by Viola Grace
Dimly, Clancy heard himself plead with her. He heard himself beg her to release him from this dying hell in life. But only dimly, because like all the rest of his boggled senses, his hearing seemed to have faded in the instant their wild, uninhibited coupling began. He heard himself plead for the mercy he already knew she was not going to grant.
Laughing lightly, Gaelle flicked emerald-tipped fingernails across his chest in a touch so light, so rife with desultory sensation, so there and gone in such a brief span of time that Clancy felt his face twist into a mask of anguish.
Energy flowed from those gentle talons. Energy snaked between them, no doubt visible if he only had the strength to look and see. Tendrils of green electricity formed an adhesive net around his limbs, around his every extremity.
That energy continued to nurture, though now Clancy understood it for what it was. It was her way of sustaining him when his exhausted, cramped body wanted only to give up. When his aching, tormented prick wanted only to release and leave its suffering behind. It was her way of holding him in stasis for her pleasure. Regardless of the torment that holding rained down upon him.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please,” he entreated. And finally, “Please!” he shrieked, knowing no one would hear. No one, least of all the woman who made him her captive and her pawn, would listen.
Given the inherent stoicism of her nature, it was hard to tell if Gaelle felt as shaken, as jolted as he. But the signs were there, so subtle that he might have missed them had he not started to know her better than he’d ever expected to know any woman.
Shimmering, gem-like, beadlets of perspiration gathered on her forehead. Tiny pinpoints and no more, they glittered every conceivable shade of bejeweled green…glittered peridot, jade, sardonyx, malachite.
She bit down on a corner of her lip and her face took on a quirky look. One fraught with the effort her rocking, plunging, concerted motions atop him cost her.
She looked human suddenly. Entirely, unquestionably human and that comforted Clancy. That put him at ease enough that some of the knotting with which his body steadfastly resisted its own needs relaxed. And with relaxation came his first hint of relief. Sweet relief, energizing relief, giving him a boost he needed badly if he wanted to continue.
And he did want.
Surging with fresh life, fresh determination, the hardened substance trapped in tender balls and anguished prick began to move. Purposefully, it moved. And positively.
Acting purely on instinct, Clancy grabbed hold. Of himself. Of Gaelle. He flung her to the side. Never sacrificing his connection with her, afraid to sacrifice it because he wasn’t exactly clear on the one-time-and-one-time-only rule and all it might entail, he sprawled with her, onto their sides across the filmy hammock that never moved, never shifted. Scissored together with one of her legs trapped between his and one of his flung atop hers, they tumbled in a way that shoved him deeper into the misty softness he’d found in her.
It was a good position. A damned near perfect one that allowed Clancy to feel in control for the first time. And he didn’t hesitate to take advantage of it.
Closing his uppermost leg tightly around the back of her knees, he held her to him with her legs still spread, accommodating his continued presence inside her. He held her tightly. Drawing her all the way onto him, his prick thundering in response, seeking out and beating itself against the most tender, most sensitive small bits of her softness.
Gaelle made a sound. A very small one. A sigh, rippling and lilting like music made up of several sighs, slipped from her lips.
The warmth of it shimmered across the side of Clancy’s face. Into his ear. Instantly, his embedded prick leaped to new life, fresh life. It hardened again, not that it had ever ceased to be hard. It hardened more, stiffening itself and steeling itself to reach for whatever secrets she might hold buried within.
She responded. She poured forth a sudden, scintillating column of scalding heat. And moisture.
The depth of Clancy’s penetration increased. Then it decreased as he drew back, only to surge forward mindlessly, heedlessly, again. And again, and again, and again. And his speed increased as well, the frequency of his entrances and exits escalating wildly. Escalating until there was no controlling them, no slowing them and certainly no stopping.
He wanted to keep her. Needed to keep her and make her his forever. His exclusively, even though he’d been warned. Even though he knew that would be impossible, even though he knew this would end and this would never come again for either of them.
He could only pray to keep her for a small while longer. Only for a moment or two. And to that end, with that one solitary purpose in mind, he made certain that when he retreated from her, he never came close to complete separation.
Whirling and swirling, the freed stuff inside him exerted new pressures from a dozen and one directions, struggling to rise and compound itself even as he fought nearly as hard to keep it contained. To stop it from rising, even when it became increasingly clear that if he did not allow it to rise, passionate and hot, it would tear some new vent, some gaping opening in a place that had never been meant to have an opening.
Clancy fought like hell. And won at least a sort of temporary victory when the rising stopped. For a moment. But of course the victory couldn’t last. Wouldn’t last, and didn’t. But for that moment, for that one precious, possibly last moment he carved for himself out of the misty murkiness of compulsive passion…
Clancy held Gaelle gently. He held her steady while he eased into her. While he exulted in her smoothness. In the way she was as free of drag and resistance as if she was made of polished, silken-smooth satin. Or maybe sinuously curved, mirrored marble. Marble that was warm…marble that lived and breathed, flowing readily to encompass him.
She was succulent. Sweet, sweet, ripe succulence embodied within all the softnesses of a thousand years of softness. Dropped for some reason, impossible to divine, right into the middle of his life. She was…
Coming!
“N…nooooo.” Part of Clancy rejoiced. And part of him mourned, his heart hitching painfully. “No,” he whispered, the word torn up from the blackest depth of a soul in mortal despair.
It did no good.
“I’m sorry,” she replied, sounding thoroughly shaken herself.
Her body clenched around his. Wresting control back from him, it clenched almost tight enough to crush. And in one of life’s greatest, most incomprehensible mysteries, in the very moment when she tightened ferociously her most intimate grip upon him, locking him into a doomed battle to the death, she flexed. The selfsame steely-firm flesh that tried to lock him in place also worked hard to entice him. In. Deeper. Alluring with all kinds of impossible promises, it pleaded with him to accept a shimmering death in depths he had never contemplated before.
Clancy had known no life before Gaelle. Driven deep inside the smoldering magic of the murmuring creature he held pressed against him, a creature who had stolen his mind if not his soul, it was as if he’d only just been born. Only recently, and only for this one specific, too-quickly-progressing episode.
His prick thundered. Seriously. A heated spear composed of three parts need and about fifteen parts desperation rose higher inside his prick. And lodged itself painfully sharp and thoroughly unforgiving just below its tip.
Sweet Christ.
He ached. Burned with the effort to hold in its place what would no longer be held. Not even if holding it was what he wanted more than anything in the world. Just to prolong. Just to make this one time with Gaelle, the one and only she’d promised they could ever have, last as long as it could. As long as his own sadly failing constitution would allow.
He hadn’t reckoned on Gaelle though. He hadn’t reckoned on the fact that she, being somewhat different from him in just about every fundamental way, might be more than a match for him.
Shuddering, shivering, clinging to him with fingertips that punished, she released a shimmering burst. Misting steam poured f
rom her, poured onto him, as welcome as water to a man long dead of thirst. Just when it seemed impossible for a body beleaguered and stressed to the point where it couldn’t possibly feel more, couldn’t possibly feel anything at all, she aroused him again. To greater agony. Greater hardness. Greater need for the release he dreaded. The release he could not resist. Release, and…
Separation.
Clancy groaned. Permanent.
Gaelle quivered. Strong and uninhibited, it radiated through her. From her. Vibrating in all the parts of her. All the delectable, delirious parts with which she touched him. All the flattened palms and sweetly bared breasts. All the clasping thighs and especially all the crushing inner regions that more and more, increasingly and endlessly, wept their sheer-crystal mists for him.
Clancy didn’t seem to be plunging any longer. He didn’t seem to be retreating either. But of course he was. He felt the shifting slip-slide of every one of those movements. “My God!” Nearly a shriek of mortal agony, the words tore up from the bottom of his soul. And upon them, quite possibly because of them, Gaelle clenched tighter.
Buried, lost, pounding, he was trapped. As he’d never been trapped before, as surely and absolutely as if he’d been snared by a saber-toothed steel man-trap designed expressly to negate any…every…best attempt to escape.
She held him motionless. In some kind of sinister, magical force field not of his desiring. She left him no place to go. Nothing to do but endure as she coaxed from his failing body everything he tried still, pathetically, to hoard.
Clancy felt a hard pulse inside his prick, inside his balls. He felt a stirring, a heat, a rising that hardened as it began and hardened as it progressed. He felt a sudden, aggressive need to fill Gaelle. A need that would not be stopped. In the very next instant, before the rising hardening even began to finish, a long and scalding jet of substance burst from him. Into her.
Gaelle cried out. It was the kind of mindless shriek of which every man dreamed…a shriek of unqualified victory at possessing and conflicting joy at being possessed in the same instant. A cry of absolute fulfillment and mingled into it, mingled through all the other vicarious, victorious elements of it, the soft murmur of words.
Her words.
At first they made no sense. At first they were a silvery blur amidst Gaelle-induced green twilight. But gradually they began to sort themselves into meaningful sentences and thoughts. Or at least into the concepts that lay behind those sentences and thoughts.
“It has been my pleasure,” she murmured in silken-sultry, suddenly sated tones.
“No.” Clancy’s body pulsed. Furiously. Releasing quantities he hadn’t realized it was possible to release.
“It has been my privilege.” Inexorable, she moved within the greatly weakened circle of his legs. Doing for herself what he had lost ability to do. Swaying and thrusting, she drove herself onto him in rhythmic repetition. As she drew from him the very last of what he had to offer, she seemed to fade. Not as if she was ready to collapse beside him, satisfied and softly ready to sleep.
This was more of a faint flickering. A loss of resolution in a poorly filmed home movie. A very ominous one. “No!” he insisted.
And she returned to the full warmth and strength of solid reality.
Clancy’s gut clenched. He reached the end of his endurance. His capability. And from the growing dread that what she’d said earlier might actually be true, came a suspicion. A growing and looming one that she hadn’t been completely honest with him. She hadn’t told him the whole story.
“Is there something else?” Clancy’s voice shook. “Is there something you should…” His body defeated him when he tried to ask her that last, most important question of all. The inevitable came to pass, and he thrust furiously. Pumping out his last hoarded store of essence, he depleted himself, his body jerking hard upon the expulsion of that very last.
The bursting heat of his orgasm reflected in Gaelle’s smoky-green gaze. Her eyes opened wide, emerald-shadowed and more lovely than any eyes he’d been privileged to see. Yearning fluttered there, fluttered all too briefly before she regained her composure and her impassive facade.
Something closed down in her expression. And when she softened again, it wasn’t in any of the ways she’d softened before. Any of the ways a woman normally softened with her completion. Not the softening of eagerly accepting readiness, this was unmistakably a softening of parting. Of her growing increasingly insubstantial, even as Clancy tried like anything to hold on to her.
Gaelle stirred. Like heavy, ethereal smoke, she stirred. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“No!” He closed his arms tighter. Closed his legs. Closed them all impossibly tight, around what more and more seemed a fading memory.
Gaelle sighed. She shivered.
His arms flexed again and this time they closed in upon nothing but themselves as she vanished utterly. Leaving behind only sparkling residue. A softly hissing cloud of dancing emerald motes. “No!” His voice seemed terribly weak. It seemed to come from far, far away. From another place and maybe even another time.
It’s too late.
Limp, weak from his recent, nearly catastrophic release, decimated and desiccated by the length and the vigor of it, Clancy collapsed to his face upon his now-shifting hammock. He collapsed completely. With nothing there to stop him, nothing but strangely scented air and a swirl of diamond-emerald flecks rising up to engulf him, he swore he felt a passing of unseen hands across his thirsting flesh. Then the world went gray-dark around him.
Clancy fell. He felt himself begin to fall, but never felt the end of it…never felt the impact at the end of the fall. He had closed his eyes. Now he opened them. He lay on something hard. Something cold and hard with harsh light glaring down upon him, hurting his head. Making him wince.
“Jeez, mister.” It was a female voice, dropping down from somewhere inside that light. Female, young and not Gaelle’s.
An angel?
Somehow, he didn’t think so. Somehow he thought he’d used up his allotment of miraculous encounters with otherworldly creatures. For today, anyway. His prick ached. Like sin. It stung, burned, prickled. Felt withered and ancient beyond hope. It felt used.
“You all right?” the voice asked.
“He went down like a tonna bricks,” a growly-raspy voice, this time male, replied. “Just grabbed at the ice cream, mumbled something that sounded like some alien language from another planet and went right on down.”
“But…” Clancy was confused. “Gaelle?”
“Gay elves?” The female sounded confused. “What the heck does he mean by that? Gay elves?”
Clancy tried to sit up. But she…he thought it was she…held him down.
“You need to take it easy, big fellah,” she said. “I think you took yourself one pretty smart smack to the head there.”
“Smack?” The word made sense. The world spun sickeningly when Clancy moved so he decided to stay right where he was. Right as he was. His vision cleared a little though, and he realized that was the aisle of the Emerald Aisles supermarket half a mile from his apartment.
His hand was cold. Freezing cold. Squinting, having to work very, very hard to keep his equilibrium, Clancy turned his head to look. His hand lay upon a half-gallon container of pistachio ice cream that hadn’t melted yet. Hadn’t started to seep around the seams of the carton. As if it hadn’t even started to melt.
“Gaelle. Green. Woman. Freezer…” He couldn’t say much more. Couldn’t make much more sense. He did hurt as if he’d taken a pretty hard smack to the head. And his back. And especially his groin. Hurt.
“Lissen, mister. We got an ambulance on the way so you need to just lie back and…”
“No ambulance.” Clancy tried again to sit up and this time there was no need for anybody to hold him down. Woozy as hell, feeling like a man who’d just completed a five-day bender with no thought for tomorrow, he fell back all by himself. Like he was about to faint all over again.
His mind rejected the notion. He was not a fainter. Had never been a fainter and would not, by God in His heaven, become one now.
It wasn’t manly.
Then he had to reject another urge. Had to really fight to reject the most unholy urge to lift a hand to his groin. To massage away the arid agony burning there. Insisting he hadn’t fainted. Insisting he’d…
Pistachio ice cream?
“Joyce!” Shit. His head really hurt, now. It hurt way worse than his groin when he thought about the way Joyce was going to pitch a hissy to be remembered in the annals of historic hissies if he ruined her goddamned green-themed picnic.
For a minute he hovered on the edge of panic. But then…
Gaelle.
She seemed to be there. Inside his mind. Something…it had to be her…whispered across his thoughts. Something shimmering-sparkling and oddly magical. Oddly soothing.
Gaelle!
He felt her touch. Swore he felt it. What the hell did he care about Joyce? Joyce was a pain in the ass. She always had been. A royal, Princess pain in the ass, and if he hadn’t actually realized it before, he sure did realize it now. He’d made one enormous hell of a mistake ever getting mixed up with the likes of Joyce. Let alone being damn-fool stupid enough to ask to marry her.
Gaelle.
Magic accompanied the silent murmur of the name. Magic that lightened his heart when he remembered everything she’d been to him in the short time they’d had to share. Lying on the floor of Emerald Aisles, listening to the chop-chop-whoooo of the ambulance siren getting closer and closer, Clancy wondered if she’d ever been there. Or if she’d been just a figment of imagination.
He might be suffering from a brain tumor. The kind of nasty, insidious thing possessed of incalculable power to induce illusion, hallucination and fantasy so real he’d never be able to separate them from reality.
He almost believed it. Because believing would make remembering so much easier. It would make all the rest of his life without her so much easier. And yet…
If Gaelle had been a figment, an apparition conjured up out of the depths of a stressed or possibly diseased mind, how could he be so sure he would never forget her? Never forget the too-vivid touch of her hands upon him? And how could he be so dead sure certain he would never accept or desire any other woman?
