The Fire in Starlight

by Maria Isabel Pita

  He allowed her to look at him for a moment before he reached down and switched off the bedside lamp. The room was plunged into a darkness that made her feel more alive than ever as thunder rumbled and lightning flashed; she was intensely conscious of her own much smaller pulse so vulnerably wrapped in soft and easily penetrated flesh. She tensed beneath the sensation of his belt slithering across her belly like a snake, but she didn't have time to think about what it might mean before he slipped a hand beneath her back and pushed her over so she was lying face-down with her arms still raised over her head. She braced herself for the hot lick of leather, both desiring and dreading it, but it never came. Instead he caressed her hair out of the way, slipped the belt beneath her, and wrapped it around her neck. She moaned in trepidation, but also with relief that he wasn't doing anything so trite as beating her. The leather's inexorable pressure around her throat was much more thrilling precisely because it seriously worried her. She moaned expectantly as she felt him get on the bed with her.

  "On your knees, Sofia."

  She pushed herself up doggie style, or cat-like as she preferred to think of it. She kept her head up, forced to do so as he tugged on the belt, stretching it taut between them as he positioned himself behind her. The pressure around her throat was squeezing warm juices into her pussy as her body helplessly responded to the vital link between her breath and her sex which was all about life.

  "Has any other man ever cut off your breath, Sofia?” He spoke sternly. “Did you ever ask any of your other lovers to do this to you?"

  "No ... my lord. It wasn't until I moved here that I started having fantasies about it for some reason, and then I had that dream..."

  "And why do you think that is?"

  "I don't know ... please don't make me talk, my lord!"

  "You hate that, don't you?"

  She didn't respond as he rested his erection along the base of her spine, teasing her by making her feel how long it was and how deeply it could penetrate her, tormenting her pussy by ignoring it and threatening her with the possibility of a much more excruciating fulfillment should he decide to fuck her ass instead.

  "You hate that so much because you don't want to think,” he informed her almost tenderly, “because you think too much all the time."

  "Yes..."

  He reached down and pressed two fingertips against her clitoris. “You don't care about having an orgasm, do you?"

  The answer was “No” and yet the way he began caressing her suddenly made her wonder if that was true as she whimpered in confusion.

  He tugged on the belt, forcing her head back even more. There was something intensely arousing about the position ... there could easily be another man kneeling on the bed in front of her getting ready to slip his big dick between her lips and all the way down her throat, which would caress him with even more dangerous fervor as John tightened his grip on the belt to assure her absolute submission to whatever they did to her. The mere thought stoked her excitement so much any discomfort felt irrelevant.

  He dipped a finger into her pussy, pressing the base of his thumb against her clit. For some reason the slight pleasure annoyed her because it was so superficial; she was craving much more intense sensations than she could easily give herself. Suddenly she resented being told by feminists that the clitoris is the most important female sexual organ. That wasn't true, not for her. The deepest dimensions of her womb, the darkest recesses of her ass, and the vulnerable depths of her neck—having these roughly, violently, and even dangerously stroked turned her on like merely masturbating never could.

  He withdrew his hand and inserted a finger slippery with her juices into her dry anus. Her tight little hole clenched instinctively around his digit as she moaned and made every conceivable helpless sound she could squeeze out of her constricted throat as he slowly penetrated her ass, his finger a harmless ambassador of the sensual battle to come when the determined force of his lust would defy all her physical limits. What really hurt was how much her pussy ached for his cock. Her cunt was as ready for him as her ass was not, and yet how tightly he had wrapped the belt around her throat mysteriously made her feel as if her neck was her most stimulatingly constricted orifice now. Her sphincter clenched around his finger when he pulled it out, making her conscious of the fact that she could also open herself up back there if she really wanted to. When he suddenly thrust his erection deep into her pussy the pleasure was shockingly absolute. She wondered how she could possibly use her safe word if she didn't have any breath with which to form it, but she wasn't at all afraid. His hard-on pulsed in and out of her in rhythm with lightning flashing outside, the silence in her head as he slowly cut off her breath filled by the roar of thunder like the memory of her freely flowing breath and blood. The more viciously he rammed the head of his cock against her cervix, the more it felt like the glowing horizon of her flesh in which her sensual soul was mysteriously concentrated and thriving on the rhythm of his intensifying pleasure, the pressure building in her chest a finite space in complete contrast to her sex, made so deep and wet by his violent thrusts that she felt bottomless. Thrust to the edge of physical existence, her body came stunningly alive and longed to remain there in this overwhelmingly fulfilling erotic fourth dimension forever.

  * * * *

  T he storm had passed and the rain gently drumming against the roof was soothing as a cat's purr. It was still dark in her bedroom where she lay in the crook of John's arm, her head resting on his chest, feeling she had always been there. The memory of lightning flashing and his dick pulsing inside her, his satisfied groans blending with rumbles of thunder, was vivid as a dream she had awoken from to the reality of his tenderness. She couldn't believe she had spent seven years lying in a similar position with another man every night. Her soul had known perfectly well she wasn't with her lord, but her personality had been foolishly afraid to be alone.

  "What are you thinking, Sofia?"

  "I'm thinking that I feel so comfortable with you."

  His arm tightened around her as she caressed his chest, wondering at its firmness and strangeness, and yet at how mysteriously familiar it felt to the nerve ends in her fingertips.

  "I'll come by tomorrow and build that coop for you,” he said.

  "You will?"

  "I told you I would."

  "Thank you, I would love that, mainly because it means I'll get to see you again tomorrow."

  "You're going to be seeing a lot of me."

  She smiled. “You make that sound like a threat."

  "I'm merely warning you."

  "You mean promising me. How could that be anything but a wonderful promise, my lord?"

  "What if it gets to be too much for you, the things I enjoy doing to you, Sofia?"

  "It would never be too much for me."

  "How do you know?'

  "I just do,” she insisted fervently. “It could only be too little for me, never too much. I could only be disappointed if you weren't intense enough, if you were afraid to be as hard on me as I want you to be."

  He reached up and caressed her face, brushing the hair away from her eyes so he could trace the line of her brow with his thumb. “Do you really believe I strangled you to death in a past life?"

  "I don't know..."

  "I didn't ask you if you knew, I asked you if you believed it."

  "I don't know,” she repeated lamely. “I think I do, somehow."

  "But now that you're conscious of your violent fate in another incarnation, shouldn't that exorcise your demons?"

  "You're assuming that my kinkiness is a result of trauma, but that's not all it's about."

  "Go on,” he urged, laying his hand over hers where it rested against his heart.

  "I don't quite know how to express it except to say that somehow I feel so much more intensely beautiful and mysteriously invulnerable when ... when you're using me like that."

  "When, technically, you should feel just the opposite."

  "It's strange, I know, but t
hat's not how my soul responds to it."

  "Your soul is very real to you, isn't it?"

  "Yes, I suppose it is,” she admitted, “even though I hadn't thought about it that way until lately."

  "Until you moved here."

  "Until I moved here,” she echoed.

  He brought her hand up to his mouth and kissed the heart of her palm “We still don't know anything about each other,” he reminded her.

  "Only some of the most important things."

  "Do you think we'll ever be a dull, boring couple?"

  "Never!” she replied fervently to cover up how happy the question made her.

  "So there's nothing else you want to know about me?"

  "Of course there is."

  "Good, because I'm really looking forward to finding out everything about you, especially what you don't even know about yourself yet, Sofia, what you would never even dare imagine you could be like. I'm going to make you do things that right now would make you die of shame just to think about them, but you'll do them for me."

  "Yes, my lord,” she whispered, attempting to picture what dire ordeals he had planned for her, but she was so relaxed and content lying in his arms listening to the quiet drumming of the rain it was impossible. “I had no idea you raised cattle.” She changed the subject.

  "I don't."

  "But I saw-"

  "I rent part of my land out to a local farmer when he needs to rotate his herds."

  "Oh ... I asked the mail lady about you,” she confessed.

  "Did you?"

  "Yes, that's why I was afraid you were still married."

  "Anne and I separated six months ago, but she still gets mail here. I promised to hold it for her until she got back from Australia."

  "Wow, what's she doing in Australia?"

  "Getting as far away from me as possible, I suspect."

  She laughed. “I find that very hard to believe."

  "That's because you're as twisted as I am."

  "I don't want to pry, John, but I'm curious to know..."

  "What I do for a living?"

  "Yes."

  "In 1995 I started an ISP company."

  "An Internet Service Provider?"

  "Yes. It did pretty well."

  "People dialing up your server to get on the Internet?"

  "Exactly."

  "How many people were subscribed to your ISP?"

  "When I sold the company, approximately three-thousand five-hundred."

  "Wow. That's a lot of people. Paying you what, ten dollars a month?"

  "Thirteen. I sold the company, and now I raise chickens."

  She laughed again. “What was the name of your company?"

  "Does it matter?"

  "I'm curious."

  "Wolf.net."

  "You look like a wolf."

  "Do you realize how selfish that was of you to beg me to kill you, Sofia?” he said abruptly. “I loved you, we were engaged to be married, and yet you asked me to murder what I held most dear on earth."

  "I'm sorry, my lord, but I wanted to die by your hand..."

  "And you keep wanting to."

  "Yes ... but not really, you know, I don't actually want to-"

  "No, you want to live on the edge. I'm so glad we found each other, Sofia. I hate to think what might have happened to you in the wrong hands.” He caressed her hair and went on as if stroking the thoughts right out of her head. “You crave those transcendent moments when your flesh mysteriously fuses with the eternal energy inside you that created, and yet also somehow needs, the intoxicating warmth of your feeling and desires, which are so much more than you think, than we can ever really know, a divine force in and of themselves."

  "Oh, my lord!" She buried her face in the side of his neck and wrapped her arms tightly around his chest, never intending to let him go.

  Chapter Twelve

  S he had fallen asleep with her head pillowed against his chest, and when she woke up he was gone, only this time he had left her a note, See you in the morning. She pieced together his progress from her bed to her desk, where he found a blue post-it pad and a red pen and quickly wrote these five wonderful words before returning to her room and sticking the square fragment of paper on her nightstand. It amazed her that she had slept deeply enough not to notice when he removed his body from beneath hers. She usually woke up at the slightest provocation, which might explain why she remembered her dreams so vividly, but while he was still there, and after he left, she dreamed nothing at all.

  Morning was the coldest time inside her house, where she rarely turned on the heat, disliking its artificial warmth and the way it dried out her skin. She quickly slipped into her black robe and slippers, opened the French doors, and stepped out onto her back porch. The crickets sounded louder and more electric than ever on this dreamy morning. A luminous mist cloaked John's field, reflecting the gentle sunlight without absorbing it. There wasn't a single cow to be seen, only this shining mist that also seemed to fall soothingly over her brain as she gazed out at it not thinking about anything. Her lungs inhaled the invigoratingly cold air, her flesh and feet snuggled contentedly in her robe and slippers, and that was all ... but not quite, there was a serpent in paradise compelling her to bite into her contentment with jagged consonants and smooth vowels. She couldn't just stand out here and be mindlessly happy, she needed to try and capture in words the feelings inspired by this misty golden morning; to express how hauntingly beautiful it was...

  She sighed and went back inside. Except for the note he had left her, there was no trace of John's presence in her home. He had put all his clothes back on and left, probably the way he had come. It was only eight o'clock, she suspected he wouldn't be by for a while, but she couldn't be sure, so she washed up and dressed, slipping into her favorite black cotton leggings and a blood-red sweatshirt. She couldn't very well dress up when he was coming over just to build a chicken coop. She would offer to help him, of course, and if there wasn't anything she could do, she would ply him with tea or coffee, and make him lunch, and give him whatever he wanted while he worked, including a blow job if he asked for it, or even if he didn't...

  She entertained herself with similarly stimulating daydreams while she made herself breakfast, boiling one of the fresh eggs he had brought her to go with her whole wheat toast, all-fruit strawberry jam, and her decaff Green tea blended with chamomile. She ate at her desk, compelled to check her LSU e-mail account even though all her colleagues and former students knew she was on sabbatical and not to be disturbed. There were no important messages, and the minute she finished breakfast she turned off the computer, slipped on her jacket and stepped out onto her front porch. She brought a notepad and pen with her, and sitting in one of her fold-out blue chairs, she let the feelings that had been congealing inside her like that luminous mist take shape as solid words; the focused intensity of her mind trying to make sense of her sentimentally dense emotions.

  The Atmosphere of Moments

  Love can never express itself

  fully enough embraced by time.

  When you're young you think it's great

  sex you want at one with true love.

  Growing older it's a mysterious

  merger of thoughts and earthly dreams

  you need as the sun begins to rise

  and set with alarming speed,

  beating you with mortality

  until you ache with compassion

  for your self and all forms

  of life, until you hope nothing—

  all those lost persons and moments—

  ever dies. Until you're forced to

  have faith in the tree of your life

  even though its roots are only theories

  of darkness becoming matter through

  light, and our thoughts are powerless

  sentences silhouetted against the sky,

  breathing this way of life into us by day,

  exhaling boundless promises at night.

  It
seemed a strange poem to write after the intense sex she'd had lately, and yet it wasn't, because despite how little she still knew about John, she felt more comfortable, more mysteriously at peace with him than she had ever dreamed of feeling with Steve. She smiled remembering the much less poetic way he had expressed it last night, “Because you're as twisted as I am” yet his tone had been quietly serious, not at all flippant or sarcastic. If her dreams were more than just the manifestations of an overactive imagination, then he had kept his promise to find her again. The mere thought was hopelessly romantic, yet it felt entirely possible this morning with the trees as defined as her thoughts all framed by the luminous mist of her feelings. The sun would soon burn it away, and she was glad, because some things were just too intense to think about all day. There was no way to prove anything true, there was only how she felt, and this had to be evidence enough, somehow.

  There were small wonders to be experienced all around her. For example, she realized two of the big bushes in her front yard, which had blossomed with leaves since she moved in, were Azaleas when she noticed purple buds sprouting everywhere. Spring was definitely on its way, heralded by the spider web she accidentally ran into as she walked around her house wondering what else she might discover. She made a mental note to order a botanical guide to the native trees and plants of Louisiana from amazon.com as soon as possible. It was sad how little she knew about nature's individual intricacies, especially now that she was surrounded by it. She discovered two other taller, narrower bushes that looked like little dead trees as a stray shaft of sunlight illuminated tiny buds glistening all over them. They were Hibiscus bushes—a humming bird tree. They looked so painfully dead from a distance that the miracle of life resurrecting every year struck her with fresh significance. Being depressed was like winter's seemingly lifeless branches which were actually still full of sap—of hope—and all it took was warmth from the right person to get it flowing, the penetrating understanding in his eyes stimulating her to grow inside and feel things she had never dared to believe before as she opened herself up to the stimulating force of his being...