At that moment, the talking fox didn’t surprise me nearly as much as it should have.
His voice – and the voice was definitely male, and seemingly too large for that small body – was weak but melodious, almost seductive despite his obvious pain.
‘You’re … a kitsune,’ I stammered. Part of me told me I should be more alarmed than I was, but I was still expecting to wake up any moment and find myself in my futon.
The fox nodded.
Foxes don’t nod. But kitsune might.
Kitsune – spirit-foxes, shapeshifters, nature guardians, notorious tricksters and seducers. In most traditional tales, they were females, causing trouble for human men because their human forms were irresistibly lovely, but their ways were too alien for a relationship to last. But, as my grandmother had always said with a wink and a nod, there must have been males, or how would you get little kitsune? Human women were either too smart to be taken in, she reasoned, or too proud to admit they’d fallen for someone who turned out not to be human.
And kitsune, the good ones, at least, could die of regret.
I’d felt bad enough about causing the death of an ordinary fox. I couldn’t risk killing a creature of legend, even if it couldn’t possibly be real and talking with me.
‘I accept your apology, kitsune-san,’ I said in my most formal Japanese. ‘But how could you have wronged me?’ I felt myself colouring in the dark. ‘I didn’t mind you watching me last night.’
The fox’s voice seemed a little stronger. ‘No, not that. That was saying goodbye. I have watched you and your friend since you came here, seen the care you take of my birds and my island. But your friend was so clumsy that sometimes she came close to stumbling into nests. I decided she needed to learn to be more careful and materialised almost under her feet, just to startle her. I didn’t mean to do her harm, but she tripped and took a nasty fall. It’s my fault she got injured, and I deprived you of your friend, and when I saw you last night I realised how very alone you would be now without her.’
His cadences were formal, some of his words old-fashioned. It took me a while to realise that the word I was mentally translating as friend or companion was probably more like lover.
Despite his solemn tone, I smiled. Then I bowed. ‘Master Kitsune,’ I said, trying to remember my best formal manners, Japanese-style, ‘I accept your apology. I regret that Akiko got hurt, but I also think that you may have saved her life by forcing her to leave here. A clumsy person shouldn’t be scaling cliffs and I was scared for her every day. And, if it helps, Akiko was my work partner, but not my lover or even a close friend. I’ll miss having someone to talk to, but eventually someone else will come to watch the albatross with me.’
I swore that even under the flashlight’s beam I could see the kitsune’s breathing become easier, see his form relax.
‘But I must make amends,’ the kitsune insisted. ‘I only meant to scare her a bit, not to harm her or to leave you without companionship. May I offer you … conversation?’
My flashlight popped out, and then popped back on, equally mysteriously.
And, when it did, a beautiful man in old-fashioned layered robes stood where the fox had lain. A fox tail peeked out from under his robe. The man I thought I’d invented in my sexual fantasy, only far sexier in the flesh. Far sexier than any human had a right to be.
‘I hope my appearance pleases you,’ he said. ‘I cannot seem to create clothing like that worn today. Ah well.’ He shrugged with incredible grace. ‘Even if I could, they would not accommodate my tail.’
Then he touched my arm, and I felt heat sear through my awkwardly thrown-on layers.
He drew closer. His eyes weren’t brown but a pure gold like a fox’s eyes, and he was entirely male yet utterly beautiful and elegant in a way that men usually weren’t, at least not 21st-century straight men. More masculine and grown-up than the androgynous bishonen boys of anime, but with that silken appeal.
‘Conversation?’ I said, realising my voice was coy, flirtatious, dripping honey almost as much as my pussy suddenly was. ‘I forget … is that another word with more than one meaning?’
When he kissed me, I did something I’d only read about in particularly bad books: I swooned. Fire and earth and growth and pure animal lust overwhelmed me and for a second I literally couldn’t see or breathe.
He caught me as I started to buckle. ‘Forgive me yet again,’ he said. ‘It has been far too long. I must remember how to … moderate myself. Let me take you to my home.’
It was and was not a cave. That is, I knew where we were, and I knew that what I was entering was a small cave, a crevice in the lava. But, when we entered, it opened into a lovely home in the antique Japanese style, complete with rice-paper walls that couldn’t possibly be there. It was warm, well lit and as elegant as my handsome kitsune friend.
And it should have bothered me immensely that none of this was possible, that I was apparently about to make love with a mythical being in a house that couldn’t exist.
I was having a harder time by the second, clinging to the conviction that I was dreaming. It was too vivid, too detailed, too unlike any dream I’d ever had. Either I was going insane or the kitsune was throwing off pheromones my long-deprived body couldn’t resist – and, since I was way too busy to become crazy, I was voting for the latter.
He offered me food and, when I accepted, a lovely meal appeared: rice balls, inari and other sushi, beautifully presented on lacquerware, and a steaming bowl of udon soup. ‘You will still be hungry in the morning,’ he explained, his face merry. ‘But it will taste good. We so crave human food that we’ve learnt to create its likeness from air and will, although we have little need for nourishment.’
‘No problem there. What woman wouldn’t love a great dinner with no calories?’
He laughed, although his face showed he was puzzled. Then again, he probably hadn’t interacted much with humans since the volcano erupted, and, in 1902, people in such a remote place would be more worried about keeping weight on than taking it off.
We ate and chatted, and the food (though it might have been an illusion) was delicious, and his conversation quirky and poetic and charming, although some of it didn’t make a lot of sense to me because his vocabulary was archaic. And all the while, as we spoke, I felt my lust building.
Dream, hallucination or creature of the spirit world – whatever he might be, I had to have him.
I kept shifting my seat, feeling the weight of my desire in my pussy, in my hard eager nipples. The conversation was light, layered in innuendo and double meaning, but I couldn’t figure out the right way to say what I wanted.
Luckily, I didn’t have to. We reached at the same time for a rice ball. When our skin touched, my breath hissed in and I could feel my eyes widening. I strained forwards.
He brushed the remains of dinner aside with one grand gesture (they turned to twigs of heather and bright chrysanthemum flowers as they hit the tatami mat, the lacquered plates to large shells), grabbed my shoulders and pulled me bodily towards him. He was strong for all his sleek elegance, strong and graceful like the predator he was.
When he kissed me, I swore the island shuddered, like it did occasionally when the volcano grumbled and threatened. I half-expected his breath to be fetid, like a dog’s, but it smelt of sweetgrass and green tea, and he wore an elusive perfume, amber and cherry blossoms, that lay lightly on top of a natural scent that was half sexy man, half warm animal musk.
My clothing – sweatpants, T-shirt, fleece, Gore-Tex jacket – moved aside for him as gracefully as if he were peeling back layers of brightly coloured and patterned kimono to reveal the red silk hakima underneath.
My underwear wasn’t nearly as elegant as that, but he made it melt away.
Damn, I had to sleep with more supernatural beings.
I delved through layers of silk, enjoying the journey, but eager to get to the goal. His skin was as silken as his clothes, but hot, hotter than a human, and his chest
was downy with fine red hair – no, fur that extended in a vee to his cock.
He whimpered when I toyed with his nipples, a puzzled, but pleased sound. When I dropped to my knees (wishing as I did that I had a modicum of his animal grace) and kissed my way down to his cock, his reaction was an amused aroused chuckle. ‘So bold! Are all women of this era like you?’
I looked up into his golden eyes. ‘Some are much wilder than I am. I’m kind of out of practice.’
His cock was shaped a bit differently from a human’s, and the way it emerged from the foreskin seemed different as well, not that I’d had a lot of experience with uncut cocks. And, when his tail swished forwards and brushed against me, I briefly had second thoughts.
If he were just my fantasy, my dream, he’d have been human inside his clothes – but he was definitely not. His differences were beautiful, even erotic, but at the same time startling.
Not an animal, but not a man either. A kitsune.
Alien. Wild. Supernatural, or perhaps extra-natural, an incarnation of nature. Not a safe partner for a human, if I were to believe my grandmother’s stories – not because he was evil, but because he was simply other.
Then the tail swept forwards again and very deliberately brushed between my legs, flicking at my clit.
Soft. The very definition of sensuality. But the rest of him was deliciously hard, and the contrast made me crazy.
I’ve never feared adventure. I’d come halfway around the world to pursue my dream, then planted myself on a deserted island.
This was just another adventure, or so my overheated body and mind assured me.
I took him in my mouth. He tasted of male musk, but not much more so than a turned-on man would at the end of a long day outdoors.
But, under that, he tasted of sunlight playing on the water, of the albatross dancing over the island, of the scruffy shrubs and the chrysanthemums, of salt and stars and volcanic ash. I could taste all of Torishima on his cock, and I wanted more, wanted him to spill the essence of the island into my throat.
He buried his fingers in my hair, began moving in opposition to my movements, letting his length fuck my mouth. I let one hand slip between my legs, stirred at my cunt to slick my fingers, began to circle my clit.
‘No!’ he cried. ‘Not like this!’ He tore away from me, leaving my mouth bereft. Then he pushed me back on to the low table.
‘Such lovely human skin,’ he murmured, as he kissed and licked my throat, kissed my collarbone. He suckled my breasts, first one, then the other, taking them further into his mouth than I would have thought possible, and I could tell he was tasting my world on my skin as I had tasted his world on his.
And, when he worked his way between my legs, he lapped at me eagerly, delicately, his hands working in concert, almost pushing me over, then pulling back at the last second and letting it build again.
‘You taste of art I’ve never seen, poems I’ve never heard,’ he said. ‘You taste of cities and, yet, of caring for what is not human.’
That so struck me that, even though my brain should have been non-functional by that point, I asked, ‘You know cities? I thought you were a wild thing.’
‘My kind is between the wild and the human, guarding each from the other. I have been in cities, before I followed the first humans here a century and more ago. They needed more kitsune here,’ he added sadly. ‘One was not enough for the balance to be preserved. But now there are humans like you to help.’
Then, without warning, as if to force his mind away from melancholy thoughts, he pulled back. ‘Turn over,’ he said and, when I didn’t arrange myself in quite the position he’d had in mind, he roughly positioned me on hands and knees on the mat, ass high, head down.
He knelt behind me, teased at my pussy with his cock. When I pushed back towards him, he growled and put one hand on the scruff of my neck, pinning me into place.
I’ve never been submissive in bed and I wasn’t submissive then – I growled back at him, pushed against his cock – but, still, the show of dominance made me shudder, made me open for him even more than I already was.
‘Now!’ I’d meant it as a plea, but it came out as a snarl.
And apparently he liked that, because he drove into me. None of this inching in, teasing, that I’d expected after his delight in foreplay, but a claiming.
And I gave it right back, shaking his hand off my neck, driving back on to his cock, thrusting on to his thrusts.
I’d been rippling at the edge of orgasm so long that when the wave broke it was a tsunami, or maybe more like the volcano blowing the top off my world, sending wave after wave of white-hot lava over me. I clenched around him, working his cock without even trying to.
But he kept going.
Another series of waves threatened to drown me.
But he kept going, slowing down a bit to let me catch my breath, let the tension build again. This time, I sensed, he would let himself come with me.
‘Not so fast,’ I said. ‘This time I want to look at you. I want to watch your face while you come.’
‘But my tail … and my face … I might not look …’
I understood what he couldn’t say. As he lost control, he might also lose control of his shape, lose his gorgeous human mask.
‘Will it be your true face I see?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then please …’
I think he expected me to lie under him. In any event, he seemed surprised when I urged him on to his back and straddled him – surprised, but pleased.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I get to watch you. You are so beautiful.’
I wondered at that for a second. I’m not unattractive, but not beautiful by either Japanese or American standards: too sturdy for the one, too small-breasted and short-waisted for the other, with the broad nose and flat cheekbones of someone from Japanese peasant stock.
And then I sank on to his cock and began to move, deciding that, if a glorious supernatural creature thought I was beautiful, I was damn well going to believe him for the moment. Especially when his clever hands began to play with my clit, coaxing me towards another climax.
Heat filled me, blinding me. I had to close my eyes against the surge of pleasure. Closed my eyes and saw Torishima below me, a tiny rugged jewel in the ocean, as an albatross saw it, then saw it as obsidian and shale and plants and nests and feathers and guano, a fox’s-eye view.
But I wasn’t going to be cheated. I reached back, began tickling his balls, felt them shift and clench under my touch. When I felt his muscles tighten and ripple, I forced my eyes open, forced myself away from the vision to watch his face.
Or rather his faces, morphing back and forth.
The handsome man. A woman lovely in the old Japanese style, with fragile features and a cloud of black hair. An ordinary red fox. A black fox with nine tails. An old man with wise merry eyes.
A being not clearly male or female, not clearly fox or human. Fox ears and whiskers and human eyes and lips. Stunning.
That face was the one he settled into as his climax claimed him.
His back arched like someone had fed him strychnine, and the sound he made was high and surreal, as much a fox’s yips as a human’s cries.
And as he poured hot as lava into me, I came again, even more violently than before.
I ended up curled in his chest. He was a human man again, or as much of one as he ever had been – his tail, as well as his arms, were curled possessively around me – and we were floating on a cloud of his long black hair.
‘I am of the night,’ he whispered. ‘In the morning, you’ll be in your own bed, alone, but you’ll see me again.’ He sniffed at my hair like a cat might, an endearingly animal gesture. ‘I won’t stay away. I can’t. You are far too beautiful.’
This time, he used a different word for you, one that roughly translated means ‘all of you honourable people’. This time he definitely meant not me as an individual, but human women, or humans in general.
Wel
l, that worked for me. He was beautiful in his own right, but all wild things were beautiful in their wildness.
And, from what I could tell, we both had the job of maintaining a balance between the wild and the human.
Perhaps we had more of a chance to make things work than the human–kitsune couples in traditional tales, more common ground to build on.
And, if not, I had had an experience even rarer and more marvellous than observing the albatross.
The albatross! I’d almost forgotten them. How much time had passed in this world between worlds? In some old tales, visiting a kitsune could distort your sense of time horribly. A day could be a year; a year could be a day. Was I reckoned to be missing, lost somewhere on Torishima? Worse yet, had I missed the mating flights?
‘Don’t fret,’ he said. ‘When the sun comes up, only one night will have passed, and it will be time for the albatross to dance.’
I had been too sleepy by then, worn by great sex and sheer strangeness, to parse that.
But, when I took my weary, but still blissful body to the cliffs in the morning, still bemusedly brushing fox fur from my clothes, the air was filled with wings tinted rose by sunrise, meeting and courting in a dance older than anything human.
Somewhere in the distance, although he’d said he was night’s creature, I heard a fox’s bark, sounding for all the world like a man’s sated laughter.
I turned to the direction from which it came and whispered on to the wind, ‘Tonight I want you in your true form.’
And the wind caressed me like a hand, like fur.
Watching the Detective Portia Da Costa
Uh oh, here we go! How many times have I heard this theme tune tonight? How many times have I pressed my hand to my heart as if I could stop it pounding fifteen to the dozen? I always get a little tingle when I hear this heavy plinkety-plunking intro. A fluttery tingle in my midsection and a big fat horny twinge way down low, because I know I’m going to see him any second!
Or at least I’ll see him if we don’t get struck by lightning in the meantime. There’s a classic Hammer Horror thunderstorm raging outside and the power’s been fluctuating and even gone out momentarily once or twice. It’s not all that long since we moved into this old house that my uncle Edgar left me and, frankly, it’s a bit of a death-trap. The electric wiring is rudimentary in places – and the plumbing and the heating aren’t much better either.
Love on the Dark Side Page 20