Vignette: "-all my dreams, torn asunder"
[Friday, February 3, 2006:]
She has been brought to climax twice by hands and mouth, and now reclines against the pillows at the head of the bed, working on a crossword puzzle with soft graphite scratches in the lamplight. He lies head to feet beside her, propped on an elbow in the smoothed burgundy duvet, and with a bright yellow feather traces the contours of toes, arch, and ankle.
She isn't ticklish. She keeps writing in the dimestore booklet resting against the thigh of the leg she has tucked up for her own use, leaving the other one to him.
He manages to wrap the feather around and through her toes, and draw it out slowly. Its ribs shiver and stutter in the unsheathing, breaking apart and then reforming into the flexible whole.
She erases an answer and, frowning, puffs and then wipes away the detritus from page and belly's rumpled folds.
The central heating purrs to life. After a minute, warm air washes through the room. It spreads the scents of sweat, musk, and silk in concentric ripples, like the itchy ruffles it leaves on his skin. Irritably he shifts his weight on his elbow, but doesn't scratch. It's a ghost sensation; it isn't real, and if he doesn't focus on it, it will vanish. He focuses, instead, on bending the feather gently against and along the high arch of her foot, and watches those ripples, the plumage of unnoticed toy.
He has not seen her since the night it happened, and her kiss when she greeted him at the door of her apartment tonight was cool and brief. He accepted it as the voiceless reproach she intended. Dinner was quiet, silverware chiming against china and the inconsequential talk of the day. Brad and Angelina, Oprah and James Frey - she has a weakness for gossip, be it in the club or the tabloids, and in any event, they never discuss business, his or hers, chiefly because she has none of her own nor wants any.
He brings the feather down the inside of her foot and tickles the bony knob of ankle. Her toes flex, then curl. A little smile is dimpling a corner of her mouth, but her eyes stay on the crossword puzzle, into which she pencils a horizontal answer. He imagines he can smell the lead and the wood from there, above the dense sandalwood of her own scent.
He knows her only through his senses. He has had time to learn, over long nights and short since Christmas, when they have explored each other's reactions with expert patience. He knows the apricot tartness of her mouth and the jasmine fineness of her hair. He knows the mole high on her left shoulder blade, a brown giant in the constellations of freckles that decorate her milky back. They thicken galactically down her spine to the shallow saddle above her hips, with a spur capping her right buttock. He has used a flechette, sharp steel cousin to the feather, for connecting the mahogany stars into new patterns. He has licked clean the delicate slices, and then rubbed heated balm into them, while she shuddered and moaned and then rolled over to take him inside her on guttural triumph's crest. He knows the tensile strength of her wrists in his hands, the way her neck's tendons stand out in aching relief, and how her deep, secret muscles clench and flow with tidal insistence, with lunar inevitability. He knows the sound of her fulfillment. He knows the sound of his.
They don't talk much.
The feather wraps around her Achilles tendon and measures its length to her calf. The tip brushes inside her knee, and he concentrates on wiggling it just so until her skin twitches there, like a horse trying to rid its hide of a fly. Her pencil pauses - her shoulders twist into the pillows - she writes a new answer down the puzzle's coarse paper.
He smiles.
He has not taken pleasure in sex for its own sake in years. He has not abandoned himself to the totality of mindless experience, in fact, since college, when he had the luxury of profligate foolishness. Now, he finds satisfaction instead in manipulation, control, or the simple need for release: the little death of orgasm, in the warm, wet tomb of a woman's body. His lust is pragmatic; its application, engineered for maximum gain from minimum expenditure.
After dinner tonight, he took off her clothes in this room, and then his, and then laid her on this bed, on this silken coverlet, and pushed her to the brink and then over it - again, and again - with only the deft strength of fingers and the sinewy heat of tongue. He can still taste her: pungency like a salty-sweet pebble smooth against the roof of his mouth.
Setting the feather on the bed behind him, he kisses her shin. It's smooth and faintly anbaric with lotion. He likes the feel of the bone so close to the surface, lacking the protection of muscle or fat. He presses his teeth against it, bone to bone, and remembers the coppery richness of blood coating his tongue, his palate, the back of his throat, and her greediness devouring him in the drowning dark.
The hot air stops circulating around them. Gooseflesh sweeps belatedly up his back and wings across his shoulders. He shivers them. He bends over to kiss her leg again, from behind a disturbed curtain of hair that serpentines sable on cooling milk.
She makes a small noise in her throat. The puzzle book's pages rustle on their way to the floor. He can feel her eyes on his throat like invisible fingerprints, and he swallows under them.
She is bored. She is always bored. He has known that about her since they met in London several years ago, when he was visiting the club there on his own business that happened to coincide with a charity function honored to have her as its hostess. She was his, too, for those few days: dinners, theatres, beds. She has been in New York for three years now, on and off - not because of him and not because of her familial duties to the ancient mercantile firm that she stands to inherit someday. He doesn't know, actually, why she is in the city. He doesn't care.
There was the Christmas party at his club. There was the night together, and then many more since then, delving into dark joys that brilliantly shadowed the memories of the first time they met. And now she is bored, still she is bored, is languid and arch, jaded by a life that has brought her nothing but unearned wealth, far more than even she could spend in her futile pursuit of experiences to touch her and pierce that serene ennui the way a flechette's surgical blade pierces the skin of her back, her breasts, her belly.
She is bored, and he is bored, and they have been bored together, and it has been something to do for both of them, the kind of transaction of which her family's company would approve.
He runs his tongue up her shin and then encircles her kneecap, moving his body in a slow turn to follow. His elbows dig into the covers on either side of her leg; his weight bows her foot under his ribcage until he can feel his heartbeat against her tendons and toes. She sighs and slips her fingertips, all she can reach to him, through the crown of his hair. More gooseflesh paints his skin, there where she touches. Gently he bites at her knee, which trembles and stiffens towards rising, then not, quiescent after all.
Excitement trembles inside him, now, for the first time in a long time, amid the cold ashes and the shadows that have bloodied jaws.
He pulls himself further up her leg, and her other one slides down the duvet, along his ribs, the heel bump-bump-bumping like a stick run over fence pickets. He rolls his head down to mouth her inner thigh, which jumps under his lips and tongue's flick. He moves his hands to brace his weight: one beside this leg, one under the other one. His breath cools and evaporates the saliva left on her skin, which jumps again.
He licks at the tendon quivering from groin to knee, and he thinks about ashes and shadows.
About fire and darkness.
Terror and agony.
She makes another noise, and her fingers dig into his scalp. Both hands now, holding his head and guiding it to where she wants it. He rests his cheek against the thigh still half-cocked above the bed and kisses the hollow where femoral blood races to heat the skin above the artery. Her hair, curly and springy, tickles his other cheek. Her sea-musk fills his nostrils, and on his breath's backwash tide, he can taste her again: a memory, many memories, a blurred palimsest of their times together.
She is bored. She is so very bored.
He thinks. He feels. Ashes and shadows.
Anger and despair.
He hitches higher, past the furry mound, and laps long and wet over her stomach's shallow cup. He avoids the stretch marks that web fine traceries from her navel: motherhood's map. Her daughter lives in London, nine years old and dark-haired and hazel-eyed like her mother, but with her father's bland burgher face. He has her picture, and the father's, in a file in his office. He has their entire lives in that file. He requires such information and pays very well for it.
He is careful. He has always been careful, at least in the past decade. Before then, he sometimes let such details slip, once or twice to his detriment. He learned from it, however. He has always been a quick study.
Her hands try to push his head back down. He catches one of them and forces it down and away into the duvet's silken folds that hoard the heat of their bodies. Her pulse thrums between his fingers. He brings his other hand out from under her leg and uses it to pivot his body the rest of the way up and over her. His mouth catches hers and holds it. Lips and tongue work on each other; teeth clash against teeth. They share breath between bumping, caressing noses. Her breasts pillow his heaving chest, and their hips push together in a damp puzzle-piece lock.
Shadows flutter raven wings behind his closed eyelids. He kisses her harder, as if she were holding back the fire from him, behind the mocking blackness in his head, and if only he tried enough, or in the right way, he could recapture it.
He lets her hand go and feels both of them rise now to him, move over him, bring him into better position, closer than ragged breath or lamplit shadow. She crooks an arm over his back. The inside of her wrist catches its cords and condyles against his shoulder blade, like the heel she rests inside the back of his knee. He moves his own hand up into her hair, down her face, around her neck to her shoulder's sweating satin cushion.
Their kiss breaks. He pants into the vulnerable hollow between her collarbones and searches through the ashes for that spark, the fire that eludes him.
Flames.
Torture and torment.
Ashes.
She doesn't notice. Her mouth takes his ear, and her tongue describes the inner arch before delving into the canal. A shiver sluices down his spine. Her arm shifts after it, her hand splayed over short ribs and her thumb resting over his kidney. Her breath ebbs and flows past his ear. Her other hand reaches down to find him, wrap around him, move him into her moist and arching readiness.
Her hand stops.
Cold ashes. Dead passion. And weakness, terrible soft weakness.
He lifts his head and sees the surprise in her eyes. He imagines the evaluation going on behind them and the cool, amused, bored scorn sure to follow. He kisses the words back into her mouth, forcefully, before she can say them. He pushes his tongue against hers and grinds his hipbones into hers, too, trapping her hand against heavy futility and the thunder of his pulse. Her fingers writhe for freedom, but he doesn't let them go, not this time.
His weight pushes her deep into the giving coverlet and the pillows. His fingers wrap around her wrist on the one side and her shoulder on the other. That arm falls from his back and folds up in the heated space between their chests. Her fingernails prick under his collarbone; the heel of her hand shoves into hair and skin and muscle, uselessly.
The sounds she's making now are still urgent, but no longer of anticipation or passion. He thinks they might help. They don't. He is still cold inside the hot shell of his flesh, his weak and worthless flesh, and darkness blinds him even when he opens his eyes and stares into hers.
Angry hazel, bound by glistening white and lush dark lashes, unfocused through sticky proximity. Her hand thumps his chest again, and he growls his irritation against her mouth. He forces her arm down by her side, like the other one, and lets his size hold her in place. He is much larger, heavier, stronger than she is, but he has not used it against her before now.
Maybe it will help.
He strains his shoulders, spine, hips over and against and into her. Her foot bangs into his leg. Her throat throbs with unformed words blocked by his mouth still fastened on her. He tries. He reaches. He works.
Maybe it won't.
Tears spark behind his eyes. His kisses thrust harder and deeper, but he remains unaroused, limp and lost.
She gives an inarticulate cry and bucks her trapped body. He rides it out. She thrashes her head side to side, finally freeing herself that much from his hold. Then she gasps something and sinks her teeth deep into his lower lip.
His head jerks up, and he tastes blood, his own.
They stare at each other.
He slaps her.
She spits and claws at him, trying to push him off, so he hits her again, flat across her flushed cheek. Even that doesn't help. He feels the influx of energy, added to the previous low simmer from earlier in the evening, and he knows that it is snaking pain relief and aphrodisiacs through the animal depths of his brain. He can't use them, however. He can't do anything. Anything at all.
He tries to kiss her again, but she's found leverage for the arm he had to free for his blows. She uses it in a wrench that shoves her up the pillows, mashing them into the headboard. Before he can scramble to recover his advantage, she has a leg up, too, that kicks into his gut, knee up into his solar plexus. He loses his breath on a huff to half-sitting on her, away from her.
They stare at each other again. Her face is red from exertion and his hand. Her eyes are wet and terrified. He can see nascent bruises on her cheekbone and her shoulder.
A faint stir of excitement, too late.
"Leave," she says hoarsely.
After a moment, he climbs off her and the bed. His clothes are on one of the armchairs by the window. He pulls on briefs and slacks, buttons his shirt over the belt he fumbles to close beneath the raw silk's untucked drape, and sits down to thrust his feet into socks and shoes.
She watches him. She never looks away. She has a hand up around her throat. The fingers cage her chin and rest shaking, manicured and polished tips on her lips.
He stands up, stamping briefly into one shoe's recalcitrant heel. He looks at her.
They stare at each other.
He lets himself out and drives himself home.
[Vignette written for X-Men MUCK.]
She has been brought to climax twice by hands and mouth, and now reclines against the pillows at the head of the bed, working on a crossword puzzle with soft graphite scratches in the lamplight. He lies head to feet beside her, propped on an elbow in the smoothed burgundy duvet, and with a bright yellow feather traces the contours of toes, arch, and ankle.
She isn't ticklish. She keeps writing in the dimestore booklet resting against the thigh of the leg she has tucked up for her own use, leaving the other one to him.
He manages to wrap the feather around and through her toes, and draw it out slowly. Its ribs shiver and stutter in the unsheathing, breaking apart and then reforming into the flexible whole.
She erases an answer and, frowning, puffs and then wipes away the detritus from page and belly's rumpled folds.
The central heating purrs to life. After a minute, warm air washes through the room. It spreads the scents of sweat, musk, and silk in concentric ripples, like the itchy ruffles it leaves on his skin. Irritably he shifts his weight on his elbow, but doesn't scratch. It's a ghost sensation; it isn't real, and if he doesn't focus on it, it will vanish. He focuses, instead, on bending the feather gently against and along the high arch of her foot, and watches those ripples, the plumage of unnoticed toy.
He has not seen her since the night it happened, and her kiss when she greeted him at the door of her apartment tonight was cool and brief. He accepted it as the voiceless reproach she intended. Dinner was quiet, silverware chiming against china and the inconsequential talk of the day. Brad and Angelina, Oprah and James Frey - she has a weakness for gossip, be it in the club or the tabloids, and in any event, they never discuss business, his or hers, chiefly because she has none of her own nor wants any.
He brings the feather down the inside of her foot and tickles the bony knob of ankle. Her toes flex, then curl. A little smile is dimpling a corner of her mouth, but her eyes stay on the crossword puzzle, into which she pencils a horizontal answer. He imagines he can smell the lead and the wood from there, above the dense sandalwood of her own scent.
He knows her only through his senses. He has had time to learn, over long nights and short since Christmas, when they have explored each other's reactions with expert patience. He knows the apricot tartness of her mouth and the jasmine fineness of her hair. He knows the mole high on her left shoulder blade, a brown giant in the constellations of freckles that decorate her milky back. They thicken galactically down her spine to the shallow saddle above her hips, with a spur capping her right buttock. He has used a flechette, sharp steel cousin to the feather, for connecting the mahogany stars into new patterns. He has licked clean the delicate slices, and then rubbed heated balm into them, while she shuddered and moaned and then rolled over to take him inside her on guttural triumph's crest. He knows the tensile strength of her wrists in his hands, the way her neck's tendons stand out in aching relief, and how her deep, secret muscles clench and flow with tidal insistence, with lunar inevitability. He knows the sound of her fulfillment. He knows the sound of his.
They don't talk much.
The feather wraps around her Achilles tendon and measures its length to her calf. The tip brushes inside her knee, and he concentrates on wiggling it just so until her skin twitches there, like a horse trying to rid its hide of a fly. Her pencil pauses - her shoulders twist into the pillows - she writes a new answer down the puzzle's coarse paper.
He smiles.
He has not taken pleasure in sex for its own sake in years. He has not abandoned himself to the totality of mindless experience, in fact, since college, when he had the luxury of profligate foolishness. Now, he finds satisfaction instead in manipulation, control, or the simple need for release: the little death of orgasm, in the warm, wet tomb of a woman's body. His lust is pragmatic; its application, engineered for maximum gain from minimum expenditure.
After dinner tonight, he took off her clothes in this room, and then his, and then laid her on this bed, on this silken coverlet, and pushed her to the brink and then over it - again, and again - with only the deft strength of fingers and the sinewy heat of tongue. He can still taste her: pungency like a salty-sweet pebble smooth against the roof of his mouth.
Setting the feather on the bed behind him, he kisses her shin. It's smooth and faintly anbaric with lotion. He likes the feel of the bone so close to the surface, lacking the protection of muscle or fat. He presses his teeth against it, bone to bone, and remembers the coppery richness of blood coating his tongue, his palate, the back of his throat, and her greediness devouring him in the drowning dark.
The hot air stops circulating around them. Gooseflesh sweeps belatedly up his back and wings across his shoulders. He shivers them. He bends over to kiss her leg again, from behind a disturbed curtain of hair that serpentines sable on cooling milk.
She makes a small noise in her throat. The puzzle book's pages rustle on their way to the floor. He can feel her eyes on his throat like invisible fingerprints, and he swallows under them.
She is bored. She is always bored. He has known that about her since they met in London several years ago, when he was visiting the club there on his own business that happened to coincide with a charity function honored to have her as its hostess. She was his, too, for those few days: dinners, theatres, beds. She has been in New York for three years now, on and off - not because of him and not because of her familial duties to the ancient mercantile firm that she stands to inherit someday. He doesn't know, actually, why she is in the city. He doesn't care.
There was the Christmas party at his club. There was the night together, and then many more since then, delving into dark joys that brilliantly shadowed the memories of the first time they met. And now she is bored, still she is bored, is languid and arch, jaded by a life that has brought her nothing but unearned wealth, far more than even she could spend in her futile pursuit of experiences to touch her and pierce that serene ennui the way a flechette's surgical blade pierces the skin of her back, her breasts, her belly.
She is bored, and he is bored, and they have been bored together, and it has been something to do for both of them, the kind of transaction of which her family's company would approve.
He runs his tongue up her shin and then encircles her kneecap, moving his body in a slow turn to follow. His elbows dig into the covers on either side of her leg; his weight bows her foot under his ribcage until he can feel his heartbeat against her tendons and toes. She sighs and slips her fingertips, all she can reach to him, through the crown of his hair. More gooseflesh paints his skin, there where she touches. Gently he bites at her knee, which trembles and stiffens towards rising, then not, quiescent after all.
Excitement trembles inside him, now, for the first time in a long time, amid the cold ashes and the shadows that have bloodied jaws.
He pulls himself further up her leg, and her other one slides down the duvet, along his ribs, the heel bump-bump-bumping like a stick run over fence pickets. He rolls his head down to mouth her inner thigh, which jumps under his lips and tongue's flick. He moves his hands to brace his weight: one beside this leg, one under the other one. His breath cools and evaporates the saliva left on her skin, which jumps again.
He licks at the tendon quivering from groin to knee, and he thinks about ashes and shadows.
About fire and darkness.
Terror and agony.
She makes another noise, and her fingers dig into his scalp. Both hands now, holding his head and guiding it to where she wants it. He rests his cheek against the thigh still half-cocked above the bed and kisses the hollow where femoral blood races to heat the skin above the artery. Her hair, curly and springy, tickles his other cheek. Her sea-musk fills his nostrils, and on his breath's backwash tide, he can taste her again: a memory, many memories, a blurred palimsest of their times together.
She is bored. She is so very bored.
He thinks. He feels. Ashes and shadows.
Anger and despair.
He hitches higher, past the furry mound, and laps long and wet over her stomach's shallow cup. He avoids the stretch marks that web fine traceries from her navel: motherhood's map. Her daughter lives in London, nine years old and dark-haired and hazel-eyed like her mother, but with her father's bland burgher face. He has her picture, and the father's, in a file in his office. He has their entire lives in that file. He requires such information and pays very well for it.
He is careful. He has always been careful, at least in the past decade. Before then, he sometimes let such details slip, once or twice to his detriment. He learned from it, however. He has always been a quick study.
Her hands try to push his head back down. He catches one of them and forces it down and away into the duvet's silken folds that hoard the heat of their bodies. Her pulse thrums between his fingers. He brings his other hand out from under her leg and uses it to pivot his body the rest of the way up and over her. His mouth catches hers and holds it. Lips and tongue work on each other; teeth clash against teeth. They share breath between bumping, caressing noses. Her breasts pillow his heaving chest, and their hips push together in a damp puzzle-piece lock.
Shadows flutter raven wings behind his closed eyelids. He kisses her harder, as if she were holding back the fire from him, behind the mocking blackness in his head, and if only he tried enough, or in the right way, he could recapture it.
He lets her hand go and feels both of them rise now to him, move over him, bring him into better position, closer than ragged breath or lamplit shadow. She crooks an arm over his back. The inside of her wrist catches its cords and condyles against his shoulder blade, like the heel she rests inside the back of his knee. He moves his own hand up into her hair, down her face, around her neck to her shoulder's sweating satin cushion.
Their kiss breaks. He pants into the vulnerable hollow between her collarbones and searches through the ashes for that spark, the fire that eludes him.
Flames.
Torture and torment.
Ashes.
She doesn't notice. Her mouth takes his ear, and her tongue describes the inner arch before delving into the canal. A shiver sluices down his spine. Her arm shifts after it, her hand splayed over short ribs and her thumb resting over his kidney. Her breath ebbs and flows past his ear. Her other hand reaches down to find him, wrap around him, move him into her moist and arching readiness.
Her hand stops.
Cold ashes. Dead passion. And weakness, terrible soft weakness.
He lifts his head and sees the surprise in her eyes. He imagines the evaluation going on behind them and the cool, amused, bored scorn sure to follow. He kisses the words back into her mouth, forcefully, before she can say them. He pushes his tongue against hers and grinds his hipbones into hers, too, trapping her hand against heavy futility and the thunder of his pulse. Her fingers writhe for freedom, but he doesn't let them go, not this time.
His weight pushes her deep into the giving coverlet and the pillows. His fingers wrap around her wrist on the one side and her shoulder on the other. That arm falls from his back and folds up in the heated space between their chests. Her fingernails prick under his collarbone; the heel of her hand shoves into hair and skin and muscle, uselessly.
The sounds she's making now are still urgent, but no longer of anticipation or passion. He thinks they might help. They don't. He is still cold inside the hot shell of his flesh, his weak and worthless flesh, and darkness blinds him even when he opens his eyes and stares into hers.
Angry hazel, bound by glistening white and lush dark lashes, unfocused through sticky proximity. Her hand thumps his chest again, and he growls his irritation against her mouth. He forces her arm down by her side, like the other one, and lets his size hold her in place. He is much larger, heavier, stronger than she is, but he has not used it against her before now.
Maybe it will help.
He strains his shoulders, spine, hips over and against and into her. Her foot bangs into his leg. Her throat throbs with unformed words blocked by his mouth still fastened on her. He tries. He reaches. He works.
Maybe it won't.
Tears spark behind his eyes. His kisses thrust harder and deeper, but he remains unaroused, limp and lost.
She gives an inarticulate cry and bucks her trapped body. He rides it out. She thrashes her head side to side, finally freeing herself that much from his hold. Then she gasps something and sinks her teeth deep into his lower lip.
His head jerks up, and he tastes blood, his own.
They stare at each other.
He slaps her.
She spits and claws at him, trying to push him off, so he hits her again, flat across her flushed cheek. Even that doesn't help. He feels the influx of energy, added to the previous low simmer from earlier in the evening, and he knows that it is snaking pain relief and aphrodisiacs through the animal depths of his brain. He can't use them, however. He can't do anything. Anything at all.
He tries to kiss her again, but she's found leverage for the arm he had to free for his blows. She uses it in a wrench that shoves her up the pillows, mashing them into the headboard. Before he can scramble to recover his advantage, she has a leg up, too, that kicks into his gut, knee up into his solar plexus. He loses his breath on a huff to half-sitting on her, away from her.
They stare at each other again. Her face is red from exertion and his hand. Her eyes are wet and terrified. He can see nascent bruises on her cheekbone and her shoulder.
A faint stir of excitement, too late.
"Leave," she says hoarsely.
After a moment, he climbs off her and the bed. His clothes are on one of the armchairs by the window. He pulls on briefs and slacks, buttons his shirt over the belt he fumbles to close beneath the raw silk's untucked drape, and sits down to thrust his feet into socks and shoes.
She watches him. She never looks away. She has a hand up around her throat. The fingers cage her chin and rest shaking, manicured and polished tips on her lips.
He stands up, stamping briefly into one shoe's recalcitrant heel. He looks at her.
They stare at each other.
He lets himself out and drives himself home.
[Vignette written for X-Men MUCK.]