He heard her swallow.
He let his hand graze the side of her breast through her tank top. She drew in a breath, but didn’t move away from him.
“You won’t be sorry,” he murmured as he caressed her breast, lightly thumbing the nipple.
Through a low chuckle as she turned toward him, she said, “I’m beginning to get that idea.”
Eight
IS IT TRUE you can deep throat a guy, like in the movie? Doobie told me you—Oh. Oh, God. Oh, my God, Lili. Fuck, yeah. Take it all. Suck it deep . . .” It was a guttural whisper from somewhere in the heaps of bodies surrounding me, maybe twenty, thirty feet away, but I heard it like it was breathed right into my ear.
About an hour had passed since Madeleine got pissed and cut out. Having tired of the bonfire, most of the Gangsters had retreated into the bathhouse, where they lit candles and sticks of incense, Pieter playing a guitar and Diane a recorder while the others lay around on pillows toking up and drinking and getting frisky.
I still sat slumped against the rock wall, smoking cigarettes and tapping the ashes into my empty beer bottle as I waited for Emmett to come back. I didn’t talk to anybody, just sat there taking in the scene, watching the candles glint like stars amid a dark, slowly roiling kaleidoscope of batik and tie-dye, hair and arms and legs . . .
Tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .
It felt almost as if time itself had been dialed down to a slower speed. Every time I raised or lowered my cigarette, the red-hot tip drew a line of fluorescence that hovered in the darkness for a second before fading away. I wasn’t remotely drunk; I’d had, like, two beers in as many hours. I started wondering if maybe I was getting off on all the pot smoke in the air, ’cause my thoughts were getting pretty damn slippery, except I’d smoked pot a couple of times, and it didn’t feel anything like this.
I decided it had just been a long, strange day at the tail end of a long, strange weekend. I was tired and bored, but too paralyzed by ennui to get up and make my way out of here and back to the château. The way I was feeling, I’d just end up tripping over everybody, anyway.
As summer evenings go, it was fairly cool, which may have been why there was just one couple in the pool, Elic and a voluptuous chick wearing a leather thong as a headband. She appeared to be sitting on the submerged bench. He was kneeling between her legs, the two of them holding each other close, hardly moving. She had on a white bikini, or at least the top of it, so I wouldn’t have known what was going on if I hadn’t heard her whispering, in a shuddery pre-orgasmic way, “That’s it . . . that’s it. Keep it slow, just like that. Grind against my clit. Yeah . . . oh, yeah, oh God . . .”
Her whisper was just one of many reverberating off the marble walls, filling my skull with a hubbub of conversations and low moans, the sucking of joints and cigarettes and cocks, the fleshy kiss of lips, skin rubbing against skin, grunts, endearments, entreaties . . .
“Slow down. Let’s come at the same time.” It was the whispered, breathless voice of Inigo, who’d been messing around with a pretty little thing named Maria. “All three of us.”
I took a closer look and saw that someone else had, indeed, joined them under their ubiquitous Indian throw. It was dark even with the candles, but I recognized the third person by his superblack hair and his height as Prince Valiant. The three of them lay snugged up together on their sides, moving to the same laid-back cadence. With two guys and a girl, you’d expect the girl to be the meat of the sandwich, but it was Inigo in the middle, screwing Maria face-to-face with Val tucked up behind him.
No fucking way, I thought, but through the thin throw, I could see Val’s ass pumping in a slow, undeniably carnal rhythm as he reached around Inigo to squeeze and caress Maria’s ass. “So, are ye bisexual, then?” he asked Inigo in a husky, slightly strained brogue.
Inigo shook his head. “Hedonist. I like girls, but man, I gotta tell you, having a big, thick cock inside you when you’ve got your own big, thick cock inside a nice tight, sweet pussy . . . I’m telling you, it doesn’t get much better.”
All righty, then. I lifted the beer bottle to my mouth, forgetting that it was empty but for ashes and butts, and Whoooaaa . . . When I lowered it, I wasn’t just seeing double, but triple, quadruple, quintuple, and on and on, a whole water-fall of shimmery green bottles.
What the fuck?
Okay, so it wasn’t the beer and it wasn’t a contact high. I’d smoked opium in ’Nam once, and it wasn’t like that, either. No mellowness, no somnolent bliss. Quite the opposite, in fact. I was starting to feel seriously fucked up.
So, if it wasn’t a drug . . .
“Hitch, did you hear me?” a woman said softly.
I looked and saw Jo, my eager-beaver playmate from that afternoon’s body-painting session, cuddling under an afghan nearby with Willow. Only, they were doing more than cuddling, as I discovered when Jo lifted the afghan and said, “Join us.”
Jo had her Wimbledon College T-shirt tugged up above her breasts, her fatigue pants bunched around one ankle. Willow still had on the see-through peasant blouse she’d been wearing when Bernie read her chakras earlier, but she was naked from the waist down. The two girls were locked together with their legs entwined, rubbing their pussies together.
“We need a nice, hard cock to play with,” whispered Willow as she thrust her hips, leaving ghostly shadows.
Oh, shit.
“Please, Hitch?” Jo implored, eyeing me seductively as she plucked one of her friend’s hard little nipples through the diaphanous blouse. “I won’t be bossy, I promise. We’re both so wet already, you won’t have to do anything but put it in us—first one, then the other. We’ll come in seconds, I guarantee you.”
“And then give you a nice long massage,” Willow purred, “your back and then your front—a very thorough massage. We’ll use our tongues.”
“We’ll lick you slowly and softly,” Jo said, “no sucking, no matter how hard you beg us, just licking, till you’re so crazy from it that you just grab one of us and shove it in our mouth and spew like a fucking geyser.”
Yeah, good luck with that.
This was every man’s dream, two scorching blondes begging for it, talking dirty, raring to go, and there I sat with my limp dick and my galloping dementia, and they were staring at me, their smiles turning perplexed, disappointed.
“Something wrong?” Jo asked.
Only that I was a fucking eunuch in the middle of a nervous breakdown, trying to figure out how to turn down two sex bombs who wanted to fuck and suck my brains out.
Jo and Willow looked at each other.
“You stoned?” Willow asked.
If only. I shook my head before realizing that would have been the perfect excuse, being too stoned to function, if only I’d had the presence of mind to grab at it. “Um . . .”
I lifted my beer bottle to buy a few seconds, groaned at the cascade of iridescent green afterimages, and put it down, and one of the girls whispered,“Fucked up,”and the other one said, “I didn’t see him smoke anything,” and I thought, They know. They know I’m not just stoned or drunk, they know I’m fucked in the head.
Tap tap tap . . .
They know. They all knew, not just the girls, ’cause they weren’t the only ones staring now. They all saw me there, cowering against the wall, afraid to get up and pick my way through this minefield of writhing, glowing bodies to get out of here, ’cause I didn’t think I could manage that, not in the state of mind I was, not with all their grinning faces looking at me like they knew I was crazy, but they had no idea how fucking crazy I really was.
“. . . scorched . . .”
“. . . Vietnam. That’s how they get.”
All the whispers, no matter how far away, I heard them all, an atonal chorus of hisses and snickers and mutters, and of course the tapping, growing louder and louder . . .
Tap tap tap tap tap . . .
It was like being back in that fucking black box, crouching there in the dark with my f
ists pressed to my ears, trying desperately to block it all out.
Just breathe, I told myself. Don’t think, just breathe.
“There it is! Catch it!”
Four guys ran into the bathhouse amid screams and shrieks of laughter, stumbling over the people lying there, leaving jerky streams of afterimages in their wake, chasing a cat, that gray cat from before, as it darted this way and that, skirting bodies.
“I got it!” someone yelled. “Wait. What the fuck?”
“Where is it? Where’d it go?”
“Hey, check it out, it’s John Wayne Hitchens.” It was Bernie, gesturing toward me with his beer bottle.
Shit. Driven by primal instinct, I rose to my feet without even thinking about it, ’cause thinking wasn’t exactly on the agenda, and stepped in front of the cave entrance so there wasn’t a wall at my back. My arms were at my sides, hands ready, brain not remotely ready, short-circuited wires in there, twitching and crackling.
Not a good time for this. Not a good fucking time at all.
“Having a good time?” Bernie asked, fixing those sly eyes on me as he took a slug out of his beer bottle. “Having a good fucking time, are we? You look a bit peaked, actually. Doesn’t he look peaked?”
His friends agreed that I looked peaked.
I knew I should say something so I didn’t look like some kind of zombie just standing there staring at them.
“Cat got your tongue?” Bernie asked. “What are you staring at? You look like a fucking zombie.”
“What?” I said.
“I said you look like a zombie.”
“But I was just thinking that.”
Bernie and his friends erupted in laughter, weird hysterical laughter, their lips drawn back to show their teeth, barking like hyenas in the night, toying with their prey.
“Keep on truckin’ there, Hitchens,” said Bernie as he turned and led his slobbering pack out of the bathhouse.
“Happy trails,” one of them called out, and they screamed with laughter as the night swallowed them up.
I was standing now. That was something. But the prospect of negotiating my way to the door of the bathhouse through all those bodies, all those eyes now staring directly at me . . .
Not my imagination. They were really staring, just staring like I was something in a zoo.
“You all right, man?” The voice sounded funny. An accent. Pieter.
Man? I sure as hell didn’t feel like much of a man, standing there like an idiot in the middle of an orgy, for God’s sake, with no way to take part even if I wanted to, thanks to the extra-special attention my captors had paid to Sparky and the boys during that savage post-escape beating. Clubs, boots, that iron rod . . .
“Hitch?” A woman’s voice. “Are you—”
I turned and bolted into the cave, ducking through the opening and running right into someone who was sitting there. I stumbled and fell, hearing him grunt as I slammed a knee into his chest, me kicking his legs as I went down.
“Sorry,” I said as I sat up on the floor of packed earth. “I didn’t see you . . .”
I still didn’t see him. There was no one there, although I swore I could hear footsteps retreating into the cave.
Oh, shit. I was gone. I’d completely and totally lost it.
Nine
BY MORNING, THE rain had ceased and the sky had cleared. Adrien awoke to find his bedroom ablaze with sunshine. He rolled over carefully, so as not to awaken Isabel, but her side of the bed was empty.
He donned his dressing gown and slippers and checked the bathroom. She wasn’t there, nor did she answer when he called her name down the hall.
He went downstairs, thinking she might have decided to make him breakfast. The kitchen was empty, as was the rest of the ground floor. He even checked the gardens surrounding the lodge, although he didn’t expect to find her out there; it was sunny, but chilly.
She was gone. She’d gotten up during the night and left. Slipped away without even saying goodbye. Of course, she hadn’t been too keen on sleeping there in the first place, ostensibly because it would only draw them closer together. It was all right to have sex, but not to share a bed and enjoy breakfast together in the morning. So much for their twelve stolen hours, their crêpes and berries and orange juice and big pot of strong coffee.
Adrien returned to the kitchen and set about making his usual small pot of coffee for himself. He put some water on to boil, ground up a handful of beans, got his press pot out of the cabinet over the vintage enameled stove, and hurled it at the opposite wall, where it cracked in a burst of glass shards.
“Zut!” Adrien kicked the stove, smashing his three smallest toes into its corner. He could feel the little bones splinter and crumple within the slipper-clad foot.
He dropped to the floor, bellowing “Merde! Zut! Merde!”
For a minute, he lay on his back grinding fists into his forehead as if that would help to stifle the pain in his foot. “Crétin,” he growled. “Imbécile.
He sat up, wincing as he pulled off the slipper, already snug from the swelling on the right side of his foot. By grabbing on to the stove, he managed to haul himself to his feet. Gritting his teeth, he limped over to the phone, snatched it from its cradle, and punched the button for the gatehouse.
“Bonjour, mon seigneur.” It was Mike. “Puis-je vous aider?”
“Pouvez-vous me conduire à l’hôpital?” Adrien said. “I broke my damn foot.”
It wasn’t until the sun had set the following night that Adrien made it back to the château.
He hobbled into the courtyard on his booted black walking cast, over which he wore a pair of blue jeans with the side seam of the right leg split from knee to ankle. Not wanting to ruin any of his good trousers, he’d dug the ratty, twenty-year-old jeans out of an attic trunk, along with the wrinkled and threadbare Rolling Stones T-shirt and denim jacket he’d put on simply because they’d been underneath the jeans.
On coming back to the hunting lodge from the hospital yesterday afternoon, he’d turned off his cell phone, unplugged the landline, and lain down for a fourteen-hour nap. For the past thirty-six hours, he hadn’t shaved, combed his hair, or consumed much more than a half bottle of Grey Goose, a hunk of Saint-Nectaire, and a desiccated old baguette. Nor had he bathed, although he did brush his teeth and splash some water on his face before heading over here to check on Emmett.
The administrateur’s aura had dimmed considerably over the past few days. It was irresponsible and shamefully self-indulgent of Adrien to have stayed away so long. Three fractured metatarsals and an aching heart were really rather trifling in the greater scheme of things.
The courtyard was swathed in shadow, its only illumination being the light from a scattering of windows, so when Adrien noticed a faint radiance on the balcony of Emmett’s apartment, he stopped and stared up at it. It was an aura, the aura of a woman reclining on a chaise longue facing away from him. He couldn’t see anything of her but an afghan with the shape of a pair of legs under it, but the corona of light shimmering around her was unusually vivid.
What struck him wasn’t just its silvery color, which was a definitive indicator of pregnancy, but the tiny sparks sputtering within ribbons of light that undulated slowly, like aurorae borealis. The aurorae meant that the child within her womb was a male.
The sparks meant he was gifted.
Adrien didn’t have his watch on, but it seemed to him that Inigo’s little redheaded playmate, Chloe, should have started her overnight shift by now. It would appear that Elic had taken a turn with her after “tapping” some gabru, though why he would have chosen to transfer precious zeru to Chloe, when there were far more worthy women available . . .
Something fell from the chaise onto the floor of the balcony—a book. The notion of Chloe turning pages in anything more challenging than Cosmopolitan was so unlikely that Adrien realized, with considerable relief, that the lucky arkhutu must be Grace Garvey. But then a hand reached down to lift the book, the h
and of someone with very fair skin.
Isabel.
Adrien stared, dumbfounded, at the scintillating aura. Isabel was pregnant. With a gifted child. A son.
But she wasn’t gifted, which meant there was only one way for her to have conceived this child.
“Je n’y crois pas,” he whispered.
Adrien entered the castle through the door in the middle of the east range and prowled around until he located Elic in the billiards room. The dusios was standing at the massive, Victorian-era pool table, his back to the door, watching Lili set up a shot while Tony Bennett sang “It Had to Be You” over the speakers built into the walls. Inigo sat in the corner, one hand raising his ubiquitous tequila bottle to his mouth, the other thumb-texting a rapid-fire message on his cell phone.
Looking up as Adrien stalked gimpily into the room, Inigo said in English—he loved English—“Hey, Morel, heard about the foot. Holy shit, look at you. Is it Casual Friday, or what?”
Elic, turning to check out Adrien’s atypically grubby attire, smiled and said, “Hey, I remember that T-shirt. You used to wear it when—”
“I just saw Isabel,” Adrien said.
He must have looked and sounded as furieux as he felt, because Elic paused in the act of chalking his cue, his expression wary and also a little surprised—as well he might. Not only was it incumbent upon a gardien to address the Follets in his care with the utmost deference, but Adrien had no closer friend at Grotte Cachée than Elic, regardless that he was a god and Adrien a mere druid.
Lili and Inigo glanced at each other as Inigo rose from his chair.
Elic said, “Adrien, I’m sorry if I’m supposed to know what you’re talking about, but—”
“Why her?” Adrien asked as he advanced on Elic, wishing he wasn’t hampered by the goddamned cast. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
Inigo snorted. “Dude. Mr. Clean said ‘fuck.’ ”
“I think he’s talking about the night before last,” Lili told Elic softly.
“What on earth possessed you to choose Isabel?” Adrien demanded.
Whispers of the Flesh Page 23
