids open, he peered through his lashes at the silhouette of his sloop still anchored in the water beyond the reef. She seemed distant, like a half-forgotten dream. Like the ghost of his former life.

  That life was gone now. Washed away by the being holding Noah close to his warm nude body, nuzzling his perfect face into Noah’s dirty, tangled hair and murmuring something soft and sweet in his songbird language.

  “I found what I was looking for, you know. I figured it out.” Noah’s voice emerged cracked and hoarse, since he rarely used it anymore. He tightened his arm around his god’s middle. Laid a tender kiss on the dark, damp skin of his lover’s neck. Another on his collarbone. “I know we can’t understand each other in words, but we don’t need that. You know how I feel, and I think you feel the same way.”

  The god said something soothing, encouraging. Ran a palm down Noah’s back and kissed his head.

  Noah’s vision blurred, turning the sunrise into glittering fragments of turquoise and gold. He rested his cheek on his god’s chest and shut his eyes, listening to the steady thud of the wild heartbeat beneath his ear. “I love you,” he whispered, and let himself sink into sleep.

  He woke in the midafternoon, alone for the first time since he’d crossed the blue jungle pool in a whole other age of the world. Surprised, uneasy, and with no real idea of what to do, he cooled his overheated skin with a dip in the bay, then wandered into the shade of the palms.

  “Hello?” His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Hello? Where are you?”

  Only the birds, the monkeys, and the wind in the leaves answered him. For the first time, he realized he’d never learned a name to attach to his personal god. Strange, being forced to face the fact that he’d fallen in love with a man—no, not a man: a god, a demon, an elemental?—whose name he didn’t even know.

  His heart began beating harder. Frightened now for reasons he couldn’t label, Noah whirled and ran through the jungle, toward the pool where he’d met the first being he’d ever loved. The weeks—months? Years?—of wandering the pathless forest with his god had callused the soles of his feet beyond pain.

  Not that he’d have felt it. The dread spreading through him like a virus smothered everything else.

  He leapt through the forest onto the rocks edging the pool much as he had that first day. This time, though, no one waited for him under the waterfall. No smooth bare skin, no wind chime voice, no liquid black eyes like doorways into nothingness.

  Noah shook his head. “No. I don’t accept this. No.”

  Wiping the sweat from his brow, he peered into the shadows between the vine-hung trees. Nothing moved, not even the birds and snakes and small animals that normally slinked and scampered out of his path. The quiet made Noah nervous. Gave him the sense of an unfriendly regard focused upon him.

  The island had never felt hostile before. He didn’t know what to make of it, or how to change it. All he knew to do was continue the search for his reason for living.

  Doing his best to ignore the unfamiliar chill pebbling the skin along his arms, he slipped back into the jungle.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon and on through the night scouring every inch of the island, from end to end and from the beach to the sheer cliff at the other side of the ridge, calling hello, hello because he didn’t know his lover’s name.

  He found nothing but the birds, the plants, the damp earth, and the salty breeze.

  His god had deserted him.

  As the sun rose, he trudged back up the slope to the island’s highest peak, stood on the edge of the sheer cliff, and stared down at the water churning far below. The near level morning rays behind him kept the crash and ebb of the waves in ominous shadow. The ocean left the jagged rocks naked and glistening for tantalizing seconds before swelling like a great breath against the foot of the cliff.

  Peering down into the water rolling over the rocks, all Noah could see was the endless dark of the eyes he’d never look into again.

  Christ, he wanted to jump. Wanted to fall into the boiling black water, through the streaks of foam into the cool embrace of the sea, feel the salt sting his eyes and his sinuses for that one brief second before the rocks tore him apart and the ocean claimed him for her own. He’d never believed in any of the various afterlives offered up by the world’s religions, but he might be wrong. Maybe he’d be reunited with his god after death.

  Jump, said the birds, the monkeys, the wind. Jump, said the sweet, musical voice in his head, the one that sounded like the creature who’d owned him from that first moment in the jungle pool. Be with me, for always.

  Ironically, hearing that voice in his mind made Noah crouch on the very edge of the cliff instead of leaping off, even though he longed to obey the voice, to join his love in the next life.

  What stopped him was the niggling question in the back of head: what would an elemental being—a deity of sex and earthly pleasures—be doing in the next life, if such a thing even existed? That tiny seed of doubt led his feet and his psyche both back from the edge.

  He sat on a boulder several yards from the drop, thinking hard. If it wasn’t his god calling to him, what could it be but his own mind? His own thoughts, warped by too long a stretch of solitude.

  Maybe the lover who’d changed his life only existed between his ears.

  The possibility shook him deep down. What did he have, if not his god? What could he rely on, if not his own senses?

  His answer came in a bright burst of memory—the
wind in his hair, the harsh glare of the sun on the water, the familiar steady tilt of Ligia’s deck beneath his feet when her sails caught the wind and she soared like a gull across the sea.

  He shut his eyes and drew a deep breath soured with the stench of something rotting in the woods. Ligia had been there all the while. All he had to do was reclaim her.

  Perched lost and bereft on the rock, abandoned by his lover just as he realized how far he’d fallen, he felt a new purpose force life into him once more. He pushed to his feet and began the long journey back to the one part of himself he could still call his own.

  Judging by the condition of his sloop, Noah figured he hadn’t been on the island more than four or five months. It felt like much longer. He would’ve sworn he’d spent lifetimes on those few isolated tropical acres. That his sense of time had been so far off angered him. Surely the creature he’d fallen for had done this to him—addled his mind until he didn’t know the month or year, didn’t know who he was or what was important.

  “I’m free of you now, you bastard.” Noah shoved the scrub broom over the last bit of dirty decking, then stopped and shook his sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes. He didn’t dare glance toward the island, in case the thing that had destroyed him still lurked there somewhere. “I’m going to sail away and forget all about you.”

  No answer, from the island or its malicious deity. He hadn’t expected one. Still, his longing to hear the creature’s hypnotic song again drowned the tiny spark of relief in a bitter, acidic swell that ate him hollow.

  Furious with the island, the god he both hated and couldn’t stop loving, and especially with himself for feeling such things in the first place, Noah set about rinsing the loose grime from the deck so he could move on to the next chore. The sooner he could set sail, the better.

  Ligia threw obstacles in his path at every turn.

  Not that he blamed her. He’d left her. Abandoned her to the ravages of weather, brine, and time. She was entitled to her revenge, no matter how petty.