sex, parting her thighs.
“Come in to me, hard, make yourself a man for me, a hard man!”
The mouths drew harder on her nipples, the tongues lapping at her breasts, her belly, the fingers pulling at her backside and scratching at her thighs. “The cock,” she whispered, and then she felt it, enormous and hard, driving into her. “Yes, do it, tear me, do it! Override me, do it!” Her senses were flooded with the smell of clean, hard flesh and clean hair, as the weight bore down on her and the cock slammed into her, yes, harder, make it rape. Glimpse of a face, dark green eyes, lips. And then a blur as the lips opened her lips.
Her body was pinned to the carpet, and the cock burned her as it drove inside her, scraping her clitoris, plunging deeper into her vagina. I can’t stand it, I can’t bear it. Split me apart, yes. Laid waste. The orgasm flooded through her, her mind blank except for the raging flow of colors like waves as the rollicking sensation washed up through her belly, and her breast and her face, and down through her thighs, stiffening her calves, and through the muscles of her feet. She heard her own cries, but they were far away, unimportant, flowing out of her mouth in a divine release, her body pumping and helpless and stripped of will and mind.
Again and again, it exploded in her, scalding her. Over and over, until all time, all guilt, all thought was burnt away.
Morning. Was there a baby crying? No. Only the phone ringing. Unimportant.
She lay in the bed, beneath the covers, naked. The sun was streaming in the windows on the front of the house. The memory of it came back to her, and a hurtful throbbing started in her. The phone, or was it a baby crying? A baby somewhere far off in the house. Half in dream she saw its little limbs working, bent knees, chubby little feet.
“My darling,” he whispered.
“Lasher,” she answered.
The sound of the crying had died away. Her eyes closed on the vision of the shining windowpanes and the tangle of the oak limbs over the sky.
When she opened them again, she stared up into his green eyes, into his dark face, exquisitely formed. She touched the silk of his lip with her finger, all his hard weight pressed down on her, his cock between her legs.
“God, yes, God, you are so strong.”
“With you, my beauty.” The lips revealed the barest glint of white teeth as the words were formed. “With you, my divine one.”
Then came the blast of heat, the hot wind blowing her hair back, and the whirlwind scorching her.
And in the clean silence of the morning, in the light of the sun pouring through the glass, it was happening all over again.
At noon, she sat outside by the pool. Steam was rising from the water into the cold sunlight. Time to turn off the heater. Winter was truly here.
But she was warm in her wool dress. She was brushing her hair.
She felt him near her; and she narrowed her eyes. Yes, she could see the disturbance in the air again, very clearly actually, as he surrounded her like a veil being slowly wound around her shoulders and arms.
“Get away from me,” she whispered. The invisible substance clung to her. She sat upright, and hissed the words at it this time. “Away, I told you!”
It was the shimmer from a fire in sunlight, what she saw. And then the chill afterwards as the air regained its normal density, as the subtle fragrances of the garden returned.
“I’ll tell you when you may come,” she said. “I will not be at the mercy of your whims or your will.”
“As you wish, Rowan.” It was that interior voice she’d heard once before in Destin, the voice that sounded like it was inside her head.
“You see and hear everything, don’t you?” she asked.
“Even your thoughts.”
She smiled, but it was a brittle, fierce smile. She pulled the long loose hairs out of her hairbrush. “And what am I thinking?” she asked.
“That you want me to touch you again, that you want me to surround you with illusions. That you would like to know what it is to be a man, and for me to take you as I would a man.”
The blood rose to her cheeks. She matted up the little bit of blond hair from the brush and dropped it into the ferny garden beside