Siren Queen(70)

I could kiss her for a thousand years, I thought faintly. Her mouth on mine, after the initial shock of being that close to someone else, dazed me, and I pressed my weight against her for more of it.

I think perhaps our kissing did do something strange to the way time flowed in the space occupied by our two bodies. Underneath me, she was perfectly open and sweet, content to be kissed and ravished. It couldn’t have lasted as long as I thought it did—long enough to build monuments that crumbled to marble ruins, long enough that the entire city of Los Angeles fell into the fault line and was rebuilt on its own corpse—but when I looked up, I felt oddly sphinx-like, other and strange.

“What is this doing to me?” I found myself asking her, and in the dimness of my bedroom, Tara’s breath came slower and she smiled.

“What sex does,” she replied. “It tells you something about yourself or the person you’re doing it with. Sometimes it changes you.”

Perhaps it should have bothered me. I had changed so much over the past few years, I should have balked at yet another one. Instead, I leaned down to kiss her, wild for it and ready in a way that I had not been ready for anything else.

Our bodies slid against each other. I could feel the grit that clung to us from walking in the fires, and I thought of snakes shedding their skin.

I slithered down her body, kissing my way between her small breasts and taking soft, flickering licks at her brown nipples. Absently, I pressed my face under her arm, breathing in her smell there as well before angling down over her hips and the slight hang of her belly. Her hair underneath was a wild thicket, lighter than the hair on her head, and when I nuzzled it, she laughed, reaching down to pet my head and my shoulders.

It was another way of losing myself. I was nothing but motion, friction and spit searching for the very center of her, and when I found it, I couldn’t keep my mouth away from her. I lapped at her, learning her taste and her textures, how I could make her gasp with surprise and how with the right touch she stiffened up like a wire run through with electricity.

I was lost in her when she slid her fingers through my hair and tugged, hard enough to send a spike of pleasure through my center and make me look up.

“Come this way,” she said, patting me and shoving me into position so that we were pressed against each other, me half on top of her and my legs spread for her eager fingers.

It was messy and awkward and sloppy; whatever magic we were making was different from what I had done with Emmaline in the light of the fires, but it was real as well.

She worked at me with her strong fingers even as her body rippled and convulsed beneath me. Her climax only paused her for a handful of breaths, and then with a growl, she was after me again, pushing me farther and faster out of my body.

I dug my fingernails into her firm thighs, not caring that I was leaving red crescents that darkened with blood right under her pale thin skin. I made a deep guttural noise as my back arched and my body released all that tension at once. It was as inevitable as falling, but I never landed. Instead I rolled over and floated in the pleasure of what we had done.

After a while, I was distantly aware of Tara turning around to rest close to me, our feet towards the head of the bed. I rolled her over on her back so that I could rest on her arm.

“Well that was…” Tara laughed, shaping her hands in the air like flying birds.

“It doesn’t need words, Miss Writer,” I said, resting my hand flat against her belly.

“Maybe not,” she conceded.





VIII


I had spent my life up until that point doing reckless things, but I never considered myself a reckless person. What I would and wouldn’t risk were always things that had set me apart, but now, as production rolled forward, I was standing on some narrow, windswept ledge; at any moment, I might realize that I could fly.

I was lucky I had to wear the tail. Otherwise I might have spent even more time sneaking off with Tara, to the storage warehouses where the flats were kept, behind the wardrobe girls’ door, even once up on the catwalk while Jacko Dewalt fought things out with the crew below.

Things were going badly, and Jacko grew more and more irritated. He had inherited the crew from Whalen Mannheim, and it showed. When he pulled, they pushed, and even if they had wanted to obey, there was no common language between them. Time seemed to stretch on set as scenes were delayed, shot poorly or replaced completely.

Tara was delighted by my boldness, even if it shocked her sometimes.

“I never made it with a monster before,” she said one day, keeping lookout while I rearranged the fishnet clotted with shells and rubber seaweed that had been draped so carefully before we had gotten to it. We had found twenty minutes in a crevice between large rolls of canvas. It wasn’t a great deal of room, but it was enough for us.

“Good, isn’t it?” I asked, giving her a kiss.

I had thought that we were done, but the kiss stretched until it became two kisses and then three. She planted her hands on the wall over my head to keep from disheveling my costume further, but I had no problem with twisting my hands in her jacket and pulling hard.

“Moore isn’t back here, Jacko,” Emmaline said calmly.

The words made us freeze. They had come from too close by, far too close, and Tara pushed away from me, her face panicked and guilty. Mine probably wasn’t any better.

“I saw her talking with the lighting guys though,” she continued. “Maybe try over there?”