Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (10 page)

She let the book fall open, found herself unsurprised when the page it opened to turned out to be written in spiky, old-fashioned handwriting and purple ink.

TO CALL FORTH THE ONE WHO WILL SATISFY YOU, said the heading at the top of the page. Then a bunch of nonsense words.

The one who would satisfy her. Hah. As if.

As if Jason hadn’t always promised he’d stick with her the rest of her life, when he couldn’t even stick with her past his own orgasm. Spurt and snore! She always had to take care of herself after he fell asleep. But she had liked being able to sleep next to him afterward, liked waking up to find he had slipped out of the apartment to go to the Danish bakery to get pastries and coffee for them both. She had liked sharing the paper with him over their impromptu breakfast, and she had loved standing on the corner after her last class of the day, secure in the knowledge that he would swing by and pick her up every time, that they would plan their evening and night together.

All those things she loved doing, and he had said she was smothering him.

Whose ideas had all those things been? She thought they had negotiated. But maybe she had been shoving all her ideas onto Jason, making him feel trapped.

Or maybe he wasn’t the person she had thought he was. Maybe he was just a prick.

She let her skirt fall around her thighs and pressed her bare hands down on the outer edges of the book to hold it open. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if you could say a bunch of nonsense words and conjure up a truly satisfying someone?

Conjure.

Aunt Helen was off meeting with the gals to swap recipes and play cards.

Mariah took a good look at the dried plants, the strange things on the upper shelf, the leather-covered desk with its outlines of old chalk. Weren’t the chalk shadows circles and letters in some other alphabet, and even a five-pointed star?

Maybe Aunt Helen really
was
a witch.

Did you have to be a witch to work magic?

Maybe it would be better if you did.

But maybe she should just say something and see what happened.

The one who would satisfy her.

Hah.

She leaned over the book, read the words to herself, then lifted her head and spoke them aloud.

Of course, nothing happened.

Maybe she had pronounced the words wrong. Or maybe this was all bullshit. Just a bunch of loony old ladies with no purpose in life getting together to pretend they had power.

Mariah studied the writing, saw that some words had accents. She spoke the words again, accenting the syllables as indicated. Yes, it sounded different this time. But it was no more effective.

She squinted at the title of the spell. TO CALL FORTH THE ONE WHO WILL SATISFY YOU. Below it in small, almost faded green letters was a legend: REPEAT THRICE.

What did she have to lose? She said the spell a third time.

Warmth bloomed at her back, and a smell like wood smoke drifted through the air. “What will you give me?” murmured a gentle voice in her ear, the breath of the words warming her cheek.

She turned and saw smoke coalesce. “What?” she said. Had she set the house on fire?

The smoke flowed and gathered into a human shape. A naked, muscular, male human shape. The skin color shifted from smoke gray to warm brown. The face took shape: he had a nicely defined jaw, sharp cheekbones, slanted amber eyes, and his lips looked luscious as he smiled at her. His hair was orange red. Flickers of flame rose from it, twisted into smoke in midair.

He held out warm brown hands to her. “What will you give me if I satisfy you?”

“What?” she said again. She blinked three times. Had she really seen a man appear out of smoke? Or was this some guy who’d been hiding in the study all along?

Sure, a naked guy hiding in her aunt’s study, just waiting for her to say some kooky spell out loud, when the odds were she wasn’t even going to come in here at all. Hah. As if.

He drifted closer without a sound. She glanced down. Maybe he didn’t produce footsteps because he was floating an inch or two above the floor. He moved without shifting his large, beautiful feet at all. Speaking of feet—well, speaking of size and shape—this guy had just gotten here and already he was happy to see her.

Her hands itched to reach out and caress him.

“Uh,” she said, “what do you want?”

“I want to share your satisfaction.”

“Uh,” she said, “how would that work?”

“If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

“Um. Sounds good to me.”

“Excellent.” He cupped her face in his hands. His touch was warm and smooth and gentle. He stroked his thumb slowly over her lips, slid it into her mouth, and she sucked on it, her top teeth moving across the ball of his thumb, her tongue stroking along the smooth square of his thumbnail. He tasted like heat and smoke and just a little like steak. Oh, how strange, how delightful, she thought, as he leaned forward and kissed her forehead, then each eyelid. Her hands reached of their own accord to close around his hot, silky shaft, and he moaned with pleasure.

He eased his thumb out of her mouth and touched his lips to hers. His mouth tasted like peppermint, sweet, so sweet, and burning. His tongue slipped into her mouth, snaked over her own tongue, stroked the insides of her cheeks. She sucked on his tongue, and it changed shape in her mouth to something broad that perfectly fit the space in her mouth, but left room for her to breathe. She moaned around it and sucked.

His hands had left her cheeks, slid down to cup her breasts. Or was that right? She also felt his arms embracing her, and something pulled her closer to him as she worked her hands up and down his shaft. She smelled something burning and looked down. Her clothes singed and dropped from her breasts and stomach as he moved his hands over her, but she felt warmth, not flame, at his touch.

He worked her nipples with some of his hands, sent exquisite streaks of pleasure through her that loosened heat and moisture in her lower self. Some of his hands massaged her head, and some, smoky and unbound by the constraints of human arm length, wrapped around her to wander over her back and buttocks. “Open for me,” he whispered, though how he could whisper with his tongue in her mouth, she couldn’t tell. But oh, she was ready for him to enter even deeper. She opened her legs—somehow, her feet no longer touched the ground— how could that be? But he held her in his arms, however many arms he had, and he wasn’t properly in touch with the floor either. She opened her legs, and he nudged her knees farther apart. He took her hands in his, pulled them from his penis, massaged her fingers, and brought her hands up to press them against his chest. Her palms flattened against the hard nubs of his nipples.

The head of his magnificent penis pressed against her lower lips, and she strained to pull him into her, but he teased her, pushing in a little, then withdrawing. She arched and struggled, tried to push herself down onto him. She wanted him inside her, wanted to trap and hold him, but he was holding her in all his arms, all those skillful hands wandering over her, teasing here, tickling there, squeezing elsewhere. He held her just where he wanted her, his tongue still a hot wet presence in her mouth, tapping and flicking the roof of her mouth, his eyes wide and amber so close to her own, so beautiful. She struggled to swallow him and couldn’t. She felt the sweat rise on her skin; his hands gloried in sliding over her. Finally she lay quiet in his embrace, and then he lowered her down onto him. He filled her perfectly, all the way, just the shape she wanted to pull inside her and hold forever—just there. She shivered and clenched around him. Now I have you, she thought, and I’m not letting go.

“Oh, yes,” he murmured, and braced himself against something and thrust even deeper into her. Then he was pumping into her, and she was riding him, and riding the waves that swept over and through her, higher, higher, waves that sent her shuddering in wide red whorls of pleasure and delight, and he pinned her there, pulsing and throbbing, in the sphere of stars, fountains of hot red fire rising through her. He was in her and around her, his taste on her tongue, his heat against her skin, his many fingers tapping in time to her racing pulses as she exploded with joy.

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.”

It was unbearable, unbreakable. How could she stay here? How could she take another moment of this unutterable bliss?

He hugged her closer, and she shattered.

* * *

She woke on the floor of her aunt’s study, still throbbing with the aftershocks of pleasure. Ashes sprinkled the floor around her, and her inside passage itched and burned with pleasurable heat. She felt stretched and achy, but completely satisfied.

She pushed up on her elbows and gazed down at herself. Her skin was patterned with charcoal handprints. Her clothes had disappeared. Her mouth was full of sweet.

“But—” she said. “Oh, but—where are you? Who were you? Come back.”

The grandfather clock in the living room bonged. Mariah lay back and listened as it struck. Twelve strokes.

Twelve!

Aunt Helen had said she’d be back after midnight. Aunt Helen had tried, in her roundabout way, to make Mariah stay out of the study. Why? To deny her this pleasure so intense that everything else faded?

Mariah struggled to her feet. She staggered to the desk and stared down at the spell. TO CALL FORTH THE ONE WHO WILL SATISFY YOU. She needed a copy …

She glanced at the floor, saw ashes everywhere. Ashes! Ashes of her clothes? These handprints on her skin, would they wash off? Oh, she needed to clean up before Aunt Helen came home!

But she needed to copy that spell first. No, there was no time. If she could make it look as though she’d never been in the study, maybe she’d get another chance—

She closed the leather book and tied it up in its thong, then raced out of the room. She fetched a broom and dustpan and swept up the ashes and threw them in the kitchen trash can. Ashes of what? Her former clothes? Or their passion? Where had he gone? What was his name? She mopped the floor with damp paper towels.

After she was sure she had cleaned up all traces of her invasion, she closed the study door. Now for the shower. Oh, these strange powdery gray handprints all over her, evidence that something had touched her. Touched her everywhere, she thought, twisting to see her back in the mirror. Splayed-fingered handprints on her butt. Oh, yes, he had held her tight, whatever he had been. However many hands he had had … how was it that he had so many hands? Maybe he was some kind of Hindu god.

If she rolled in a white towel, would the handprints come off, leave her a map of their passion, proof that he had ever been there? Could she get his fingerprints and track him down? Ridiculous. She bet nothing with six or eight or ten arms would be in the criminal database. Not without at least a mention on the cover of the
National Enquirer
, which she’d studied every week at the supermarket, wondering about the depths journalism sometimes sank to.

With a story like hers, though, maybe she could make a deal with the
Enquirer
. She heard they paid well. What a start to her journalism career.

Forget it. Whatever had happened, she wanted to keep it to herself. She ran the shower good and hot and stepped under the stream of water.

The water hung in the air, and his face formed from it, crystal and clear, only the eyes colored, glowing amber above his clear smile. “Share happiness again?” he said, more and more of him forming around her as water poured from the showerhead.

“What’s your name?” she whispered. His embrace felt different, wet, hot, all-encompassing, exciting.

He rubbed his cheek on hers. He felt smooth and wet and solid at the same time, an impossible slick texture that made the hair on the back of her neck prickle and rise. This time his shape was even less human than last time, flowing streams that ran up and down over her, everywhere, though nothing ran down the drain. He was as close to her as a hot bath, wrapped around her like a down quilt, but more active. Everywhere on her skin he pulsed and thrummed, submarine sounds more felt than heard, waking sweeps of pleasure that arrowed through her. She closed her eyes, drowning in the sensation of being touched everywhere by warm wet rapture.

“My name,” he whispered in her ear.

“You went away,” she said, panting between words, “and you didn’t tell me who you were or how to find you.”

“You want to find me?” The throbbing against her skin speeded up. Shudders of delight wracked her. She reached down to finger herself, but the water swelled against her clitoris, swelled and grew harder, pulsed in mind-altering rhythm.

“Mmm,” she moaned. She breathed high and hard and spread her legs apart, and he flowed into her.

“My name,” he whispered again, then breathed a string of syllables into her ears. “Oh, my exquisite ocean of bliss, my delightful source of nourishment. Only say my name, and I will come for you anywhere, anytime. You taste so good.”

He was all around her, insistent, stroking and pressing and sucking her until she writhed in pleasure.

Later, she blinked back to herself to discover she sat on the floor of the shower, cold water pulsing down on her from the showerhead. She was so warm inside she thought water should turn to steam as it hit her. She felt so tired she could hardly stand up and shut off the shower.

Oh, God. He had told her his name, but it was so long and strange she couldn’t remember it.

Not that she’d want to say it again tonight. She barely had the energy to dry off, brush her teeth, and collapse across her bed.

* * *

A timid knock sounded at her door. Mariah groaned and rolled over onto her back, then put her arm across her eyes to block the morning light.

The knock sounded again. “Mariah?” Aunt Helen asked. “Honey?”

Mariah groaned. She lifted her head, saw she was naked on top of her bed. “Just a minute,” she called, and her voice came out creaky. She struggled to her feet, staggered over to the closet, and pulled out a bathrobe. In the mirror on the closet door she stared at her image before she pulled on the gray terrycloth. She looked … clean. Very, very clean. No more handprints all over her body. She leaned closer, nose to nose with her image. There was a faint pattern on her skin: swirls, almost invisible against her tan, a little more obvious where her swimsuit covered her. A tracing of river waves.