Siren Queen(38)

“Stay right there,” she murmured, and she started to kiss me almost desperately, mouth all over mine, my eyelids, my nose, my cheeks and my chin. I could feel her pearly teeth behind the kisses, occasionally pressing too hard against my lip or my cheekbone, but that small pain made me press closer to her as well.

I jammed my elbow on the bench seat, grinding up with my hand even as she pressed down on me. It felt as if she was everywhere over me, enveloping me, enclosing me. A dull pain traveled from my wrist to my elbow and my hand was faintly numb, but it all mattered so much less than how hot and wet she was and how good she felt …

Then every muscle in her tensed, and Emmaline pressed her face hard against my shoulder, her mouth opening in a soundless cry. Her lips and her teeth pressed against my bare shoulder, and suddenly I wanted nothing more than for her to bite me, leave some kind of mark that would stay long after we returned from the fires.

I let my hand fall down, the muscles in my wrist sighing with relief, and she came to rest half on top of me, her body almost pushing me off the seat. Our breath evened out together, and only then did I realize I had been breathing as hard as she was, that my face and throat were slick with sweat. My hand was sore, and I stretched my fingers slightly, marveling at how wet they still were and how good she was.

“Should we get up?” I wondered, and she butted her forehead against mine playfully.

“Not yet,” she said, her voice raspy. “I’ve always been a girl who believes in going Dutch…”

For one blind moment, I had no idea what she was talking about, and then her hand was sliding the hem of my dress up to my hips. She had an easier time of it than I did, even if she still had to fight her yards and yards of skirt, and she parted my legs with her own bare thigh. I squirmed against her, startled at how strong she was while looking as delicate as a wisp of lace. Her thigh was warm and vital between my legs and when she pressed against me, I couldn’t help locking my legs around hers.

Now it was my turn to cling to her, my face against the rise of her breasts and my hands doing endless damage to the fabric of her dress. I couldn’t reach her skin with my hands, but she clung to me, murmuring soft encouragement that I didn’t pay any attention to at all. I was too intent on her between my legs, how I could stretch and stiffen and grind until I was shaking, and she was endless patience, not budging until I was as helpless and pleasured as she was. When I finally cried out, it was less powerful than when I was on my own in the bathtub, but it took the heart straight out of me and threw it into the sky. My body quaked, and I lay in Emmaline’s arms. It was the most important thing in the world, at least in that moment.

Her soft fingers covered my mouth, and at first I kissed them. Then I realized she was keeping me still, and startled, I listened. A rumble, a roar, and the sound of excited shouts grew louder. I gritted my teeth and reached to pull my dress down over my thighs, and then we held on to each other while the hunt rode by. Her eyelashes brushed against my cheek as she closed her eyes, and I held her tighter.

At last, there was silence, and we emerged from the car. I wondered whether the world would look different after what we had done, but it was just the same. Instead, I looked at her and found a soft glow on her cheeks, and from the stunned way she looked at me, I could see she felt the same.

“Beautiful,” she murmured, cupping my cheek in her hand. She leaned up to kiss me, more a blessing than a lover’s token, and then stepped back, offering me her hand. We wandered the fires as if we were strolling through a park, and though we never spoke, sometimes we looked at each other in secret wonder.

I returned from the fires with my heart glowing and so full of adoration that I could feel it spilling out of me. I wondered sometimes how the whole world didn’t seem able to see it, but Greta shrugged.

“That kind of love, it’s invisible until you cannot ignore it,” Greta said. She and I sat on the lip of the small balcony at the end of our hallway’s floor, our legs dangling down over the four-story drop. Above us, the Saturday sun was just beginning to rise in the sky, and in the pool below, some studio changelings were already rehearsing their underwater routines for the synchronized swimming extravaganza that the Mannheim brothers were shooting on Lot 3. I saw that they had lost at least one girl to the fires, and they were frantically trying to close the gap.

I tilted my head towards Greta, who watched the swimmers with a kind of grim intensity, as if she could divine some kind of fortune or future in their graceful passes. She walked me to Emmaline’s fire every Friday night, and she might stay, but more often lately, she walked back into the night. She came back solemn and strange from the darkness, so oddling that no one questioned her.

“And the kind of love that you have with Brandt Hiller?”

Her mouth turned down unhappily, and Greta shook her head without looking at me.

“That is something else,” she said gruffly.

I left it alone, but I reached over to cup the back of her neck with my hand. I wondered for a moment if I had touched my sister like this once upon a time, when she was small enough to want comfort and I was still there to give it. It seemed unlikely, but I had learned the gesture from somewhere. Greta sailed like the moon in the sky, untouchable and cool even now. She tilted her head forward and exhaled softly, never taking her eyes from the swimmers.





VIII


There’s no such thing as a natural rhythm when you can walk out of a winter morning on Lot 3 and walk into an Aegean sunset on Lot 8. Still, when I was with Emmaline it was springtime in a place I had never been, one she told me about sometimes after we lay exhausted on her enormous bed in her house in the Palisades.