“I wanted you, too, Alex, and I want you inside me now, please.”
He laughed and took me in his arms. “I can’t deny a damsel her desire, but one favor deserves another. Next time you’ll pose for me. You show me all your secrets, and I’ll show you how beautiful you are in my eyes.”
Even the mere thought of baring myself to him like that made my cunt turn to honey.
I clutched at his belt desperately. Still laughing, he struggled out of his jeans and briefs, his stiff rod twitching and eager as I was.
After hours of visual foreplay, I was so horny, I swung a leg over Alex’s hips and immediately sank down onto his cock. He let out a deep “Ahh,” and I tightened my pussy around him, squeezing and massaging the shaft, making the pleasure last as long as I could. I did feel everything more with Alex, my senses heightened to the point that I was almost embarrassed at the speed and intensity of my orgasms.
I nudged my left thigh into his, our signal to roll, a two-backed beast, into the center of the bed. Alex’s body enveloped mine, and he began to thrust into me slow and deep. His lips at my breast sent pulses of pleasure all the way down to my pussy. My inner muscles continued to milk him, and I felt my climax
begin to bloom, a fluttering tickle deep in my flesh.
How could I capture this feeling and make it last forever?
I remembered, in a sudden flash, how I’d once made love to ghosts in this bed. Now the mattress was smooth and flat beneath me. The boxes were gone, the lingerie discarded, the photo albums stored, at my urging, with his other work as lessons of craft and history. The heat and sweat was ours—and very, very real. The throbbing deep in my pussy began to rise, up and up, a fiery flower of pleasure, banishing all thought of the enchantments of the past that brought us here together.
We had our own magic to make.
YOU
Charlotte Stein
I
confess I thought the stories were little more than fairy tales when my sisters first whispered them through the darkness at me.
He has the horns of a beast,
they had said,
and teeth like knives. And if you go to the bridge between the forests at a minute past midnight, he will come to you and grant you a wish.
How childish it had sounded then!
But it does not sound childish now, as the pale moon above seems to dim, and his footsteps ring out slow and heavy on the cobbles—like the sound of my heart. My heart, that cannot bear his heavy, slumberous approach a moment longer.
His footsteps are like the end of the world. They will ring out inside me until the day I die, I know it—and that day comes soon, soon. My sisters were wrong. He does not grant wishes. No monstrous dark shape such as his could ever grant wishes. He comes to you in the night, instead, and steals away your soul.
Or at least I think so until the clouds part around the moon,
and light paints one side of him. And then I’m not quite sure what to believe, because he is neither as monstrous as the stories made out nor as fearsome.
It is true—he does not have the legs of a man. They are the legs of a deer or a goat, I’m certain of it, furred all over and strangely shaped. And these legs end in hooves rather than feet, as though he really is Pan or the Devil or some beast-god, the way everyone claims.
But his horns are not great monstrous things, sprouting from his forehead. They are the smallest nubs, set within the rich tangle of his dark hair. And his eyes are not slits, burning out at you like the deepest fires of hell. Even through the darkness I can see they are blue, a dark, deep blue like stones at the bottom of a lake.
He regards me with them, silently, and I do not fear for my soul. Instead I find myself looking at him, in return—at his mouth like a slash in his face, and his arms so pale and sinewy in the dim light. He looks like a man who spends all of his time running through endless forests, with hounds on his heels and nothing but trees and vales and mossy banks ahead of him.
And then I realize I’ve thought of him as a man rather than the thing he is, and I don’t know what to think of that. I don’t know what to think of it, other than,
He makes it easy.
“Have you come to ask of me, maiden?” he asks, finally, and I know by heart what I am supposed to say in return. I’m supposed to say,
I have come to ask of you, He Who Has No Name.
And yet I do not speak the words. Instead I think of the word he used—
maiden
—and I wonder if he knows. If he has some power that sees inside the hearts of women and understands that they are pure or tainted, good or wicked. Can he see my wickedness clear, when he looks at me? I have never lain with a man,
but there are other ways to do evil. A part of me did not want to come here, after all, and make these wishes for my sisters.
A part of me was afraid and could not be brave for them.
But that part is done with, now. He is not so monstrous that he can frighten me off and force me not to speak.
He is like the forest,
I think instead, like a wild and untamed forest—and I can ask. I put my shoulders back. I steel myself.
“I have come to ask of you, He Who Has No Name.”
He inclines his head the moment I speak, like a nod only not. In truth it seems more like a salute, a sealing of the pact we are about to make. He has done this dance before a thousand times and probably knows what I will say before I say it. When he looks at me with those blue-stone eyes, I feel as though he can see right into my being, through all the places I hide within.
But he still asks it of me.
“Speak your wish, then,” he says, in a voice as clear and cold as a mountain stream. It strips me down to nothing and makes me shiver, but I find the words inside myself anyway. They have been there a long time—ever since I saw Eladria sobbing for want of a husband.
“My sister cries for her true love. She cries day and night, and will not rest. I would ask that you bring this true love to her, oh He Who Has No Name, and end her torment.”
He is silent for a long time after I have spoken, but I cannot tell why. Did the words sound like a lie? Can he see that deeply inside me, to the place where my sister resides? If he can, I am not sure what he might see. Eladria can be fickle, and sometimes I am half-certain her weeping and wailing is not in earnest.
But then, surely he must know. Surely he must understand that as spoiled or false as someone might be, to be without love is still a torment. To have no one to walk beside you, no heart that beats as your own does…
Can he not simply see inside my own heart, and know that this is true?
“Are you sure that this is your wish, maiden?”
Apparently he cannot. He has spent his existence as impassive as stone, a granter of human wishes, an observer of their faults and foibles. But there is no true understanding inside him, I am sure.
“It is,” I say.
Strange, that he looks almost disappointed when I do. However, he still finds it in him to name his price.
“A kiss, then,” he says, and for a moment I am sure I have misheard. Why would a creature such as him want a kiss from the likes of me? I spend my life sewing buttons on shirts and soaping clothes in water. I read books and marvel over all the things I’ve never done in my life.
Only fairies and beautiful damsels and women like my sisters get kisses from beast-gods. Though mostly they seem to despise and hate it when things like that happen to them. They all want princes, handsome princes—and I’m quite sure he thinks the same of me.
He thinks I’m going to refuse, I know it, but the thought only makes my hand steadier. My head clearer.
“Agreed,” I say, and I do as the book told me to. I put out my hand for him to shake, which had seemed like a very poor sort of mystical agreement sealer to me. But he takes the outstretched offering all the same and laces his fingers with mine, and just like that the deed is done.
No lightning strikes. No mist rises. The coldness of his palm thrills through my entire body, and I am certain for a second that I am about to drown in his eyes, but that is all.
It’s quite disappointing, I must confess. I don’t know what I had imagined, but this wasn’t it. And then afterward his stony
touch drops away from me and he just waits, as though I told him a moment earlier that a wagon would be along soon and we should both catch it, if we hoped to be home before morning.
It’s a dull, mealy, mundane sort of moment, made more so by my own littleness. A greater woman would know, I’m sure, what should be done here. She would reach up and offer the price he asked for, rather than just standing here in a cloak too big for her, eyes downcast, everything in her saying
Go on, go on.
Only then I do go on, and it’s all wrong. I know it is before he’s even said a word, because as I reach up on tiptoe toward his strange but beautiful face, he shies away from me. Not enough to be rude—oh dear me no, a godly creature such as him could never be rude—but certainly enough to make it clear.
He does not
really
want me to kiss him. It’s some other kiss he meant, or maybe…yes maybe it’s the kiss of another person he’s after! These devils are all known for making tricky bargains, and what would be trickier than asking me for a kiss
from someone else
?
I think about my still-lovely mother. My other sister, Luvia. In fact, I’m still thinking of both of them when he finally explains, in a voice that stills my blood.
“The kiss I have asked for is not one you can give with your mouth.”
Or maybe it’s the words that still my blood. The ones that tell me I have made a grievous error. Of course the book
told
me that he might change one word for another and mix me all around. But it seems that I did not listen—or at least, I did not listen half so well as I thought I had.
I thought I was clever. But I have to admit I cannot think of a kiss I could give without my mouth. I’m not clever enough for that. And even if I were, I’m not sure I’d ever want to know. A kiss without mouths is undoubtedly something so rude, so
illicit, that no mortal woman should ever be allowed to think about it.
Though somehow it still comes as a surprise, when he says:
“Lift your dress, Ren.”
I consider many things, then. How he knows my name, how I’m supposed to do what he has asked, how a mouthless kiss can happen with me bare below the waist. But none of them help me in the task I now have to perform, not even the slightest bit.
My hands are shaking as I stoop down to grasp the hem of my dress, but I do it anyway. Because I have to—I swore. I shook hands with the Devil, and even if the Devil meant something else entirely by
kiss,
you can’t go back on it.
He might poison my sisters if I go back on it. He might poison me. He might look on me with his stone-eyes now bright with the light of a thousand years and put his hands on my face as though I am suddenly something precious, and say:
“Do not fear me.”
And I wish I didn’t, I do. But the funny thing is, I don’t think this would be half so thrilling if I were not so afraid. I can smell him now like the forest and like something burning, and when he drops to his knees my mind swirls with all the things he might possibly do.
Because of course he said
kiss
. And he said that I might not do it with
my
mouth. But he didn’t say anything about his own, or all the possible places he could press his lips, or how tremulous and on the cusp of something wicked I would feel, the moment I felt him
there
.
I try not to make a sound. The road stretching away on either side of us is silent, but in this moment of bared legs and strange hands on my thighs, it feels as though a million eyes are watching us from the forests.
And it grows steadily stronger when he leans forward quite
suddenly and gives me that kiss he promised.
Of course, I have no idea why I use the word
promise
. He didn’t promise me. I promised him. And yet it swims up inside me anyway, unbidden, as he lays his mouth on the warm, wet split of my sex.
Maybe because it’s like a gift. It shouldn’t feel that way, I know. I should be crying out over my womanly virtue, but instead I cry out in a different way altogether. He’s found some secret heart between my legs, some well of pleasure, and the water from said well flows up and up inside me until it comes right out of my mouth.
And then my whole body sways and I simply have to touch him, I have to—if only to hold on. Though of course once I’ve done it—once I’ve put my hands in his hair to steady myself—I can’t help but marvel over the feel of him.
The tangles are like the roots of a plant, I think. Like grass, so cool and slippery between my fingers. And when he kisses me more deeply—more deeply than he should be doing, oh far more deeply—I dare to do more.
I feel out the little rough humps of his horns, to remind myself of what he is.
And then he kisses me harder, wetter, oh god he uses his
tongue
, and I don’t pull away. Lord forgive me, I don’t. I know I should, I know I should think of the word
maiden
and not make a slattern of myself, but I can’t help it.
He spoke so ill of this, when he called it a kiss. I’ve seen kisses—they are not like thing he is giving me. I’m swooning—though I keep my footing—and when his narrow devil’s tongue slides through my slit I feel every fold and whorl he uncovers. I feel all the things I didn’t even know existed, including a sweet little swollen spot right where everything begins or ends.
I’ve never known this. I didn’t understand that people could
do things like this—though likely as not
people
don’t. It’s just him, it’s just creatures
like
him, and now I’m going to hell right along with all of them because he’s licking that little stiff point and
oh
it feels so good.