Grave Danger

by K. E. Rodgers

  Corrigan’s lips broke away from hers for a moment, his breath beating warm and heavy against her face. Her own cool breath escalated as he took up paying homage to the soft underside of her neck. She could actually feel the sensitive energy currents of her skin quiver in anticipation of his lips brushing heated caresses against her throat.

  Then his lips returned to their post at her mouth, delivering messages of more things to come with the flick of his tongue against the seam of her mouth. Clarissa opened her mouth, more than ready to receive the news of carnal love from the man of all her soul’s desire.

  His teeth scraped against the plump line of her lip and she could feel the shape of them, different from her own. Like all flesh-eaters, the canines were elongated more so than in a traditional human mouth and all their teeth were set in a jaw designed to exert enough pressure to cut through bone and tissue in a matter of seconds.

  But as his teeth pulled gently on her lower lip, it was not in an act of pulling apart tendons from meat, but to enhance the pleasure of this beautiful act that at first seemed impossible. A flesh-eater and ghost caught in a world of carnal pleasure, unheard of until now.

  When lips met so too did hands. Corrigan’s right hand reached up encompassing her left, holding it above her head while his left hand traveled the journey from her shoulder down to the soft undersides, down further where ribs met waist to hips that moved gracefully with the movement of her right leg that swept about him. He set a course to a destination of pure bliss. Her body which should have been insubstantial for his body to touch flowed with the energy of a thousand nuclear bombs. Though her flesh remained cool, already he could feel warmth under the surface with each sway of her hips against him, bringing heat to his already overheated body. He was sure her energy would consume them both in an inferno that would leave them both blissfully incapacitated. He’d like nothing better.

  Tucking her hips closer to him, he expressed without words how much she was affecting him. He’d been fantasizing about what she’d look and feel like under all those pretty clothes she came over to his house in and he never saw her wear the same outfit twice. They went swimming in the ocean many nights and sometimes he hoped the current would whisk away her bathing suit so he’d get to see more of her beautiful skin. She always prudishly insisted on wearing a one piece suit with shorts. She was adamant about the fact that she had a slight muffin top in a bikini and that it wouldn’t look very good. He had no idea what a ‘muffin top’ was in reference to. In his estimation muffins were delicious and then that set his mind to Clarissa as a tasty muffin slathered in butter.

  He felt her smile against his lips as he moved to kiss his way down her neck to the spot just above where her heart should be. With a girlish giggle he’d never heard from her before she whispered above his head. “I hope that’s not ‘rigor mortis’ kicking in?”

  That stopped him. He lifted his head from where he was enjoying making licking bites over the area near the swell of her breast where he’d pushed the shirt aside. She had a delicious smell, black raspberry vanilla she’d said. It was her favorite scent she’d used liberally when she was alive and was so much part of her that now her skin smelled permanently like the potent fragrance. But he didn’t appreciate the ‘rigor mortis’ joke, not at the moment anyway. And it cooled his ardor enough to put blood back into his brain.

  “No,” he said darkly.

  Clarissa felt him let go of her hand, felt as he was retreating back away from her. She quickly held his hand to her, refusing to let him pull away because she’d made a really, really bad joke. She was extremely nervous about doing this with him and though she couldn’t deny she hadn’t thought about it before. That didn’t mean when confronted with the possibility of it actually playing out that she could just go through the motions without some moments of hesitation or in her case covering her own insecurities with a poor urban euphemism.

  “Forget I said that,” she said, taking up where he left off by kissing a trail along his warm neck to the open collar down his chest. He wasn’t responding as she’d hoped. Clarissa guessed the ‘rigor mortis’ joke hadn’t gone over so well with someone who was technically a reanimated corpse. She made little mewling sounds in the back of her throat, trying to encourage him, but he remained impassively still, his face staring off into the distance above her head.

  Corrigan,” she nearly shouted, forcing his focus back down to her. He had this annoying habit sometimes of pushing her away from him, enclosing himself behind an invisible shield of glass. It took all her effort sometimes to smash it down and get to him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. Can you blame a girl for being a little nervous?”

  “No,” he answered. Brushing her hair over and away from her forehead he placed a gentle kiss upon her warming flesh. Her cheeks had become rosy along with her lips making her entire face glow contrasting beautifully with the radiance of her inner soul. He pulled back knowing it was for the best. She wasn’t ready for him yet, and despite how easy it might be to override her anxieties he somehow guessed it wouldn’t be what she wanted; what they both wanted.

  As Corrigan sat upright on the old leather couch, watching as Clarissa remained reclined enticingly over the armrest, he wondered where his new found sense of gentlemanly discretion had come from and why the hell it decided to rear its ugly moral head in his face at this moment. He watched the pout form over her temptress’s mouth and the rise and fall of her breast as she breathed in and out. They moved with her lungs like breathing mountains. His ‘rigor mortis’ was going to kill him if he didn’t think of something else to distract not only him but the siren next to him, who was even now moving over the couch on her knees to attack him.

  “Clarissa,” he whispered as she curled herself on his lap. She was trying too hard, wrapping herself around him like a sexy contortionist trying to make up for the fact that she wasn’t sure of herself or him in this kind of situation. As far as he knew she’d never been intimate with anyone in her current form and her new body chemistry might work differently than when she was a living woman. That coupled with the fact that they’d never been intimate with each other like this, intense make-out session excluded. They were treading on new territory in their relationship.

  She seemed almost frantic in her movements as if she were just trying to get through it, hoping that when it were over the worst part would be behind them and they could ‘maybe get it right the next time’. Her little purring noises and wandering hands were making him loose focus and with a determination that made his ‘rigor mortis’ rage retribution throughout his entire system he swept her hands away from her target bringing them to his mouth.

  He kissed her cool finger tips, one by one, each time watching as her fingers curled spastically trying to get loose of his grasp. He held firm.

  “Clarissa,” he whispered her name again, trying to get her eyes to focus on his face and his words and not on how she could get him out of his pants without the use of her hands. She captured his lips, silencing him, trying to use his body against him. Clarissa wriggled her hands free during a moment of weakness on his part. Those hands began to wander his body again.

  She had quick little fingers and she’d made short work of opening the front of his pants before he realized it was happening. In the second before she reached in to explore further though he grabbed her dexterous little fingers and placed her hands behind her back.

  “Corrigan LeMoyne, if you don’t let go of my hands I’m going to bite you,” she bit out harshly before doing just that. Her mouth was at the base of his throat just above the mark of his death and where his pulse beat quickly against her lips.

  His ‘rigor mortis’ told him to ‘fuck gentlemanly morals and let her have her way with you’, but that damn frayed bit of moral fiber wouldn’t allow it. Corrigan pushed her away, pushing her down on the couch in the opposite direction from where they’d begun this. Holding her hands above her head, he waited until her head stopped thrashing back and forth,
holding himself away from her bucking hips until she finally quieted and looked up at him.

  Tiny prisms of liquid light fell from her angelic blue eyes. He’d come to realize that ghosts did not have the capacity to cry human tears. What leaked from their eyes was in fact a viscous form of their soul. Her chest rose and fell heavily with her strangled breathing. Clarissa was forcing herself to be something she thought he wanted, not realizing that all he wanted of her was her sassy smart-mouth self; the one that loved him without condition.

  “Don’t cry, mo ghrá geal,” Don’t cry, my bright love. Corrigan wiped his thumb across the tears her soul wept. Clarissa made a wounded sound in her throat, trying to turn her face away from him. He wouldn’t let her, using one hand to hold both of hers suspended above her head, he forced her face away from the protection of her arm. His thumb made a sweep over her lips which quivered in her distress like a rippling pond.

  “What’s the matter with me?” she said as she once again tried to turn away from him. Again he refused to let her hide from him. “I’m not naïve, I know how this goes. So why can’t I… ”she trailed off.

  “I don’t care,” he said, though the damn ‘rigor mortis’ cried out, ‘I fucking care!’. He refused to listen. Moving back into a safer position on the couch he pulled Clarissa so that she was sitting half on the couch, half on him. “This isn’t something we have to jump into because social standards say that’s what we’re supposed to do. If we need to go slower to get to that point when we’re ready to faigh muin then we can do that.”

  You burraidh, his sex drive raged at him.

  Clarissa wiped away several more tears from her cheeks, looking up at him with a questioning frown. “I want to though,” she said, placing her hand on his chest, just over his heart. “Tha an t-eagal orm,” I’m frightened. She uttered the truth, her face against his side. He’d been teaching her some Gaelic and she was a surprisingly fast learner. He cupped her head as she continued. “I’m afraid I’ll hurt you; that I’ll forget myself and make a mistake and truly hurt you.”

  Clarissa’s fears weren’t entirely unfounded. Her gifts as a bokor coupled with the fact that she couldn’t remember how to control them at times made her feel as if the wrong move on her part could heap terrible disasters. But Corrigan knew that not only was he safe from her gifts, he’d never let her believe that her gifts were purely evil. A bokor could use their talents for dark magick. He had firsthand experience to the evil wrought from such a person. But Clarissa was not Elmira; the purity of her soul outshone the withered one that beautiful bitch carried.

  “Tá grá agam duit,” I love you, Corrigan said against her hair, “Tá grá agam duit, a-chaoidh.” I love you, forever. It wasn’t the moment he would have picked to finally tell her the truth of his heart, but he found it vital that he tell her now, nonetheless.

  He wasn’t usually one to believe in the instant bonds of love between two people, he was more inclined to believe that love had to be formed over time and hardship. But the fact that Clarissa could love him despite the knowledge that he should be her most hated enemy. That she was the only woman in his entire existence who had ever sought the light inside the soulless beast. It was proof enough that someone, God perhaps, had deemed him worthy of the elusive flame of love. Corrigan would hold that gently burning flame forever tending it so that it would never burn out.

  Clarissa wrapped her arms around him, moving fully onto his lap as she held onto him as a boat to its anchor. Her face buried against his neck she whispered, “Tá grá agam duit. Tá grá agam duit, Corrigan. Tá grá agam duit, Corrigan, a-chaoidh.”

  Corrigan was glad she couldn’t see him, her face buried against him. His face held an expression that read both pain and pleasure, the blurring of emotions that did something odd to his face as it drew lines into the usually relaxed, smooth skin around his mouth. He’d exist a thousand lifetimes on this planet and never forget the moment he first heard those words from Clarissa’s lips, spoken in a tongue that he’d not heard in decades or more. He wiped the evidence of this moment off his cheeks just as she drew back to look up at him, all the love in the world reflected in her angel blue eyes.

  “I almost forgot,” he said, trying to speak normally around the lump of emotion that had set up residence in his vocal passage. “I have something I wanted to give you.”

  Clarissa scooted off his lap at his urging. He walked on awkward legs over to a corner of the room that had been blocked off by a bed sheet that had been strung up. Clarissa held back an unladylike laugh as he discreetly put himself back in order while he turned to face away from her. He slipped behind the curtain for several seconds then reappeared moments later with two objects.

  Coming back to her on the couch he handed her the first item which was wrapped rather poorly in cream colored paper with big blooming roses all over it. Clarissa smiled as he sat back down on the couch next to her, a hesitant, worried look on his face as she started pulling open the wrapping. Who ever had wrapped it, Corrigan, had used about a roll and a half of scotch tape on the package, even going so far as to winding it around and around like he was wrapping up a mummy. It took several really hard tugs to get just a little of the paper to tear.

  “Here,” Corrigan finally said after watching her struggle for several minutes. “I don’t know anything about wrapping. Two rolls of the tape might have been overkill.”

  Clarissa handed over the gift as he set the larger one on the floor. It was about the size of a picture window. She had an idea of what it might be, but didn’t want to ruin it by saying anything. In a matter of moments Corrigan had the wrapping paper off the first gift and he handed it back to her, that hesitant smile still on his face.

  “Thank you,” Clarissa said, holding the back-pack out in front of her so she could see it from all angles. It was light blue which for some reason reminded her of Corrigan’s beautiful eyes. It was a little smaller than her old one but it was new and very pretty.

  Corrigan forced her to turn it around until the front pocket was facing them. He pointed to a personalized stitching that wasn’t done by a manufacturer. In thread a few shades darker blue than the back-pack itself were two letter C’s, one placed backwards so that the ends formed a circle or a bloated symbolic heart shape. Inside sat a blooming rose with the center holding a flame that burned blue at its core. It was a beautiful symbolism for the bond that held herself and Corrigan connect. The C’s which represented each of their names connected with the blooming flame of their new borne love.

  “It’s wonderful, perfect,” Clarissa managed through another set of tears. “My old one was looking a little beat up wasn’t it? I’ll try to keep this one in better shape.”

  Corrigan kissed her cheek, wiping away the liquid light from her slightly warm cheeks. “Don’t leak out on me yet, love, I haven’t given you the other one. You’ll turn into a little ghost puddle if you keep that up.” He tried to lighten the moment with a joke, but found he had to keep wiping at his own face as well as hers. There was a lot of floating dirt in the attic, he told himself.

  “Nothing could be better than this,” Clarissa exclaimed, holding the back-pack to her chest like it contained a million dollars instead of the paper stuffing that the store put in it to keep its shape.

  Clarissa’s curiosity however got the best of her and she finally set the back-pack aside close to her on the couch as she accepted the second and larger gift from Corrigan. Holding it on the floor in front of her she pulled the paper off finding it easier than when she’d tried to open the other present. She looked to Corrigan who was watching intently as she opened his second gift.

  Seeing her curious questioning face he answered simply. “I ran out of tape.”

  “Someone in this family must know how to wrap a gift properly,” Clarissa said as she pulled away another strip of cream colored wrapping paper. It was really too pretty to destroy.

  “Maude,” Corrigan spoke his sister’s name. She’d tried to show him how he was
only supposed to use three pieces of tape and the different folding techniques he could use on odd shaped gifts. He hadn’t been a very good pupil to her tutelage. There might have been a moment when she threw the roll of tape at him. “She helped me with the stitching of the decals.” He’d done better with the sewing and had only broken the needle four or five times and kept the cursing to a minimum. Margaret Ann hadn’t been there and Maude was more lenient of cursing than she was or else she didn’t voice herself as strongly.

  Clarissa had extracted the last strip of paper and was looking at her gift was an intense frown on her face as if she couldn’t quite come up with a response. She tilted her head to the left then to the right like she were an art dealer trying to make sense of a new artist. Then she made her eyes into tiny squints before opening them real wide like she was surprised.

  “What are you doing?” Corrigan questioned her when she continued through several bizarre expressions. “I assure you no matter how you distort your face the canvas won't change on you.”

  “Am I looking at this wrong because all I see is a blank canvas?” Clarissa ran her fingers over the pristine white canvas. Then she caught Corrigan with a fixed grin on his beautifully handsome face. “What, am I missing something here? Maybe you have to have a fleshy body to understand this kind of art. Thank-you by the way for my – not blank canvas.”

  Corrigan laughed then at her adorable whit. “It is a blank canvas,” he said taking the canvas from the floor and holding up to her, “but already I see you absorbed in its fibers. I see your face and hair and that beguiling smile.” He traced the line of her cheek then a spot on the canvas where he thought it should be. “I want to paint you on to this canvas just as I see you now. In truth it’s more of a gift for me. I haven’t done a portrait work in a long time.”

  Corrigan yanked her from the old leather couch, pulling her over to where the bed sheet was hung like a curtain. Holding back the sheet he gestured for her to go behind the curtain. He followed in behind her, letting the curtain fall in his wake.