The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,424

to tell him about the door being carved on the tomb in the cemetery but she was so tired.

They walked on slowly together, winding over to Philip Street and then up to Prytania and over to Jackson Avenue. They passed lovely houses in the dark; they passed garden walls. Then down to St. Charles they walked, past the shut-up stores and bars, and past the big apartment houses, and towards the hotel, only an occasional car slipping by, and the streetcar appearing once with a great iron clatter as it rounded the bend, and then roared out of sight, its empty windows full of butter yellow light.

In the shower, they made love, kissing and touching each other hastily and clumsily, the feel of the leather gloves exciting Rowan almost madly when they touched her naked breasts and went down between her legs. The house was gone now; so was the old woman; and the poor sad beautiful Deirdre. Just Michael, just this hard chest of which she’d been dreaming, and his thick cock in her hands, rising out of its nest of dark glossy curling hair.

Years ago some idiot friend had told her over coffee on the campus that women didn’t find men’s bodies beautiful, that it was what men did that mattered. Well, she had always loved men for both what they did, and their bodies. She loved this body, loved its hardness and its tiny silky soft nipples, and the hard belly, and this cock, which she took into her mouth. She loved the feel of these strong thighs under her fingers, the soft hair in the curve of this backside. Silky and hard, that’s what men were.

She ran her hands down Michael’s legs, scratching the backs of his knees, and squeezing the muscles of his calves. So strong. She shoved him back against the tile, sucking in longer more delicious strokes, her hands up to cup his balls, and lift them and bind them against the base of the cock.

Gently, he tried to lift her. But she wanted him to spill in her mouth. She brought his hips more tightly against her. She wouldn’t let him go, and then he spilled over, and the moan was as good as everything else.

Later when they climbed into the bed, warm and dry, with the air-conditioning blowing softly, Michael stripped off the gloves and they began again. “I can’t stop touching you,” he said. “I can’t stand it, and I want to ask you what it was like when that thing happened, but I know I shouldn’t ask you that, and you know, it’s like I’ve seen the face of the man who touched you … ”

She lay back on the pillow, looking at him in the dark, loving the delicious crush of his weight against her, and his hands almost pulling her hair. She made a fist of her right hand and rubbed her knuckles along the dark shadowy stubble on his chin.

“It was like doing it yourself,” she said softly, reaching up and catching his left hand and bringing it down so that she could kiss the palm of it. He stiffened, his cock poking against her thigh. “It wasn’t the thunder and crackle of another person. It wasn’t living cells against living cells.”

“Hmmmm, I love these living cells,” he purred in her ear, kissing her roughly. He mauled her with his kisses, her mouth coming back at him as disrespectful and hungry and demanding as his own.

When she awoke it was four o’clock. Time to go to the hospital. No. Michael was deep asleep. He didn’t feel the very gentle kiss she laid on his cheek. She put on the heavy white terry-cloth robe she found hanging in the closet and went silently out into the living room of the suite. The only light came from the avenue.

Deserted down there. Quiet as a stage set. She loved early morning streets when they were like that, when you felt you could go down and dance on them if you wanted as if they were stages, because their white lines and signal lights meant nothing.

She felt clearheaded and all right, and safe here. The house was waiting, but the house had waited for a long time.

The switchboard told her there was no coffee yet. But there was a message for her and for Mr. Curry, from a Mr. Lightner, that he would return to the hotel later that day and could be reached this morning at the retreat house.