Siren (14 page)

Inside the restaurant, they sat in warm lighting, with a revolving team of waitresses willing to cater to their every whim.

“I love this place,” Sarah said for the fifth time that day.

“I’m with you,” Evan said, reaching his hand out to take hers. “And I love you.”

She put her hand on his, resting against the table. “I love you too, Evan. I know I haven’t been any good these past few months. Thanks for sticking with me through all of this.”

A chill froze Evan’s heart as he thought about just
how
he’d been sticking with his wife lately. He wasn’t proud of what he’d done with Ligeia. And yet, as he sat there looking at the faint crow’s-feet playing into the skin beside his wife’s eyes, and took in the love that stared back at him, colored by a constant sadness, he knew that he wouldn’t take it back if he could. He loved Sarah. He owed her almost every happiness in life that he could remember. But right now, he was itching to get back in the car and drive an hour north to Delilah, so that he could get out on the beach at nightfall. Because there was another woman who was giving him some happiness that Sarah, for all her well-meaning heart, could never give.

But that wasn’t going to happen. Instead, the dark slowly swallowed everything around the Beach Chalet as they sat at a table by the window and looked out on the ocean.

After dinner, Sarah pulled him down the wooden steps and onto the sand. “Let’s take a walk,” she suggested.

“Haven’t we done enough of that today?”

“Not on a beach,” she reminded.

They slipped off their shoes and walked barefoot in the sand down to the tide line. There the sand turned hard and walkable thanks to being saturated by the occasional wave that pushed up high onto the beach.

“You can see my footprints in the sand,” Sarah enthused.

“And you can see mine,” Evan said, grinding his heels in to make the imprints extra large. “We won’t be famous,” he said, “but at least someone will know we’ve been here.”

“I don’t care if
I
was here,” Sarah said, her voice colored by sadness. “I just wish that Josh still
was
here. He deserves to be here. He should be with us.”

Evan felt his throat fill with emotion, and his voice cracked when he first opened his mouth to answer. “I know,” he said. “I want that more than anything too. But I made sure that couldn’t happen.”

A silence took over the moment. They had managed to avoid talking about Josh for most of the past six months, and whenever one of them brought it up, the conversation stalled. They had cried together in the beginning, before the guilt had overtaken Evan, and he couldn’t stand to talk about it anymore. It was all his fault, after all, he thought every time his son’s name came up between them. And she must hate him for that.

“Evan, don’t think that way,” she said. “It was an accident. I know that.”

He couldn’t answer her. After a few awkward moments, they turned and returned in silence to the deck of the chalet.

After leaving the beach, they took a cab to the hotel, and Sarah undressed Evan at the foot of the bed, her brown eyes sparkling in the faint light that streamed in
the windows from the city outside. “I love you,” she whispered, and leaned in to kiss him.

In his heart, Evan felt a dagger stab and twist.

“I love you too,” he said.

In moments, he didn’t feel quite so much like a hypocrite, as his wife moaned her appreciation, and his own excitement peaked.

Afterward, they lay together in bed, arms entwined, and Sarah cried, just a little while. “Sometimes it’s hard,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “It’s like he’s with me every day, but every time I go to say something to him…I know he’s gone.”

Her arms gripped him tighter, and her eyes closed. “It’s not right that we’re still here, and he’s not,” she whispered.

Unbidden in his mind, Evan pictured himself naked on the sand, with Ligeia’s breasts rolling and moving provocatively in the air just tantalizing inches above his mouth. He struggled to blink away the obscenity.

“No,” he said. “No, it’s not right. Not right at all.”

“You think you’re someone?” Ralph asked, the auto shop owner’s belly jiggling like a damn tidal wave beneath his stained red shirt. “You haven’t been someone since the day you set foot in here and said you needed a job. That was the day you gave up
being
someone. Now? You’re mine, and as my own personal grease monkey, I’d like to see you get some
work
done.”

Ralph pointed across the garage at the car raised up on a hydraulic lift so that a mechanic could get beneath it easily. “Like…maybe…have that Corvette ready to roll by tomorrow at seven
A.M.
? And don’t mouth no bullshit about overtime to me…you’ve been taking long enough to fix shit as it is. You don’t go home tonight until that car is purring like a damn cougar, and I mean the female kind. I want that car to sound like she’s in heat when she pulls out of this garage.”

Terry didn’t know what to say. Actually, he did know what to say, but he also knew he couldn’t say it. Because saying “take your donkey dong and stick it up some other horse’s ass” would no doubt get him fired. Fast, and final. And let’s face it, Terry needed the job. He didn’t change spark plugs for kicks; he was trying to support his momma and younger brother Jimmy here. He kept his mouth shut through Ralph’s little hissy fit, and when he
felt like spitting…well, he just coughed into his hand and wiped it on the back of his pants.

Damn he hated this job.

He hated oil and he hated spark plugs and he hated filters and fluid sticks and everything else that went with being a mechanic. Terry had wanted to be anything but a grease monkey. Before everything had turned to shit, he’d been taking business courses at the junior college. He had read the Jim Collins books on creating and sustaining a successful business. He thought
Good to Great
would help him be at least more than average as a low-level business drone. But in the end, he realized that all the highly touted “be successful in business” concepts were a lot of hot air. The long and the short of it was, if you licked ass and did something people liked, they bought your shit. And if you didn’t? You starved.

That didn’t really help Terry to make the million bucks he wanted to drag back home like a bear to his cave with a carcass.

Ralph spit on the floor and motioned toward the Corvette once more. “Make sure it’s done in the morning, or you’ll be looking for a new shop to tinker in.”

Terry knew that looking for a new shop would be difficult since this was the only one within twenty miles that had any automotive bent at all. Still, it wasn’t the most motivating message. Ralph grumbled something else and moved out of the shop toward the front door for the night.

As soon as the owner left, Terry walked over to the front door and cranked up the volume on the radio. If he were going to be stuck here for the night, the least he could have was the blaring, soaring guitar leads of Boston echoing through his head like the glory of six-string heaven.

Damn, they were good.

Terry pulled out a tool drawer as the room echoed
with the twining guitars of the best music to get high to…ever. He even tried to get beneath the body of the ’Vette. It was a sweet car, but you know…when someone tells you
“ya gotta”
at eight o’clock at night, you pretty much don’t
wanna
, no matter how sweet it is. Terry saw a lot of cars in his business, but not many as hot as this one. Damn—this was one expensive ride. He climbed into the driver’s seat and enjoyed the slight cushion of the black leather-wrapped steering wheel beneath his hand. Then he popped the glove box and riffled through the owner’s manual and oil change coupons there. At the back of the compartment was a stack of gold coins. Terry picked one up and saw an imprimatur of a nude woman with the words “Lusty Lady.” Peep show money. He smiled. He’d pocket it if he knew where it would be good.

Then he climbed out and popped the trunk. ’Vettes had almost no storage space, but he was curious. The tiny space looked empty on a first glance, but then Terry saw a scrap of glossy red paper was trapped in the crack of the fake floor. He popped up the flooring to see if anything was stored beneath.

Bingo.

A lurid pile of magazines were stacked in one corner. On the cover of one, an icy blonde with breasts the size of cantaloupes held her chest with her own two hands, red lacquered nails glistening wetly against her skin like wounds. Around her belly, two black male hands reached, kneading her groin. The title was
Chocolate & Cream
.

Terry riffled through the handful of titles, uncovering
Cuckold Dreams
,
MILF 17
and
Deirdre’s Dirty Secret
. The latter featured a busty redhead with a dildo as long as her arm on the cover. He pulled the pile of porn from the trunk and shut the lid.

Instead of working
on
the car, Terry did some work
in
the car. He took the stack, climbed into the ’Vette’s slick black leather seat, shucked his pants down and tilted the seat back. And then he got to
work
.

By eleven o’clock, the ’Vette was still up on the lift, and Terry woke up from a long nap populated by kinky girls wearing leather corsets and blindfolds. The magazines were spread throughout the interior of the car on the dashboard and passenger seat, opened to his newly found favorite photos. He gave a long yawn and shook his head, and decided he’d best clean up and get underneath the car before midnight.

Stashing the magazines back in the trunk, he decided to take a walk and a smoke break to wake up. Ralph’s shop—Under Your Hood—was just off the beach, and Terry often took short jaunts to the water and back just to get away from his asshole boss. A quick cigarette and a few breaths of the sea air always brought his urge to scream “take this job and shove it” under control. The beach had saved him from losing a steady paycheck many times.

Terry lit up and walked the sandy path from the back parking lot of the car shop over the weedy no-man’s-land beyond. The path rose and the sound of the surf grew louder, and then Terry was over the dune, and trudging down to the hard-packed sand of the beach. The ember of his smoke burned exceptionally bright tonight; the clouds had rolled in and promised a midnight storm; the normally brilliant sky loomed ominous and closed. One cloud bank glowed slightly, the light of the moon behind it, but aside from that and a few lights off the shore from seaside homes, the night was black as tar.

Somewhere nearby, Terry heard music, and wondered if kids were camped out on the beach, sneaking booze or toking up. He grinned, remembering the many times he’d come down here with friends back in high school. He began
to walk toward the faraway sound, thinking that he’d give the delinquent kids a scare before heading back to work. Nothing more frightening than an adult stumbling across a teen party when you’re a teen. He grinned and blew a cloud of smoke across the beach. This could be fun.

The music seemed to be coming from near the point, though he didn’t recognize the tune. It seemed strangely quiet and stark for party music, though Terry had to admit, very pretty. All of his frustrations with Ralph faded the closer he got to the sound. Hell, maybe instead of scaring off the kids, he’d sit with them and have a drink. Fuck it if he ended up fired tomorrow…he was tired of this place and this job anyway. Maybe it was time to drift on.

He slowed as he reached the curve of the beach that ultimately led out onto the rocky wall that was the finger of the point and looked around harder. He didn’t seem to be any closer to the source of the music, and he still hadn’t seen the lights of a campfire or flash or anything. Where the hell were these kids? Out on the rocks? Usually when teens partied on the beach, they lit a small fire to stay warm, and on a night like this, to
see
one another. Unless it was a couple—in which case, perhaps they didn’t want to be seen. Terry grinned at that. Maybe this was even better than he thought—maybe he’d catch some seventeen-year-old skin doing the nasty! He almost laughed out loud when he imagined the squeals his appearance would bring when he caught that little glimpse of heaven.

He slowly did a 360-degree turn in place, peering hard at the sand, trying to find some faintly moving shadows that he somehow hadn’t picked up on yet. He started to turn quicker once his vision reached the ocean, assuming that the music wasn’t coming from out in the water…but then he stopped.

What was that flash out in the dark water? It looked white, but not like a whitecap. Terry squinted and stepped closer. Damn if it wasn’t a chick out in the water! Skinny-dipping by the look of it. He could see her legs kicking out above the water, and when her body moved up and out of the waves, he could see nothing but creamy skin. No suit.

Nice.

He couldn’t see anyone swimming near her, and the beach appeared empty. Still, the faint but seductive music seemed to come from nearby. It was all around him, and he closed his eyes, trying to identify which direction it came from. Instead, in the dark space behind his eyelids, it seemed to amplify and grow, sparking pinpoints of light and swirls of ambient fog that lit his brain like a psychedelic drug.

“Damn, that shit’s intense,” he murmured, and opened his eyes.

There was a naked woman standing five feet away from him. Her pale skin dripped with the ocean, and dark hair hung in wet, knotted curls across her neck and down her chest. Despite the gloom of the sky, her eyes reflected a shimmering light. They sparked tiny motes of fire while staring hard at him, unblinking.

Terry’s gaze slid from her face to her breasts though, because it was hard to ignore a pair like that. They looked firm as fruit, and his throat salivated at the thought. God he wanted to bite into her. Look at those tits! He could suck those…and look at that tummy—flat, tight…mmm. Terry imagined his tongue licking the salty water from her belly button and then dipping its way lower to lave between her thighs…

She was singing.

In the midst of Terry’s unapologetic sexual perusal of
the woman, it occurred to him belatedly that the music he’d been hearing for the past few minutes was not coming from a boom box secreted somewhere in the sand. It was coming from this woman, here, five steps away.

Okay, three.

One.

Her hands slipped up his arms from elbow to shoulder, and all the time her lips kept gently moving, her voice a trilling, gentle massage. Her song slipped into the clouds and then slid back down, a warm and potent melody of loss and love, pain and need. He could feel himself respond to the song, as much as to her skin, and he put his arms around her, drawing her wet body to him without thought.

In seconds his lips were locked to hers, and without knowing her name, Terry ran his hands down the cool, slippery skin of her waist and across the enticing swell of her ass. He slid a finger between her cheeks, and was poking the swollen folds of her sex from behind before he’d even ended their first kiss.

This was moving fast, he thought, too excited and surprised by his luck to question why a naked woman would walk out of the ocean and throw herself into his arms and then, without a word, unbutton his shirt and start to work on his belt.

He helped her with the latter, eager to get to the business at hand, because this was likely to be the best business he ever
got
in hand. This chick was fuckin’ magazine-spread material. He flashed back to the skin mags he’d been looking at a couple hours ago and thought,
Nah, they got nothing on this bitch
! He had a moment of panic when he wondered, after all of his exertion in the car, if he’d be able to perform now that the real deal was right here.

But then she sprung him from beneath his jeans into
the night air, and shifted her legs to let him press against her, impaling herself on him as she sucked his tongue into her mouth, and his worries dissolved like desert clouds.

She moved over him with an aggression he wasn’t used to; most of the girls he’d been with were happy to let him do all the pushing and shoving, so it was strangely exciting for a woman to be pushing and grappling him to the sand. And she did. She forced him with her hands on his shoulders first to his knees, weaving her fingers into his hair and pressing his head to her groin, and after he’d satisfied her immediate musky need there with wet laps of his tongue, she’d straddled him atop the cold sand, and her teeth sparkled white against the night as she threw back her head and opened her mouth to moan her appreciation at his movements beneath her.

“Damn, baby, you are amazing,” Terry said, as his moment came.

The woman said nothing, only shifted her hips against his and increased her rhythm, again tilting back her head to stare up at the cloud-covered sky. This time, instead of moaning, she began to sing again, and as Terry felt his nerves electrify and pulse with an amazingly intense orgasm, his ears suddenly turned to jelly as well; her song made his body want to melt. The blur of clouds and dark and sand turned into a landscape so faint and indistinct with her song that Terry couldn’t even move his hand to hold her as she began to fall toward him.

Her mouth brushed across his with a wet kiss, but then continued on to nuzzle his ear, and finally his neck. All the while she sang a whispery song of sated seduction and he felt paralyzed by its melody. Her hands slipped up his arms and gripped him as she pushed her breasts to his chest, pressing into him so hard that he really, for a moment, felt they were one.

And then the pain began.

The kiss at his neck, so warm and blissful after the big O suddenly turned hot, in a slap-at-your-neck-to-stop-the-mosquito kind of way, except that Terry didn’t feel like he could move his hand to do the swatting, both because she was holding it and because her song was almost holding him in a weird trance. But then the heat grew to excruciating pain, and he opened his mouth to cry out. He had only just begun to scream when her lips fastened down on his, and he tasted the iron of his own blood in his mouth. His eyes opened, and he saw her suddenly in a new light.

Her eyes weren’t brown with a strange sparkle to them. They were yellow, somehow reptilian. Like fish eyes. Her nose no longer looked patrician, but hawklike pointy, and her arms weren’t flawlessly creamy, but blotched; a mélange of intricate streaks of dark pink scars and brown discolorations amid the white. And as he struggled to break her violent kiss and peered lower, suddenly drinking her in for seemingly the first time, he saw that her hips didn’t curve seductively quite as he remembered at his first glance. They slimmed down from her waist and tapered into something silvery blue and geometrically shadowed. Something that was not two legs, but a solid tail of shimmering alienness, a heavy tail pinned between his legs. The beautiful woman who had pushed him to the sand was not beautiful at all; in fact, she wasn’t really a woman. Her ass ended in fish scales.