Soul Siren (23 page)

“Will you…” My turn for shyness. I sensed a magic in her, a prowess that both tantalized and intrigued me. “Will you do things to me?”

Her mouth on mine in a sudden hungry rush as if my request was a granting of permission. I felt her straddle me like a man, climbing on top of me with almost a masculine assertiveness, snuggling down to crush our breasts against each other’s, Jill flicking her tongue out playfully, running it over my bottom lip just before she sank her teeth into it, rubbing her pussy urgently on my thigh. “I don’t know if this is going to work on a girl,” she murmured almost in apology, and she took my right arm and raised it above her head, nibbling the sweet spot just below my armpit. All at once she rolled onto her side to spoon behind me, left hand coming around to finger my pussy, right hand pressing against the small of my back, still tasting my skin below my arm.

I felt myself opening up to her as I heard her whisper
you’re so wet
and the actual slurping sound of her fingers on my slick labia, her fingers on my back sinking down, slithering down, making their way down, down, down to the very top of the cleft between my buttocks, and it was like she hit a massage point or something
there
. So intimate just at the top between the cheeks of my ass, and now Jill’s breath on my neck, tonguing me just behind the ear, my voice squealing surrender, “Oh, fuck me, baby, fuck me hard, please, please fuck me hard!”

Like a nimble cat, she scrambled to the other side so that she could face me, dexterously switching hands, and back she went to that delicious point just at the top of the cleft in my ass, three fingers inside me now plus a warm wet tongue alive in my mouth. Coming in short cathartic spasms now,
aah, aah, aah,
opening my eyes to look at her as I felt my mouth open in wonder as well, saying again and again like a chant, you’re so good, so good, baby, and in one violent quake, I held her tight as she rammed most of her hand into my greedy pussy, thumb on my clit, pumping my hips as I gritted my teeth and cried and cried.

I lay back with such a sense of grateful release, stroking her hair, saying, “For someone who says she’s never done this before, you sure know what you’re doing.”

She looked modestly down at the sheets, covering half her face in her hand. “I like…giving pleasure. I just always thought it was weird, you know, the idea of lying flat on your back and letting a guy do stuff to you. I can’t enjoy myself unless I’m pleasing my partner. It’s all intuitive for me.”

“So how can I please you?”

“I’m okay,” she said, kissing me reassuringly.

“I want to see you come,” I whispered.

“I…don’t know. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

“Well, what do you want, sweetie?”

“Do what you want with me,” she said. And when I hesitated, she added, “No, seriously. I can’t come unless I know the other person’s enjoying him—herself. It’s my hang-up.”

“You are straight,” I laughed. With one hand, I gently insisted, “Now lie back and think of England.”

“Shut
up
!”

But I was busy opening her legs. I smelled the enticing odour of her pussy. I probed with my tongue, I teased, I offered long, warm, wet strokes that worried that lovely bud of her clit. The tension in her legs seemed to gather in a ball, Jill’s fingers running through my hair. As she rose on the crest of the wave, her thighs began to close on my face, and she apologised in a high-pitched sob, spreading herself for me again as she flew back on the pillows. I was lapping her furiously, and when she cried out, a new tide of her juice flowed with her orgasm. I wanted her as swept away as I had been for her, my tongue still lathering her, and then the fingers that were in my hair softly caressed their way down to a point on my neck, tapping, gently tapping. I didn’t understand at all what she was doing. It was almost distracting me, and then as I sucked her clit into my mouth and began a rhythm with this mischievous technique, thrilled with her moans as she bit her lip, a bolt of lightning went from my neck down my spine and to the core of me. I was crying suddenly like a little girl, curling up in a fetal ball, still sucking Jill but touching my own pussy as my vaginal muscles contracted with a furious impulse. The two of us coming simultaneously, Jill getting off from striking at the very heart of me.

We kissed and fondled each other in after-play for a good hour, no words between us. Then she fell asleep. She seemed to fall asleep easily, little tossing and turning, not so much drifting off as suddenly collapsing into slumber. I traced a fingernail down from the mound of her breast, over the shadows of her ribs to the sweet fleshy portion of her hip, circling around to the softness of her ass. God, she was beautiful. She made love like a
Cosmo
magazine fantasy about massage therapists, those deadly
Kama Sutra
fingers of hers finding erogenous zones you never knew existed. She woke up and kissed me as if we’d been lovers for a while, asking groggily, “You okay?”

“Yeah. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

I was a little embarrassed, but I couldn’t stop.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I need…I was watching you sleep.” She had caught me masturbating.

For some reason, it made her smile. The flash of those brilliant teeth nearly drove me over the edge. “You getting off on actually watching me sleep?”

“Yeah.”

“You want some help?”

“Yeah.”

We kissed a short kiss on the lips again like familiar lovers. One more short kiss, then a long one as I kept strumming my clitoris, and there was a rustle of the bed sheets as her hand massaged my breasts then settled on a point between them. Kissing me, her other hand resting on my pubic bone. Her touch so light, no more than the weight of a coin. She told me later that all kinds of disciplines had identified these points on the body—acupuncture, chiropractic, cranio-sacral therapy. It was getting warm below my navel and between my breasts, and her voice was a dirty lullaby,
keep touching yourself, baby, you look so hot touching yourself, I want to taste your cream,
and oh oh oh, bringing my knees up and shedding tears as whatever she did to me this time happened.

Her mouth on me was exquisite, perfectly timed.

S
he found me half an hour later, standing naked in the doorway of Erica’s bedroom, asking once again if I was all right. I felt her arms drape around me, felt the wedge of her fur on my buttocks.

“I have a confession to make,” I said, turning to her.

She raised her eyebrows at me, still smiling, still on a high from our making love. She waited.

“I think I was a major bitch to you when you first showed up,” I said. “I guess I felt threatened. I’ve worked with Erica for quite a while now, and I…Well, I wasn’t prepared for someone else to work with her so closely, day in and day out.”

“Seems to me you got over it,” she laughed and hugged me close.

“Yeah, guess I did. I know it sounds silly now, but I feel guilty over how I behaved.”

“You
are
being silly. We both got our jobs to do.”

“That’s right,” I agreed. “You’re right. I have to share her now.”

In the darkness of the apartment, there was just enough light to see the fog of confusion on her face. I didn’t think what I said was so odd.

“That’s not the way I look at it,” she said after a moment.

“No?”

“Erica has to share
you
with
me
.”

She smiled at me in the darkness, our faces close together, and then she added, deflating me a bit, “Look, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea or lead you on. I like you, and this blew my mind but…I’m not looking for a serious relationship right now, guy or girl. I think I’d like to try this again—” She kissed me tenderly, briefly. “—And soon, but I also like how we’ve become friends. Would that be too weird for you? Hooking up when we need it? Some people have said to me, ‘Jill, you treat sex like a guy,’ like I’m a callous bitch or something, but I don’t know. I can’t be objective about myself.”

“It’s a two-way street,” I said, stroking her hair. “What if I’m really frustrated, and I need you for a night? You going to be there for me? Or will you tell me you’ve ‘done a lot of soul-searching,’ and you’ve found yourself now. That you’re straight?”

“Honey, I don’t think I’ll ever think of myself as that after tonight.”

Fair enough, I thought. Things were promising. Her talk about not wanting anything heavy but asking permission to sleep with me now and then—who was she kidding with that? We’ll see how it goes.

She led me back to my bed, and I was happy. I felt the euphoria of infatuation. And I also felt:
I’m home safe and dry.
She’s with me now. She asked me if she can trust me, and now she believes she can. Even if we don’t get involved, if we never sleep together again, there shouldn’t be any more questions about Steven Swann’s murder. Dead ends on all the roads to evidence, and the one persistent, relentless individual who once still gave a damn now likes me naked. Jill’s on my side now. It’s over.

I was wrong. I was wrong about everything.

I
was in my office when the phone rang. Morgan.
Ugh.
He didn’t bother to say hello. What he said in that gravelly tone was: “It’s not enough.” Blunt and to the point, and I wondered if he’d already been drinking.

“What’s not enough?”

“Your little kiss-off remuneration, my dear. I’ve got my pocket calculator out, and I can work up a rough estimate of what Erica’s going to make on her royalties.”

“Morgan, we had a deal.”

“Yeah, based on what we
thought
the songs were worth. Seems I underestimated your girl—or rather myself.”

I let out a long breath. “I can’t go and up your price again for the arrangement work. It’s a done deal, and you were paid. BSB’s going to wonder what the hell I’m thinking if—”

“Then get it from one of their other ‘special’ funds,” he snapped sarcastically.

“What? So you can come back and bleed us again?”

“I think I’m letting everyone off pretty easy considering what you’ll make off that album. And you know I can sink it with one phone call to
Rolling Stone
or one of the other mags. Doesn’t matter if they think I’m full of shit, they’ll print it anyway—”

“You keep threatening us, Morgan. No one will buy it, they’ll dismiss it out of hand.”

“Not if I go to court.”

“You do that, Morgan, and you know you’ll lose every friend you’ve got. You won’t even get gigs in basement dives anymore.”

“So you’re threatening me now?”

I sighed in exasperation. “No, Morgan, no, I’m not! We’re
friends
. Why are you doing this? I can talk to a couple of people around the office, see if we can get you more arrangement work, maybe even a producing contract on one of the B-artist albums—”

“I don’t need help getting work, Michelle,” he said indignantly. “And doing more work isn’t payment on work
already done
.”

“Why are you coming back to me with this shit, Morgan? Why do you want to hurt her?”

“This isn’t about hurting Erica,” he said. “Michelle, do you think she’s the first blazing hot talent to find her way into my elevator, demanding my help?”

“I’m sure she’s not.”

“Don’t patronise me, darlin’. No, she’s not. She is, however, for the record, the
best
of them, but that’s not the issue. They all come up, and I do my stuff and I teach ’em, man or woman, don’t care, and I give all of myself, you understand? I put it all out, and I get stupid time and again. Each time, I think it will be different. They go away, and I hear snatches of my own stuff coming out of their tracks, and I
try
not to be petty. Not one has ever cut me a cheque except Luther. And Erica and Luther had me do the arrangements, and that’s good. But that shouldn’t be my compensation! They didn’t put it to me that way when they asked, and if they had I would have told them to go to hell. So don’t ask me to be bend-over-backward grateful over what’s reasonably
my due
! Everybody’s great buddies until the money rolls in. Guess what? I’m a professional, too.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. Any bitterness he’d ever shown us had always been mitigated by his self-deprecating charm, his bearing and easy grace that seemed to be echoes of a Blue Note Birdland world we admired, but only as spectators gazing back in time. He admitted that he enjoyed all our attention, treating him like a holy relic and national treasure, but when a relic is locked away, it gathers dust. He was sick of it. Recognition would be nice, but cash you can spend. I could see his point—no, not about who wrote the songs. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that, not yet—I thought maybe he was owed more for how he helped her, plain and simple.

It was a debt of Erica’s I couldn’t repay. And Morgan had lately been evolving into another jazz cliché, hell, an entire music industry cliché. The gifted but anonymous player who starts to let himself go a little, who uses just enough drink that he’s not out-and-out pathetic but does become a self-fulfilling embarrassment.

“Morgan. We can talk about this. I can’t give you an answer over the phone. Let me check a few things out first. Why don’t I swing by your place tonight?”

“Okay. But if you’ll excuse the pun, Michelle, don’t bring me any late-night promises.”

I had a grim queasiness of familiarity in my stomach as I took the subway up to Morgan’s place. In some ways, I prepared better than I did with Steven, but a high percentage of me didn’t know what I was actually going to do. I carried the intent, but I didn’t have the means. I sat on the train, trying to concentrate on the tune playing through my portable CD player’s headphones. Vonda Shepherd again. I listened, aptly enough, to a song called “Soothe Me” with its achingly sad lyrics and mournful piano, a song of regret for a lonely wanderer through the streets of New York. It made me think of Luther and Erica, and Luther and Jill, and, yes, of course, I couldn’t hear it without thinking of Karen.
And, darling, I love you, but I swear that I’ll be goo-ooonnnne by the time you figure out what you want…