The Red Collection (34 page)

How delightful it would be to ensorcell her again and plunge his borrowed stiffness into her.

He experienced a momentary qualm … guilt, he recognised. Guilt at exploiting the slumbering woman, and using her for his own satisfaction – even though he had given her pleasure and her subconscious had gladly welcomed him.

No, next time they joined – fucked, had sex, made love, as the humans so whimsically called it, even when they didn’t love each other – next time, exquisite Lois would be an active conscious participant. That was a promise he silently made, and swore to keep.

Yet still his acquired flesh ached and ached.

Of course, the answer was to disassociate again. No body. No arousal. No physical ache. But he didn’t want to do that. The month of May was precious and there were only a couple of days remaining. He wanted to remain human for as much time as he could.

Settling into his chair, he unzipped his jeans and drew out his cock.

How fine and delightful it felt to caress himself. To fuck the beautiful girl curled up on the bed was obviously the ideal satisfaction, but handling himself had its own particular charm. Curling his large fist around himself, he pumped greedily at his penis, working and working it. There was no need to take his time. No need to delay in order to increase his partner’s sensations. He could rush, snatch his release quickly, come fast and hard.

But, when relief came, her name was noiseless on his lips.

For a while afterwards, he just sat there, letting his consciousness roam around the room, examining her possessions and her clothing, learning about her.

Eventually his attention settled on the device set on the rustic table, the one she called her laptop.

Robin had come to understand what the laptop was, and he applauded it as an excellent mode of communication. Humankind might be sorely limited in the way they interacted with one another, but they were ingenious in creating mechanisms to allow themselves to do the best they could, and this small computer was a prime example of what they could achieve.

He touched it and, energised by
his
energy, it sprang to life. Quickly, he rode its patterns of force and deduced the way to mute its operating noises. He didn’t want to wake Lois yet. It would be better to ‘meet’ her for the first time in more acceptable circumstances. Finding an intruder in her bedroom wouldn’t get their relationship off to a very good start!

As he played with the device, he sifted through thoughts and notions that he’d gleaned from Lois. She was vexed with her little computer, and vexed with herself over it. Out here, far from so-called civilisation, there was no way for her to connect it to the great web of energy lines she called ‘the internet’. It needed something called ‘wi-fi’ to become a part of that matrix.

Robin smiled. It was simply a node that was required, a nexus that would focus yet another pattern of force. Swooping down, he caught up a big handful of dust and compressed it tightly in his palm.

A moment later, he looked down at a small gleaming
lozenge
shape that pulsed softly in the dim light of the cabin.

His kind weren’t called magical for nothing, he thought wryly, as he attached the little ‘hotspot’ to the underside of the desk, well out of sight.

A gift, my Lois, he thought fondly. In return for the pleasure you gifted to me.

With one last longing glance at her, he disassociated and floated away.

‘What the fuck?’

Staring at the screen, Lois forgot the shivering chill of the cabin. She forgot the fact that her feet were blocks of ice and she could only keep marginally warm by wrapping the entire duvet and a couple of extra blankets around her. She even, for the moment, forgot the raving hot erotic dream she’d had, that seemed to have burnt itself into her brain in lurid Technicolor detail.

She had a wi-fi connection where one was impossible.

‘This is mad!’ She refreshed the list again.

But there it was. She was logged into a connection designated ‘000000’ and the signal strength was excellent and the speed frankly phenomenal!

Absently rubbing her chilled toes together to increase their circulation, she went through all the settings, and everywhere, where there should have been strings of figures, she got ‘000000’.

‘This is mad,’ she repeated, and then clicked on the icon for Google, which brought up the search engine instantaneously.

The inexplicable connection bugged her, but after a few fruitless minutes of diagnostics, she gave up.

What the hell, at least the IP address wasn’t 666.666.666.6.

By the time she’d checked all her favourite pages, and
even
uploaded a bit of work to her testing server, the sun was high in the sky and its soft yellow rays were cascading in through the windows to warm up the cabin.

Thank heavens for an oil-fired heating system!

Lois was grateful for that small mercy as she took a shower in the tiny cubicle. It might be absolute rubbish at warming the rooms of the cabin, but at least it provided plenty of hot water.

She needed to be clean after last night. She’d felt icky and sticky and foxy after that dream. Masturbating in her sleep? Nothing wrong with it, really, nothing at all, but still sort of disturbing that she should be so horny, and not actually all that consciously aware of it.

Touching herself before she stepped beneath the spray, she’d been almost afraid she’d smell the odour of lavender on her fingers, and she’d been relieved – but irrationally disappointed – when all she’d smelt was plain old Lois-smell.

The bay was bright and blue when she stepped out on to the shared porch connecting the two cabins. Despite its convenience, the phantom wi-fi connection troubled her more than she cared to think about and, contrary to her every usual instinct and inclination, she’d turned off her laptop and decided to get out into the fresh air and do some ‘nature’.

But why is it so bloody cold?

Despite the late-May sun, she was glad of her fleece and her boots as she trudged down the short packed-earth track and on to the beach. With just the two holiday cabins sharing it, the tiny bay was deserted. Lois had no idea where her neighbour was. She’d thought she’d heard him tramping about on the porch earlier, but now there was no sign of him. It would have been nice to make friends because, when she had managed to encounter him briefly once or twice, she’d
rather
fancied him. He was good-looking in a slightly heavyset sort of way. But there was nothing doing. His responses had been barely monosyllabic, and a dark pall of ‘touch me not’ sadness seemed to envelop him.

‘Poor bugger,’ Lois observed as she stepped out on to the sand and made for the firmer stuff, closer to the water’s edge, ‘but you can’t be happy if you don’t give anyone a chance to cheer you up, can you?’

Yes, it would have been nice to forge a little holiday romance with her bay-mate if he’d been amenable, but maybe she didn’t really need one. Not with the hyper-real sex dreams she was having! She was having plenty of erotic kink without any of the effort of the courtship dance. It was perfect. She could be as lazy as she liked, and still get satisfaction. Result!

Away from the pull of her computer, and the puzzle of the mysterious wi-fi connection, her experience of last night rushed in again to claim her.

Boy, had it been hot!

Dream Lover might have been chilly-skinned, but everything else about him was nothing short of incendiary. Just thinking about it all warmed her up inside her fleece and jeans, despite the spiteful bite of the nippy wind.

Dream Lover rose up before her in her imagination.

The tall dark powerful man out of nowhere was a classic romantic archetype, but where the hell had the image of odd eyes and gold-frosted hair come from? She had no explanation for those.

Not to mention the funky smell of lavender.

She seemed to smell it now, that rich sweet scent. And her body was growing warmer and warmer and warmer, surging and rousing with a rush of reborn lust.

The mysterious stranger advanced through her mind towards her and she felt so weak at the knees that she was forced to stagger to a scrappy outcrop of sand grass that had created a small dune at the edge of the beach.

Cowering on the little hump, she hugged her arms around her, shaken by the intensity of returned lust.

This is mad! Just mad! I’m going crazy!

For the second time in a morning, it was impossible to focus on reality. She was right back in her sweet, dangerous, nocturnal fantasy even while she scanned the bright clear sky above the bay.

A solitary bird was wheeling in the brisk salty air. It was dark, and appeared tiny so far aloft, but, as she watched it, there suddenly seemed a new purpose to its circling. It swooped, and seemed to be flying right at her, inducing a wild rush of Hitchcock-related panic.

Don’t be crazy! How can it have seen you? And, if it has, why would it fly at you?

Yet still the bird, a gull of some kind, was closing, diving on dark wings, but revealing a strange mottling to its plumage as it neared. There were lighter speckles among the feathers around its head and its eyes, possibly white, possibly yellow … possibly gold.

Lois wanted to spring to her feet, and run back to her cabin, pack up her gear and just get the hell out of Dodge … but all she could do was sit and watch, locked in place as the bird began to circle again, slowly, maintaining its distance in the air over the water.

The leisurely repeated sweeps were hypnotic. Her fear ebbed, and the strange warmth in her body grew almost tropical.

And so, to her astonishment, did the low, deep, sweet
welling
of desire. Night and day coexisted somehow; she was in her dream, but also awake, in the sunshine.

Half her mind watched a bird. Half of it was back in the cabin, in the soft lamplight, watching Dream Lover approach, anticipating his touch.

‘Oh please,’ she whimpered, repeating her plea from last night.

She yearned for him, desire flickering deep in her groin for this vivid, but imaginary man. Her nipples tingled, her sex clenched on emptiness, the hunger to be filled so intense it brought tears to her eyes.

No real man had ever satisfied her like him.

Without thinking, she clasped her hand to her crotch, squeezing, trying to ease the ache. Pressing and massaging, she stared up at the strange dark gull, watching it execute a graceful diving spiral, almost in response to her action. Then she looked down again, observing her own pale hand against the stonewashed cloth of her jeans, and wishing it were another hand. One that was bigger and stronger and totally male.

Imagining him behind her, she moaned, longing for it to be his great body on which she leaned while she took her pleasure, longing for his arms to enfold her and gentle her through the spasms.

‘Oh! Oh, God!’ Crying out, she came in a sudden rush, out of the blue, dimly hearing the gull shriek too, as if applauding her or even sharing her crisis.

Still clutching herself, she wrapped her other arm around her torso, hugging and rocking.

She didn’t hear the heavy trudging footsteps until it was too late, and, when they did penetrate her haze, she looked straight up into the frowning face of her next-door neighbour.

‘Are you all right?’

Hot blood flooded her cheeks. Oh, God, it must be obvious what she’d been doing, and his dour frown seemed to confirm her worst suspicions. His grim set expression spoilt what was really a very personable countenance. Any normal man would have been smirking at her, turned on by what she’d been up to … but not him. He appeared unutterably depressed and disapproving.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’ Even though it was a lost cause, Lois snatched her hand from her crotch and stuffed it surreptitiously into her pocket. ‘Thanks. Just got a bit of a stitch. It’s going now. Thanks.’

‘Sure?’ His brow was still crumpled.

She had no idea whether he believed her but, if he didn’t, her little exhibition obviously left him cold. His eyes were bleak and bitter, as if he were already weary of talking to her.

‘Yes, thanks, I’m fine,’ she parroted, her face flaming.

‘I’ll be getting along then. Be seeing you,’ he concluded gruffly, and, as he turned and stomped away, Lois didn’t know whether to be angry or relieved.

He thinks I’m some kind of sex maniac. He thinks I’m disgusting!

‘Well, screw you!’ she muttered, hurling the suppressed insult at the broad retreating back that had already reached the path and was rapidly receding from view. ‘Any
normal
man would be all over me like a rash.’

Attracted by a flash of movement, she realised that the dark gull-like bird had landed only a couple of yards away from her and was regarding her solemnly, its peculiarly mottled head cocked on one side.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, birdie! I know the guy’s obviously got some serious problems and I should feel sorry for him …’
She
paused, her throat tight all of a sudden, and her eyes hot with unexpected tears. ‘But I’m lonely. I’m used to being around people … but Sandy said I needed a break.’ Bright avian eyes blinked and Lois blinked too. There was something very odd about this creature, and yet she couldn’t stop herself rambling on to it. ‘I don’t know … when I saw him, I was sort of hopeful; it’s a while since I, um, was with anybody, and I suppose I was hoping I’d get a bit of holiday nookie.’

The bird hopped sideways and flapped its wings making Lois jump.

‘Oh fucking hell, I’m talking to birds now! I’ve had enough of this … I’m off to the shop to get some wine and I’m going to get drunk!’

She leapt to her feet and, as she did so, the bird took flight and seemed to hover for a moment, floating above her, before flapping vigorously and soaring away.

Lois shook her head.
I’m going nuts here … just another day or so, to keep Sandy quiet, and then I’m back to town, no messing
.

Wondering what kind of wine the small local shop stocked, and how much of it they had, she stomped off towards the path, her sandy footsteps blending with those of her neighbour.