Thor'sday Night - Paranormal Erotica (22 page)

He comes and stands over her. ‘Are you going to
be all right?’

His sudden tenderness brings tears to her eyes
like a blow. ‘I have no idea.’ For once, she is being completely
honest.

Staring down into her shining eyes he caresses
her cheek with his thumb, and runs his fingers through her hair.
‘I’ll make us some sandwiches.’

‘Can I help?’

‘No, just take it easy. You’ve had a hard
day.’

She manages not to flinch. ‘And it’s not even
one o’clock,’ she informs his retreating back, then stares blindly
in the direction of the kitchen into which he disappears. Her
stunned mind hits a mysterious ‘pause’ button then waiting for him
to emerge, and she closes her eyes.

She opens them again when something smooth and
cold slips between her lips.

She savors the mouthful of baked ham wrapped
around a cube of Gouda cheese.

‘I decided against sandwiches, since I’m out of
bread.’ He seats himself beside her and pulls the glass coffee
table closer.

She reaches gratefully for her sweating glass of
white wine, and they eat and drink in silence for a moment.

‘Well, Carmen,’ he says finally, ‘either you’re
a witch, or something strangely profound is going on here.’

‘Feel free to check my purse for little wax
figurines, but they’d only melt in Miami.’

He laughs. ‘You have no less than four
familiars.’

‘Three of which I have to give away soon.’ She
can’t meet his eyes, wondering if Mike still plans to come by her
apartment tomorrow night.

‘Look at me, baby.’

She has to obey him.

‘Have you fucked your boss?’

‘No,’ she replies with conviction, because
telling him the truth is simply out of the question.

‘What about that cop?’

‘No.’ At least that’s true, she only gave him a
blowjob.

He smiles. ‘You’re not a very good liar, Carmen.
You’re a greedy little whore, is what you are, but that doesn’t
change the fact that something else is going on here. My wildly
imaginative diagnosis fits the symptoms, but that doesn’t mean
there’s a cure other than letting the ailment take its natural
course. These men are actually losing sleep over you.’ He unbuckles
his belt, and leaves it hanging open as if he ate too much, which
he didn’t. ‘They’re completely obsessed with you.’ He unzips his
pants, grabs a handful of her long, soft hair, and pulls her head
down into his lap.

She pulls his soft penis out through the opening
in his underpants, and nurtures it like a seed against her warm
tongue.

‘That’s better,’ he says, ‘now maybe I won’t
find it so hard to talk about something that’s absolutely fucking
impossible.’

The dark curtain of her hair sways gently back
and forth between his thighs as her tongue strives to give the
performance of its life for him.

‘Viking nobles were dispatched with all their
wealth, Carmen, and this virile warrior whose grave they just
discovered even brought a girl with him into the next world. She
was probably picked out from amongst the household slaves by his
widow, who I’m sure would have known who his favorite was, and
enjoyed getting her revenge.’

She recalls Linn’s
eyes meeting hers in the mirror at
John Martin’s as she slips off the couch to kneel more
comfortably between his legs. Now she can bring her hands into
play. His underpants are an encumbrance; they won’t allow her to
cradle his balls, or to tease them with her fingernails. She moans
in frustration, and reaches up into his shirt so she can at least
feel the skin of his belly and of his chest as she grabs the base
of his erection with her other hand, and starts pumping him slowly
and firmly as she sucks hungrily on his helmet.

‘In the article, it said that on the evening of
the funeral,’ he sounds unaffected by her hard work, ‘the poor girl
was escorted to the grave site by the dead man’s closest friends.
They might have drugged her, or she might have been fully conscious
of what was happening to her, but hopefully they at least got her
drunk. Anyway, the only other person who attended the rite was an
old woman who stood for the corruptible nature of the flesh, which
not even the greatest warrior can hope to conquer. She chanted and
rattled some bones with runes carved on them while the men laid the
girl on her back next to the open grave. They tied her arms over
her head, spread her legs, and fucked her, one after the other. Mm,
yes, this little story’s exciting you, isn’t it, baby…?

‘When they were all finished with her… you like
the sound of that, don’t you? When they were all finished with
her,’ he repeats kindly, ‘two of the men wrapped a cloth around her
neck, and strangled her.’

Her response to the story of a girl’s brutal
murder is perversely intense. She takes full, passionate possession
of his penis with her lips and tongue and throat, her hands, and
the dark web of her hair that clings to her fingers, sticky with
the adult candy of his semen, which tastes deliciously of his
pleasure.

‘What if you were a girl like that once, Carmen?
And what if your boss, that cop, and me, were three of the men who
fucked you, then killed you? Maybe that’s why you like it when I
hurt you, and maybe that’s why I enjoy hurting you.’

In her hands, and between her devoted lips, his
erection is as hard as an ancient standing stone commanding her
fervent worship as in her mind’s eye she sees a girl’s body – her
body – the pounding heart of a scene that, until that moment, had
remained buried deep in the darkness of her subconscious. The dirt
between her thighs is wet from the salty tide of sperm flowing out
of her body, completely surrounded by the rugged mountains of naked
male chests. Then the two men kneeling on either side of her head
wrap a long, crimson strip of fabric around her neck. She looks up
at one of them, and the tenderness in his eyes fills her with hope.
Holding on to it, she is barely aware of the cloth tightening
inexorably around her throat. She is conscious only of the curious
sensation of rising weightless off the ground on her fluttering
pulse as the first stars appear in the sky just beyond his
eyes…

Emptying her mouth, she looks up into his eyes
and says breathlessly, ‘You were one of them!’

‘Yes, the one who was about to come,’ he replies
dryly. ‘Did I tell you to stop?’

‘Jay, you were the one I was looking at when I
died!’

*

Carmen takes her time in the stand-up shower.
She is enjoying the contrast of the black-and-white tiles and cold
stainless steel fixtures with her own rosy flesh. Jay had some
phone calls to make before he could continue giving her his
undivided attention, so she is free to relax for a while.

Her senses are performing at peak efficiency.
She seems to be able to hear every individual burning spear of
water hitting the tiles, and the bar of soap is a slick chunk of
jade in her hand dissolving into a fresh-smelling sea foam. The
light out in the bathroom glows gold as sunlight captured by the
shower stall’s frosted glass, and the tiles beneath her feet are as
perfectly smooth and hard as her skin is beautifully smooth and
soft.

She passes the soap slowly across her breasts,
then down over her womb, thinking about the mysterious fact that
her consciousness is embodied. Because without her body nothing
would be what it seems to be, nothing would feel the way it feels,
nothing would be what it looks like, tastes like or sounds like.
Without her body, her unique sense of self wouldn’t exist at all,
and the thought excites her. It turns her on to know that, in a
very real sense, her body is the world. Because if it wasn’t for
her eyes there would be no such thing as color, only the
electromagnetic radiation that through her senses’ unique way of
receiving and categorizing information becomes color and shape,
texture and form, sound and sensation. Therefore, it seems wrong to
say that her sense of self is merely the sum of her senses, as if
there was a better way to know herself.

Right now part of her (all of her?) is
attempting to translate the memory of Mike’s clenched fingers into
philosophical thoughts in an effort to hold on to the pure, hot joy
she experienced while he fist-fucked her. Her constant state of
sexual arousal is beginning to feel like a fever, and yet also,
mysteriously, like the very nature of good health.

She steps out of the shower, and reaches for one
of the thick black towels that hang from a stainless steel rod as
fine as a saber. Everything about Jay’s bathroom is modern and
masculine.

She wraps the towel around herself, and walks
out into the bedroom in a cloud of steam.

A queen size futon mattress adorned by a black
comforter is set in a metal frame that evokes a ship: small spheres
like portholes are cut out of both the headboard and the baseboard.
The wall across from the bed is dominated by a state-of-the-art
entertainment center. Stereo, receiver, CD player, DVD player, and
no less than six speakers of varying sizes, surround the temple god
of a television so big it makes her think of a temporarily inactive
portal into another dimension.

Holding the damp towel closed, she perches on
the edge of the bed. That terrible night in the Grove was a storm
that set her life on a whole new course. She is in uncharted
territory now, navigating blindly through the dangerously choppy
waters of all her desires and fantasies. Yet she doesn’t want to
slow down. She doesn’t want to play it safe.

She sits listening to the quiet, even rhythm of
Jay’s voice in the other room. He is still on the phone, which is
good. She is relishing her timeout. She has so much to think about.
Yet her thoughts are only the masts supporting the fully open bed
sheets of her passions, which are caught in no less than three
powerful currents. She is going down, and that’s all there is to
it.

She falls back across the bed, and lays sifting
fragments of dreams and recent events like the pieces of a puzzle
across the ceiling.

She remembers watching
the news the night she was almost raped. That was when she found
out about the Viking grave, which explains why she noticed the
cover of National Geographic at the supermarket. The fact that Jay
bought her Thor’s hammer earrings in Washington

D.C. before he read the same article on the
plane is significant, yet also completely coincidental. That Mike
suddenly noticed her after months of working with her can be
explained: she told him she was almost raped, which made him see
her as vulnerable and desirable. A psychiatrist would probably tell
her she was channeling her forbidden lust for her boss into dreams
about Vikings in keeping with her vivid imagination and her love of
history. Will probably can’t stop thinking about her because he
feels cheated of what he almost had, and any obsessive thought
process inevitably leads to lack of sleep. That Mike is also having
trouble sleeping is perfectly understandable. As a married man he
has a lot to lose by having an affair with his secretary.

She closes her eyes.

The time has come to face the memory of those
few terrible seconds when her arms were pinned over her head and
her legs were spread open…

She was only a heartbeat away from being raped,
from being stabbed by some nameless dirty cock that would have
killed a part of her forever even if her body had survived. In
retrospect, her glimpse of the skeleton on the television just a
short while before seems like a sinister warning of what would
happen to her if she went out that night. Yet her subsequent
interest in the ancient grave could just be a natural
identification on her part with another victim – a young woman like
herself who was not, however, miraculously saved at the last
moment. Jay’s theory about what is happening is a thrilling
fantasy, but it can’t possibly be true.

She sits up, suddenly realizing that the
hypnotic flow of his voice out in the living room has stopped.

The bedroom door opens.

The damp towel feels cold and heavy around her
as she stands up.

‘That takes care of work.,’ he closes the door
behind him, ‘now I can take care of you.’

With one hand she pulls out the bobby pin
holding her hair up. ‘And just what,’ she shakes it loose around
her shoulders, ‘are you planning to do with me?’

He approaches her. ‘Whatever I please.’ He yanks
the towel off her. ‘That’s the second shower my little pussy’s
taken today. Is she feeling dirty?’

‘No, I just like—’

He slaps her.

Even as she catches her breath she admires how
neatly he does it, and how casually he exerts just the right amount
of force.

‘Carmen,’ he bends over and opens a drawer
contained in the bed frame, ‘what did I tell you about lying to
me?’

The glimpse she gets of the drawer’s contents
makes it impossible for her to think straight enough to answer
him

– coiled black shapes with the dangerous aura of
sleeping

snakes.

He casually plucks one out, and turns towards
her.

She instinctively steps back, picks the towel up
off the

floor, and holds it in front of her. Slowly and
deliberately, he runs the whip’s full length through his hand.
‘Jay, what exactly are you planning,’ her stomach clenches, ‘to do
with that?’

His smile strikes her as a naked extension of
the black leather strip. ‘What do you think?’

She considers locking herself in the bathroom.
But fascination and fear have her equally in their grip like fangs,
and she can’t seem to move. Even as her hands clutch the towel, the
rest of her begins to feel oddly languid.

The end of the whip slithers towards her bare
feet.

She takes a few more steps back.

Obeying his wrist, it follows her, hissing.

‘Stop that, Jay!’

‘You have a lot to learn, Carmen. Drop the
towel.’