Terran Times 18 - Emerald Envisage (47 page)

Her glance pierced right to the heart of the matter. By dropping perfectly, specifically, straight to the swollen, aching, throbbing and inhumanly outraged mound of his crotch.

I am.

“You are.” Laughing softly, the first time she’d done such a thing, she continued to lead. And now he had no need to ask where. Her destination suddenly became clear. Emerald-crystal clear.

A bower.

That was what his mind insisted on calling it. A bower, even though it was really only the very prosaic, very normal and of-this-earth Saint Theodota’s picnic ground.

Deeply green, deeply
deep
, it lay just behind the market and just next door. Deep and sheltered, sheltered and exceedingly secret on the surface, it seemed a scandalous place for the kind of exchange he knew was about to take place between him and his…him and Gaelle. But in reality, that only gave it an air of irresistible titillation. And the undeniable attraction of being about to do something forbidden. In a place where such things had no business ever being done.

Clancy almost laughed.

Gaelle’s
green
world reached out. To draw him in. To close around him.

Her realm.

The thought came unbidden. But never unwelcome. Certainly not unwelcome! Clancy knew he should be concerned. The picnic ground was a public place, after all. It was open to the public, free for them to use any time they wanted. At any moment some passing person might happen upon them. Or worse, one or more of the gentle nuns from the convent right next door might spot them. One of them might be outraged.

He should be concerned. But wasn’t.

Following Gaelle, acting upon what he stubbornly insisted upon telling himself was entirely free will and his own choice, he felt…protected.

This haunting green gloom that slipped in around him seemed literally to transport him and her. To some far, far removed world that had nothing to do with any he’d known before. Including Saint Theodota and her picnic ground.

This was a world of ethereal and everlasting hush. Of dim light and even dimmer intent, of enchanting escalation of the way Gaelle sparkled and glimmered before him.
For
him.

She turned to him.

The stone upon her staff burned steadily bright as never before. Its brilliance radiated still from within, but now the gleam and glow reached and touched every outward facet as well. The stone gleamed violet-orchid, the color of amethyst on fire, and its only remaining resemblance to the stone it had been lay in the flickering shape it barely continued to retain.

Clancy caught his breath.

The stone generated magic. It generated
desire
. Rising, heated desire that transferred itself somehow through some unnamed yet unquestionably potent process into a prick he had previously, erroneously thought incapable of feeling more than it already felt.

This heat seared. It debilitated. It went to work at once to melt flesh and bone, to reduce all that he had ever been, all that had ever been human about him, to a pool of formless smoke and ruin. It worked from deep inside him,
burned
from deep inside him. And like the magic of that sparking and sparkling stone, seeming akin and at one with the magic of that stone, this burning never entirely reached the surface. It remained amazingly, antagonizingly buried somewhere near the deepest core of him.

Catching his breath again, he shivered.

In response, Gaelle smiled once more. Sadly. “There are things you must understand.” She spoke quietly. Gently. But her words carried a terrible undertone. A terrible
warning
?

Then she released his hand.

Inconceivable loss rolled over him, engulfing him. Black, vile, it drew stunned tears from stung and startled eyes. Tears that seared and scorched in their own right as they slid unchecked, barely heeded, across his cheeks.

He wasn’t ready for such uncensored honesty of emotion. But he could do nothing to stop it. “Why?” he asked, almost sobbed, as he tried to reach for her.

Gaelle resisted capture. “You must listen,” she said as gently as before, though somehow much more forcefully. “You must understand what we are about to do.”

“I understand.” His prick kicked hard, adding its agreement. “I understand all too well and I…”

“This thing we are about to do…this…” She paused. Stared at him for a second or ten. Stared hard in a way that made him almost want to squirm. As if in her penetration of his soul, she revealed things about him. Things he’d never suspected, never meant to have revealed and lay bare, things that would automatically proclaim him unworthy and unfit for the kind of attention she’d lavished upon him. “This is not to be undertaken lightly.”

“I understand.” He reached for her again.

And again she eluded him. “This will change you in some way. I cannot say how. Only that this will make some fundamental difference in you. This will mark you. For all time. This will…”

“Gaelle.”

“You must understand that I may favor any mortal. In any way I choose. But I may favor him only once.”

“Once?” Clancy shook his head. He tried to shake it, but like just about every part of his body other than his dancing, clamoring, jerking and jigging prick, the necessary nerves would not engage. The corresponding muscles would not respond.

Looking very grave, her expression returning for the most part to its former grim and slightly forbidding lines, Gaelle did not move her gaze away from his. “Only once,” she reiterated. “No matter how desperately you will want more and no matter how eloquently you might plead. That will not matter. Nothing will matter except that we will have had our once, and it can never come again. I can never exist for you again.”

Clancy couldn’t think. The spell of her amethyst-spun magic was that strong. That enveloping. All of himself, all of his concentration found its center and its entire reason for existing in the swollen, pleading prick that now ruled everything. That now represented the entirety of a narrow and swiftly shrinking existence.

Something inside him, something captured and held even more strictly hostage than Gaelle held his suffering attention, would not let him think. There was only flesh. Her flesh. Tighter than tight flesh, with which he must be surrounded.

Must
.

“Do you understand?” Her tone was as gentle as before.

Will she be green inside, too? Will her cum…
“I understand.” That was his voice. But it came to him hazily. As if through the reaching, overlapping, inundating layers of a dream. He moved forward.

Or perhaps he was
summoned
.

Would her color infect him when she had her way with him? Was that what she meant when she said he would be changed? Marked? Those were questions Clancy could not, did not try to answer. Because none of it mattered. He had given his consent. His survival demanded he give his consent. Make his contact. Step toward her.

This was destiny, this dream-state in which her magic wrapped him and enfolded him. This was destiny, awaiting him in this twilit green glade that more and more seemed nothing at all like an earthly glade or an act of free will, but once again like a…

Spell.

A particularly potent, perhaps virulent one. And Clancy did not care. It was enough that destiny had arrived. On a low and guttural wail as Gaelle placed her hands on his shoulders to guide him deeper into the verdant gloaming that more and more became all of his world. All of the world she allowed him.

She guided him into her private den of wicked delight and magic. With the subtle pressures of her cool, yet scorching touch, she helped him to lie down upon a silken hammock of sorts. A thing that exactly like her could
not
be there. Yet was.

She disposed of his clothes with a single, violet-flashing sweep of her magical staff and then she dropped it. Set it aside, its purpose finished. For the time being.

Gone.

Magic.

Finding it easy to accept the reality of that now, he tried to speak. Tried to make sound. But his throat seized. To the consistency and pliancy of rigid steel. So he remained silent, worried that his heart might explode. That it might rupture in some vital, internal way that could never be repaired. That it must certainly split itself in two from the stuttering force of its own uneven pounding and he would cease to exist. As simply and easily as that he would be gone completely. As if he’d never been.

Silken smoothness stroked his skin wherever the hammock touched his flesh. Gauzy-net, forest-hued, it hung taut between two trees of a species and size he didn’t recognize…a species that hadn’t inhabited Saint Theodota’s picnic ground moments before. Unlike the hammocks he’d known before, this one made a firm platform. It didn’t shift, didn’t sway in the dizzying, dazzling way other hammocks did.

Clancy floated secure in its gossamer-strong embrace.

Gaelle’s costume had vanished as completely and inexplicably as his own clothing. Mounting the hammock without making it shift or sway, without creating any noticeable movement in it at all, she was naked. Aroused. The dark-colored nipples tipping her magnificent breasts had peaked already into enticing buds. Shimmering green again, not so vaguely or haphazardly this time, her flesh
sparked
. It sparkled with flame that terrified at least as much as it enticed.

Clancy’s heart tried to wrench itself free of its moorings. His breath hitched, stuck deeper than his throat now…stuck tight at the center of his chest. Painfully erect, desperately erect, he groaned. From the depths of his heart and his soul, he groaned.

In response, Gaelle brought her hands down upon him. She brought them down
around
him. Brushing his hands away when he tried to clutch them around the base of his agonized prick, the better to offer it up to her, she enclosed it—
all
of it—within the warmth of her palms.

Clancy expected her to stroke. He expected,
wanted
, her to drift tormenting fingertips aimlessly along his over-swollen length.

She didn’t.

She undertook a form of torture no one, himself included, had ever dreamed before. She rolled his convulsing length between flattened hands that exerted
pressure
. Sometimes, most times, fatal pressure.

“It d…does…sn’t…”

Work that way.

He was too far into extremis to say it…too far into extremis to do very much of anything other than lie still and helpless, staring up into the flickering strength of her face.

She was definitely greener.

Clancy didn’t believe it was shadow from the trees overhead or reflection of the dusky-verdant gloom surrounding them. This was something else. Something he couldn’t explain and wouldn’t try to explain. Because frankly it scared the living shit out of him. So he chalked it up to excitement. His and hers. He chalked it up to the heady attraction that sparked and flared between them, almost visible in the depths of their bower.

As if she shared the thought, Gaelle’s breathing escalated. Already deep, it began to rasp. Losing its regularity, the sound of it quite effectively communicated her mounting arousal.

“G…Gaelle…”

“Hush.” Murmuring softly in a way he supposed was meant to soothe anxiety from him and calm the roiling turmoil that jerked visibly in his prick, she leaned over him. Delectably, perilously, terrifyingly close to him as she positioned herself atop his thighs so he couldn’t move. Couldn’t escape.

Clancy felt a moment’s panic. That he wouldn’t want to escape. That he
would
. That…she didn’t soothe with the smoothness of her touch. She
inflamed
.

“One time only,” she murmured, her tone shifting to one of genuine regret. “You make take as much as you like. As much as you can. As long as you do not finish and I do not finish.”

Inside Clancy, pressure mounted. Continuous pressure, pressure aggravated mightily by the continued stroking of cool hands massaging, no longer gently, the length of him. Anguished, he groaned again.

“You must remain steadfast.” Gaelle’s kneading shifted. Moving lower, her hands took up their insidious work upon balls that felt as hard, as unforgiving and relentless as petrified marble. “If you finish early…you must not finish early. You must wait. You must control the urges of your body…must rein them in, and hold them inside. You must…”

“You’re k…kidding, right? You’re…”

“You
must
!” She was deadly serious. Her voice, her expression, said she was. And yet her hands continued their wicked pursuits. They continued to stroke at him and work at him, doing their best to draw from the insane hardness of him exactly what she wanted him to withhold.

Clancy tried to lift his head. And found he could not. Found he was paralyzed, helpless, unable to make even the simplest attempt to help himself. “How the hell am I sup…posed…” He ran out of breath. So he could only think about it. Think long, think hard, think agonizingly.

How the hell was he supposed to wait, when every single, damnable thing she did was clearly intended to goad him into doing exactly, precisely the opposite?

Her palms flamed. Clancy imagined unbridled, sparking electricity flying from them, imagined it igniting the parched, dying flesh they held so firmly. Though of course he never saw any such sparks. No more than he’d seen them before.