her left breast like a constellation I’d never learned the name of. I wanted to taste every inch of her. “You are … you are so fucking beautiful.”
She smiled again, each time stronger than the last, and began unbuttoning my shirt with slender, dextrous fingers. And she breathed words against my lips, strange words about April and lilacs and rain on a dead land.
I stopped thinking. With teamwork inspired by mutual urgency, we stripped each other naked and fell on the bed in a mess of touching and testing and seeking and wanting. It was strange having to re-learn what it was like to be with a person who didn’t have a wellspring of supernatural power backing them up. You couldn’t push as hard, you had to react more, feel her responses more carefully. And oh did she respond. There were a whole bunch of times I thought I’d honestly broken the lady, only to have her rise up and pull me back to her. She fucked with a sincere, mortal yearning that I couldn’t help but be drawn to.
It took a while, but eventually exhaustion overcame enthusiasm and she lay on her back, panting, one arm crooked over her eyes as if she was trying to dab lying down.
“That was…” she began.
“I hope it was what you…” I tried.
“Uh-huh. I still … I’m not normally that much of a screamer.”
I reached out to stroke her stomach, and she shifted almost self-consciously. “I can’t say I minded.”
“I feel—fuck. That was—I don’t even.”
On the one hand, this was all very flattering. On the other, I wasn’t used to getting a reaction quite this intense. I like to think I’m pretty good in bed, but I don’t normally literally blow people’s minds.
“I feel like a virgin sacrifice to a pagan goddess.” She turned to look at me. There were almost tears in her eyes. “I—I still can’t believe you’re real.”
I looked at her—all the naked beautiful remarkable humanity of her. That was going to be the problem, wasn’t it? I wasn’t real, and she was. I could touch ordinary, every now and then, but I was a half-faery who’d been to hell, sworn fealty to an otherworldly queen, and been the lover of the vampire prince of pleasure. I could visit this world but I couldn’t live in it. I didn’t know what to say.
She ran her hands over my face, down my neck, across my breasts and my body. “It’s like—God it’s like I never want to stop touching you.” She laughed. “Christ on a bike, I’ve just fucked Artemis.”
And I’ve just fucked an estate agent from Brentwood. And it felt so good, and so right, and so perfect and so … small. Suddenly I was convinced I should be anywhere else but should be and was going to be were different things. Shit I wished I wasn’t so terrified of making decisions. “Should I …? How do you …? I can go.”
Her hand snapped back. “Do you want to?”
If you knew me, lady, you’d know I have no idea what I want. “No. It’s—it seems like you might want to keep this in the fantasy space. A get up tomorrow, go to work like it never happened deal.”
She flipped onto her back and covered her face with her hands, emitting a sound that was a mixture between a sigh and a groan. “Fuuuuuuuck. I fucking fucked that up, didn’t I. Can you please forget I called you a goddess? It was stupid, and cheesy, and way too intense.”
“It’s cool.” I wished I could have thought of something more eloquent than it’s cool. “It was the sex talking. Believe me, I’ve been there.”
“Then will you stay? I’d like to wake up with you. I’d like to have some proof this wasn’t a dream.”
Which was ironic in a way. Most days I would have been glad of proof that it was. “Of course. And thank you. For your help with the case and for”—I made an inarticulate gesture that strove to encompass her, dinner, the bed, and everything else that had happened that evening—“for all of it.” I kissed her again, and she moved against me like—like nothing, like a woman in a bed kissing somebody she wanted badly to be kissed by. “Besides,” I added when we stopped for breath, “you still owe me that poem.”
She pulled away and retrieved her glasses from where they’d fallen during the—y’know—fucking and put them back on. Then she sat with her bare back against