And Able (29 page)

AGAIN
Sharon Cullars
 

I
 
nner resolve is a true possibility when temptation isn’t within sight. Like the last piece of chocolate cheesecake with chocolate shavings; that last cigarette; that half-filled glass of Chianti…or the well-defined abs of a man who’s had to take his shirt off because he spilled marinara sauce on it. Not deliberately. Accidents happen. At the sight of hard muscles, resolve flies right out of the window and throws a smirk over its wing.

Part of it was her fault. Tyne had offered him a shoulder rub, because during the meal he had seemed tense, and she’d suspected that his mind was still on the occurrences of the day. After dessert, he sat in one of the chairs in the living room while she stood over him. Even though he had put on a clean shirt, she could feel every tendon through the material, the image of his naked torso playing in her mind as her fingers kneaded the taut muscles.

As David started to relax, he leaned back to rest his head on her stomach. The lights were at half-dim. Neither of them was playing fair. Especially when a hand reached up to caress her cheek.

“Stop it,” she whispered.

He seemed to realize he was breaking a promise, because the hand went down, and he said, “I’m sorry.” But his head remained on her stomach, his eyes shut. From her vantage, she could see the shadow of hair on his chest. She remembered how soft it felt, feathery, like down. Instinctively, and against her conscious will, her hand moved to touch the bare flesh below his throat. She heard the intake of breath, felt the pulse at his throat speed up.

She told herself to stop, but there was the throbbing between her legs that was calling attention to itself. It made her realize she had lied. When she told him she wanted to take it slow, she had meant it. Then. But the declaration seemed a million moments ago, before her fingers touched him again, felt the heat of his flesh melding with her own.

He bent to kiss her wrist, and the touch of his lips was the catalyst she needed. The permission to betray herself again.

She pulled her hands away, and he looked up like a child whose treat had been cruelly snatched away. She smiled and circled him. Then slowly she lowered herself to her knees, reached over, unbelted and unbuttoned his pants. Slowly, pulled down the zipper.

“But I thought you wanted…” he started.

“That’s what I thought I wanted.” She released him from his constraints. “But right now, this is what I want.” She took him into her mouth.

She heard an intake of breath, then a moan that seemed to reverberate through the rafters of the room. She felt the muscles of his thighs tighten beneath her hands, relax, tighten again. Her tongue circled the furrowed flesh, running rings around the natural grooves. She tasted him, realized that she liked him. Liked the tang of the moisture leaking from him. And the strangled animal groans her ministrations elicited.

There were pauses in her breathing, followed by strained exhalations. Then a sudden weight of a hand on the back of her head, guiding her. She took his cue, began sucking with a pressure that drew him farther inside her mouth. Yet there was more of him than she could hold.

He was moments from coming. She could feel the trembling in his limbs. But suddenly he pushed her away, disgorging his member from her mouth with the motion.

He shook his head. “No, not yet,” he said breathlessly. “Why don’t you join me?” Before she could answer, he stood up, pulling her up with him, and began unbuttoning her blouse, almost tearing the seed pearls in the process. The silk slid from her skin and fell to the ground in a languid pool of golden-brown. He hooked eager fingers beneath her bra straps, wrenched them down. Within seconds, she was naked from the waist up, and the current in the room, as well as the excitement of the moment teased her nipples into hard pebbles. His fingers gently grazed them, then he grazed each with his tongue. Her knees buckled.

“How far do you want to go?” he breathed. “Because I don’t want you to do this just for me.”

Her answer was to reach for the button of his shirt, then stare into those green, almost hazel eyes. “I’m not doing this for you. I’m being totally selfish. I want you…your body…” She pushed the shirt over his shoulders, yanked it down his arms.

“Hey, what about my mind?” he grinned.

She smiled. “Some other time.”

They undressed each other quickly, and as they stood naked, his eyes roamed the landscape of her body with undeniable appreciation. Then without ceremony, he pulled her to the floor on top of him so abruptly that she let out an “oomph.” His hands gripped the plump cheeks of her ass, began kneading the soft flesh. She felt his hardened penis against her stomach and began moving against it, causing him to inhale sharply. His hands soon stopped their kneading and replaced the touch with soft, whispery caresses that caused her crotch to contract with spasms. One of his fingers played along her crevice as his lips grabbed hers and began licking them. His finger moved to the delicate wall dividing both entryways, moved past the moist canal, up to her clitoris, started teasing her orb just as his tongue began playing along hers. She ground her pelvis against him, desperately claiming her own pleasure, listening to the symphony of quickly pumping blood, and intertwined breaths playing in her ears.

He guided her onto his shaft. Holding her hips, he moved her up, down, in an achingly slow and steady pace that was thrilling and killing, for right now she thought she could die with the pleasure of it, the way he filled her, sated her. She felt her eyes go back into her head (she had heard about the phenomenon from other bragging women, and had thought they were doing just that—bragging. But now she knew how it could happen.)

“Ooooh, fuck,” she moaned.

“My thoughts exactly,” he whispered back, and with a deft motion, changed their positions until he was on top of her. Straddled on his elbows, he quickened his thrusting, causing a friction that drove her to a climax she couldn’t stop. Her inner walls throbbed against the invading hardness, and she drew in shallow breaths as her lungs seemed to shatter with the rest of her body.

She put her arms around his waist and wrapped her legs around his firm thighs. His body had the first sheen of perspiration. She stroked along the dampness of his skin, then reciprocated the ass attention with gentle strokes along his cheeks.

“I want…I want…” he exerted but couldn’t seem to finish the sentence. Instead, he placed his mouth over hers until she was able to pull his ragged breaths into her needy lungs. The wave that washed over her once had hardly ebbed away before it began building again. Now his pace was frantic, his hips pounding her body into the carpeting, almost through the floor. Not one for passivity, she pounded back just as hard and eagerly met each thrust. The wave was gathering force, this one threatening a cyclonic power that would rip her apart, render her in pieces. She didn’t care. His desperation was borne of sex, but also she knew, of anger and frustration. He was expelling his demons inside her, and she was his willing exorcist…

Blood was everywhere. On the walls, which were already stained with vile human secretions; on the wooden floor, where the viscous fluid slowly seeped into the fibers of the wood and pooled between the crevices of the boards. Soon, the hue would be an indelible telltale witness of what had happened, long after every other evidence had been disposed of. Long after her voice stopped haunting his dreams. Long after he was laid cold in his grave.

He bent to run a finger through one of the corkscrew curls. Its end was soaked with blood. The knife felt warm in his hands still. Actually, it was the warmth of her life staining it.

He turned her over and peered into dulled brown eyes that accused him in their lifelessness. Gone was the sparkle—sometimes mischievous, sometimes amorous, sometimes fearful—that used to meet him. Now, the deadness of her eyes convicted him where he stood, even if a jury would never do so. The guilt of this night, this black, merciless night, would hound his waking hours, haunt his dreams, submerge his peace, indict his soul. There would now always be blood on his hands. For that reason alone, he would never allow himself another moment of happiness. Not that he would ever find it again. What joy he would have had, might have had, lay now at his feet in her perfect form. Strangely, in death, she had managed to escape its pall. Her skin was still luminescent, still smooth. If it weren’t for the vacuous eyes, the blood soaking her throat, the collar of her green dress, the dark auburn of her hair…he might hold to the illusion that somewhere inside, she still lived.

He reached a shaky hand to touch her cheek. It was warm, soft, defying death even as it stiffened her body.

He bent farther, let his lips graze hers one last time. Their warmth was a mockery. Her lips were never this still beneath his. They always answered his touch, willingly or not.

He saw a tear fall on her face, and for a second was confused. It rolled down her cheek and mixed with the puddle of blood. He realized then that he was crying. It scared him. He hadn’t cried since he was a child. But now, another tear fell, and another.

Through his grief, he knew what he would have to do. She was gone. There was no way to bring her back. Her brother would be searching for her soon. She wasn’t an ordinary Negress. She was the daughter of a prominent Negro publisher, now deceased, and the widow of a prominent Negro lawyer. She had a place in their society. So, yes, she would be missed. There would be a hue and cry for vengeance if it were ever discovered that she had been murdered.

Which was why he could not let her be found.

He knew what he had to do. It wasn’t her anymore. It was just a body now. Yet, he couldn’t resist calling her name one last time.

“Rachel.”

Then he began to cry in earnest.

Tyne pushed through the sleep-cloud that fogged her mind. The dream-world still tugged at her, reached out cold fingers to pull her back. But her feet ran as fast as they could, ran toward the name hailing her, pleading with her to hurry. The name reverberated around…
Rachel…Rachel…Rachel…

“Rachel…Rachel…”

The sound woke her. She slowly opened her eyes, lay there for a moment, not remembering. Gradually, disorientation gave way to familiarity. Shaking off sleep, she became aware of her surroundings. Recognized the curtains that hung at the moon-bathed window, saw the wingback chair that was a silhouette in front of it. Sometime during the night or early morning, he had retrieved her clothes and laid them neatly on the chair’s back.

He was shifting in his sleep, murmuring. Then she heard the name again, just as she had heard it in her dream. “Rachel.” He strangled on the syllables, his voice choked with emotion—with…grief, she realized. She sat up, turned. His back was to her, shuddering. He was crying…in his sleep. Was calling to a woman—a woman named Rachel. Someone he’d never mentioned before. And obviously a woman who meant a lot to him, and whose loss he freely felt in his unconscious state. So he’d lied about never having been in love. But why?

A pang of jealousy moved through her, pushed away affection, gratification. She didn’t want to be solace for some lost love he was still pining for. Didn’t want to be a second-hand replacement to someone else’s warmth in his bed. She looked over at the clock. It was almost four anyway. She might as well get home to get ready for work.

She shifted off the mattress delicately, grabbed her clothes from the chair and started for the door. She would dress downstairs to make sure she didn’t wake him. She turned at the door to look at him. The shuddering had stopped. There was only the peaceful up and down motion of deep breathing. She opened the door, shut it lightly and made her escape.

Jessica Inclán.

WHEN YOU BELIEVE
T
 
he men had been after her for a good three blocks.At first, it seemed almost funny, the old cat calls and whistles something Miranda Stead was used to. They must be boys, she’d thought, teenagers with nothing better to do on an Indian summer San Francisco night.

But as she clacked down the sidewalk, tilting in the black strappy high heels she’d decided to wear at the last minute, she realized these guys weren’t just ordinary cat-callers. Men had been looking at her since she miraculously morphed from knobby knees and no breasts to decent looking at seventeen, and she knew how to turn, give whoever the finger, and walk on, her head held high. These guys, though, were persistent, matching and then slowly beginning to overtake her strides. She glanced back at them quickly, three large men coming closer, their shoulders rounded, hulking, and headed toward her.

In the time it had taken her to walk from Geary Street to Post, Miranda had gotten scared.

Now Post Street was deserted, as if someone had vacuumed up all the noise and people, except, of course for the three awful men behind her.

“Hey, baby,” one of them said, half a block away. “What’s your hurry?”

“Little sweet thing,” called another, “don’t you like us? We won’t bite unless you ask us to.”

Clutching her purse, Miranda looked down each cross street she passed for the parking lot she’d raced into before the poetry reading. She’d been late, as usual, Roy Hempel, the owner of Mercurial Books, sighing with relief when she pushed open the door and almost ran to the podium. And after the poetry reading and book signing, Miranda had an apple martini with Roy, his wife Clara, and Miranda’s editor Dan Negriete at Zaps, but now, she was lost even though she’d lived in the city her entire life. She wished she’d listened to Dan when he asked if he could drive her to her car, but she’d been annoyed by his question, as usual.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, rolling her eyes as she turned away from him.

But clearly she wasn’t fine. Not at all.

“Hey, baby,” one of the men said, less than twenty feet behind her. “Can’t find your car?”

“Lost, honey?” another one said. This man seemed closer, his voice just over her shoulder. She could almost smell him: car grease, sweat, days of tobacco.

She moved faster, knowing now was not the time to give anyone the finger. At the next intersection of Sutter and Van Ness, she looked for the parking lot, but everything seemed changed, off, as if she’d appeared in a movie set replica of San Francisco made by someone who had studied the city but had never really been there. The lot should be there, right there, on the right hand side of the street. A little shack in front of it, an older Chinese man reading a newspaper inside. Where was the shack? Where was the Chinese man? Instead, there was a gas station on the corner, one she’d seen before but on Mission Street, blocks and blocks away. But no one was working at the station or pumping gas or buying Lotto tickets.

The men were right behind her now, and she raced across the street, swinging around the light post as she turned and ran up Fern Street. A bar she knew that had a poetry open mic every Friday night was just at the end of this block, or at least it used to be there, and it wasn’t near closing time. Miranda hoped she could pound through the doors, lean against the wall, the sound of poetry saving her, as it always had. She knew she could make it, even as she heard the thud of heavy shoes just behind her.

“Don’t go so fast,” one of the men said, his voice full of exertion. “I want this to last a long time.”

In a second, she knew they’d have her, pulling her into a basement stairwell, doing the dark things that usually happened during commercial breaks on television. She’d end up like a poor character in one of the many
 
Law and Order
 
shows, nothing let but clues.

She wasn’t going to make it to the end of the block. Her shoes were slipping off her heels, and even all the adrenaline in her body couldn’t make up for her lack of speed. Just ahead, six feet or so, there was a door or what looked like a door with a slim sliver of reddish light coming from underneath it. Maybe it was a bar or a restaurant. An illegal card room. A brothel. A crack house. It didn’t matter now, though. Miranda ran as fast as she could, and as she passed the door, she stuck out her hand and slammed her body against the plaster and wood, falling through and then onto her side on a hallway floor. The men who were chasing her seemed to not even notice she had gone, their feet clomping by until the door slammed shut and everything went silent.

Breathing heavily on the floor, Miranda knew there were people around her. She could hear their surprised cries at her entrance and see chairs as well as legs and shoes, though everything seemed shadowy in the dark light—either that, or everyone was wearing black. Maybe she’d somehow stumbled into Manhattan.

Swallowing hard, she pushed herself up from the gritty wooden floor, but yelped as she tried to put weight on her ankle. She clutched at the legs of a wooden chair, breathing in to the sharp pain that radiated up her leg.

“How did you get here?” a voice asked.

Miranda looked up and almost yelped again, but this time it wasn’t because of her ankle but at the face looking down at her. Pushing her hair back, she leaned against what seemed to be a bar. The man bending over her moved closer, letting his black hood fall back to his thin shoulders. His eyes were dark, his face covered in a gray beard, and she could smell some kind of alcohol on him. A swirl of almost purple smoke hovered over his head and then twirled into the thick haze that hung in the room.

She relaxed and breathed in deeply. Thank God. It
 
was
 
a bar. And here was one of its drunken, pot smoking patrons in costume. An early Halloween party or surprise birthday party in get-up. That’s all. She’d been in worse situations. Being on the floor with a broken ankle was a new twist, but she could handle herself.

“I just dropped in,” she said. “Can’t you tell?”

Maybe expecting some laughs, she looked around, but the room was silent, all the costumed people staring at her. Or at least they seemed to be staring at her, their hoods pointed her way. Miranda could almost make out their faces—men and women, both—but if this were a party, no one was having a very good time, all of them watching her grimly.

Between the people’s billowing robes, she saw one man sitting at a table lit by a single candle, staring at her, his hood pulled back from his face. He was dark, tanned, and sipped something from a silver stein. Noticing her gaze, he looked up, and smiled, his eyes, even in the gloom of the room, gold. For a second, Miranda thought she recognized him, almost imagining she’d remember his voice if he stood up, pushed away from the table, and shouted for everyone to back away. Had she met him before somewhere? But where? She didn’t tend to meet robe wearers, even at the weirdest of poetry readings.

Just as he seemed to hear her thoughts, nodding at her, the crowd pushed in, murmuring, and as he’d appeared, he vanished in the swirl of robes.

“Who are you?” the man hovering over her asked, his voice low, deep, accusatory.

“My name’s Miranda Stead.”

“What are you?” the man asked, his voice louder, the suspicion even stronger.

Miranda blinked. What should she say? A woman? A human? Someone normal? Someone with some fashion sense? “A poet?” she said finally.

Someone laughed but was cut off; a flurry of whispers flew around the group and they pressed even closer.

“I’ll ask you one more time,” the man said, his breath now on her face. “How did you get here?”

“Look,” Miranda said, pushing her hair off her face angrily. “Back off, will you? I’ve got a broken ankle here. And to be honest with you, I wouldn’t have fallen in with you unless three degenerates hadn’t been chasing me up the street. It was either here or the morgue, and I picked here, okay? So do you mind?”

She pushed up on the bar and grabbed onto a stool, slowly getting to standing position. “I’ll just hobble on out of here, okay? Probably the guys wanting to kill me are long gone. Thanks so much for all your help.”

No one said a word, and she took another deep breath, glad that it was dark in the room. If there’d been any light, they would have seen her pulse beating in her temples, her face full of heat, her knees shaking. Turning slightly, she limped through a couple of steps, holding out her hand for the door. It should be right here, she thought, pressing on what seemed to be a wall. Okay, here.
 
Here!

As she patted the wall, the terror she’d had out on the street returned, but at least then, she’d been able to run. Now she was trapped, her ankle was broken, and she could feel the man with his deep distrust just at her shoulder.