Ashes of Midnight

by Aurora Rose Lynn

  Violet halted abruptly. “Are you able to transfer thought to me?”

  Once again, he shook his head.

  “You're making this quite difficult, aren't you?” she teased.

  His lips quivered in a thin smile.

  “Can you make love to me, like go all the way?” She meant full penetration and a climax.

  No, but his eyes brightened.

  “You want me, don't you?” she asked, glancing away before she saw his response. Of course he did. Hadn't he been lying on his bed naked and waiting for her?

  “Can you get yourself off while you're watching someone um, masturbate?” Violet had never done herself in front of someone else before, but she was working with a theory.

  Grant's head canted to one side, asking for an explanation.

  “I've got this theory. I don't know where I read it, but sex is supposed to be a powerful energy source. If I masturbate and think about a solution to your problem, then maybe we'll figure it out.” She smiled hopefully. “It's a theory. I'm not promising any miracles.”

  He shrugged and nodded at the same time as if telling her to go ahead, but she saw the lust in his eyes. Which was a good sign.

  “Okay, here goes.” She lay on the bed as if she were going to sleep, her head on the soft pillow and spread her thighs apart. “I've never done this in front of anyone before.”

  Grant didn't seem to have any inhibitions. He floated toward her and settled down between her legs, his gaze watchful and eager.

  Might as well give the man some visual pleasure. Goodness knew what he had in the hell in which he was living. She held her finger up in a wait one second motion, pulled a pillow out from under head and pushed it under her ass, lifting it higher and giving Grant an awesome view.

  “You ready?” she teased.

  He licked his lips as she widened her thighs and toyed with her pubic hair, curling and twisting it lightly and erotically. Grant rolled his eyes, and she laughed good-humoredly. “You wish you were doing this, right?”

  He gave her a broad smile.

  Unable to tell him he might not get the chance for a long while, she lowered her hands to her labia and spread the full, pink lips apart.

  Grant's chest rose and fell as if he were finding pleasure in seeing her wet, glistening clit.

  With the pad of her index finger, she circled the hard flesh and closed her eyes. Behind her trembling eyelids, she saw a naked Grant, his throbbing cock sinking into her wet channel. Violet sighed. She had to stay focused on a solution, not get more aroused and have no way other than her fingers to relieve herself. Slowly, she began to climb the slope toward an orgasm, acknowledging the different images flashing into her mind.

  Her muscles tensed, and she rocked as the images came and went. A flash of lightning during a thunderstorm. The full moon being obscured by a thick, menacing cloud. Chad in her drawing, lying naked on the couch, his hand circled around his hard shaft, his face a mask of sweet agony. A man who wasn't quite solid and claimed to live in two dimensions. The pictures came faster in whirlwind procession.

  Violet was rubbing her clit faster and faster, and the tension was arcing through her body. At the moment of release, an overwhelming light blurred the past, present and future into one pulsing wave. Her muscles spasmed several times. She shuddered, and a thin film of perspiration lay on her forehead, her tightly beaded nipples and her stomach.

  She batted her eyes open and found Grant smiling tenderly at her. “Did you enjoy that?” she asked with a tremulous smile.

  His head bobbed up and down energetically.

  “I think I know how I might be able to help you.” She spoke in a shaky, reedy voice. “Will you sit for me?”

  Grant's eyebrows shot upwards in question.

  “Oh, you're already sitting. Sorry about that. I meant if I have a pencil and paper, I'll draw you.”

  Another raised eyebrow.

  “I'll draw you like you would see a negative of a picture taken by a camera. Have you ever seen one of those? Kind of spooky if you ask me.” She rolled over and started rummaging in the nightstand beside the bed. Lethargy from her climax began to set in, but she fought it off. Grant came first, before sleep.

  Violet found white paper and a sharp pencil that she sometimes doodled with. Grant sat on the bed with his hands between his legs. She remembered how a film negative could be made into an actual photo, and hoped that if she drew him in black and white and showed him the picture, the same would happen, except he would revert back to his human self.

  “Are you nervous?”

  He inclined his head.

  “I don't know if this will work.” She settled in the upholstered armchair facing the bed and made herself comfortable. She lost track of time as, in the moonlight, she drew the light shifter with deft, sure strokes of the pencil.

  When she finished, she brought herself back to the present and focused her weary eyes on Grant. He sat as motionless as when she'd first begun drawing him. “Are you ready?” she whispered, her stomach knotting a hundred times over.

  He grimaced, pressed his fingers to his lips, and blew her a kiss. Her heart thumped like a marching band's drum. She moistened her lower lip and started praying that this idea, which sounded so stupid in hindsight, was the right one. Then she faced the drawing towards him. In her head, she kept repeating, “And the light will cast out the darkness”, a passage, she thought, from the Bible, but what if that were true in reverse with the Inasad?

  Grant peered at the paper, and blinked, and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead.

  “Here,” she murmured, tamping down her excitement, “take it.” Take it into the other dimension.

  With a frown that said he wasn't comfortable with the idea, he reached toward the paper.

  And the darkness will cast out the light.

  As soon as his fingers touched the white sheet, dazzling light exploded all around him, forcing her to squeeze her eyes closed against the overpowering brightness. There was a male cry of terror and pain, but she didn't dare open her eyes.

  Ringing silence descended. Violet began praying that Grant was all right. She really hadn't thought the idea would work, but it was the thought that counted. Her heart broke for the very idea that she could possibly mislead Grant, a man she'd begun to deeply care for in the last few hours.

  “Vi?”

  She pressed her lips together at hearing the sound of his husky voice. He was about to tell her that this hadn't worked, that he'd be stuck as an Inasad until the day he died. A tear squeezed through her eyelid and down her cheek. What foolishness had caused her to lead him on? Her pencil drawing was nothing more than a representation, and couldn't do a damned thing.

  “Vi?” She heard him call out again.

  Another tear rolled down her face, and then she felt him take firm hold of her hand. Her eyes flashed open.

  She sputtered nonsensical words. Grant faced her and he appeared to be as solid and real as she was. “Is it over?” She managed to string the words together.

  “Violet Georges, we did it!” His voice was hoarse, and his eyes gleamed with pleasure and relief.

  Violet was stunned. “How?”

  “Your hunch paid off. As soon as I took the paper from you, it transferred a blast of energy that annihilated the Inasad energy.” He stepped closer and embraced her with a mighty bear hug.

  She clung to him. “Forever?”

  “I don't know, but now we know how to deal with it if it happens again.” He swung her around and around. Far away, in a haze, he thought he heard Waneth screaming hysterically, but he mentally told her she’d have to find her own way home. Together with Violet, he’d found his own. Being an Inasad, and Waneth’s captive in essence, had drained him of his energy. If he couldn’t be wholly there, nor here, then he wasn’t real, to himself or to the people who mattered. He had what he’d always wanted, a wonderful woman and freedom.

  Violet hung onto him for dear life. “Hey! Put me down! I'm no
t a rag doll!”

  He set her on her feet, but the world spun crazily for a few seconds before everything righted itself.

  “Let's dance together now and make our own light, Vi,” he whispered urgently. “I want to make love to you until the day I die. Do you want me?”

  “Is that what Waneth was doing?” Violet asked out of curiosity. “Creating her own light?”

  “Some Inasads have the power to do that. Waneth bled those people dry, to the point they would die.” His mouth turned down in a grimace.

  “Is that what she was trying to do with you with the dancers in the ballroom?”

  Grant nodded. “An Inasad can project images, and she was teasing you to barge in on me as you did. Then, she was hoping I would turn you into Inasad.” He sighed, and a tear rolled down his cheek. “Enough of that.”

  With his hard cock pressing against the softness of her thighs and her breasts squeezed against his broad chest, she nodded. She had a hundred questions rummaging around in her head, but they could all wait. The answers were easy to obtain directly from him. “Yes, I do,” she murmured as a wonderful exhilaration threaded its way through her. Grant would be hers as long as he lived, in this one dimension.

  Author Bio

  Aurora Rose Lynn lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and conure. She enjoys writing romance with a sensual twist, but first and foremost, her stories must be about love. When she isn't writing romance, she writes young adult and fantasy stories under a pen name.