Walking on Sunshine
Page 37
Pressure mounted. His cock teased me, and he felt my yearning as my hips rose to meet his. I squeezed him as he taunted me, and he gasped with me. We both got the exquisite burst of pleasure when a woman’s secret muscle closes on a man’s cock. It was wonderful—but then he began to slide away!
No, you don’t. Keeping my eyes shut so that his invisibility couldn’t confuse me, I curled, pushed against the cave floor, ran my cheek along his invisible cheek.
“Don’t go!”
“Sophie—if you want it the way it was—”
“I want you to fuck me,” I growled in his ear. And then, finding it by touch, I pulled his invisible head down toward me, opened my mouth wide, and bit down hard on the back of his neck.
With a cry, he slid into me all the way, smacking against my button and making stars burst. I fought for breath. The tightness inside became tightness everywhere, and he plunged and plunged into me.
I wanted him with me while I shattered. I wanted us to be one again.
How did that work? He said, Through the senses, through scent.
I smelled my harsh, wild-animal smell and imagined throwing myself into that cave. I snatched at my cock with my sheath, first with intent, No, you can’t leave yet, and then involuntarily as the spasms began, first in me, then in him, then together, echoing back and forth like a roll of thunder, unifying us like lightning marrying the earth to the sky.
After a time I realized he was fully material again—heavy and sweaty, panting on my neck and shuddering like a racehorse. I opened my eyes. His blackness darkened the cave.
“Hey,” I muttered, my mouth crushed under his shoulder.
He lifted himself off me on one hand. “Yes?”
“We had a bargain.”
His head shook, and his sweat dripped down on me. “Not for another ten minutes. Twenty. I think you’ve killed me.” Slowly he eased onto his side next to me, scrunching his legs up in the tiny cave. He picked crushed salsapareille flowers off me and crushed them more between his fingers, then put them to his nostrils, closing his eyes.
I reached up one finger and touched the dragonfly tattooed on his cheekbone. “I think I can prove my part of the bargain now.”
His eyes opened. “Will I have to move?” He closed his hand over my breast, as if to say, j’y suis, j’y reste.
“Only a little. I want you to look outside.”
“At what? The full moon?”
I smacked his arm. “Are you blind? That’s sunlight falling on us between these rocks.”
“In your dream. In your fancy.”
“Just look.”
He drew a long breath. “I can tell I love you because I really don’t want to move. But I go.”
He clambered over me and exited the cave feet first, licking me, nose and shoulder, as he passed over me.
The cave opening darkened as he left.
I waited.
His voice came. “Very nice. How do you know what I can see?”
“I don’t. I’ve been here before, of course, but I’m not doing the thing we just did. What’s it called, when you are me and I’m you?”
“Insanity,” he said absently, his voice a little farther away.
I scooted on my behind through the opening until I could get out of the cave, too.
He was standing naked under the French summer sun, shading his eyes and turning slowly, staring. I joined him.
“What are all these trees doing here?” he muttered. A row of thick trees encircled the maze.
“Cherry trees. Planted by a small boy who spat out the pits along the whole border of the maze, more than eighty years ago.”
He climbed up on the rough rock wall of the maze, swearing. “Can’t you imagine me with shoes on? These rocks are sharp.” Then he stood again and stared in all directions. “Is that the belvedere? And beyond it, I see the chateau.”
I smiled and waited for him to understand.
And then he did.
He looked down at me from his perch. “Sophie, what happened? We’re—I’m home.”
“Yes. Not in my imagination or my dream, or even in yours. You’re really home. We did this. Together.”
He jumped down and took my hands in a strong grip. “How?”
“I don’t know exactly. The same way we did before. The way Yoni and Baz can make a miraculous rain of rose petals, I suppose. She told me some things that happened, and I told Madame Vulcaine, and she suggested that I—”
“What?” There was warning and dread in his voice, and skepticism in his face.
“She said I would have to want it. I knew you wanted to come home. I wanted it for you. She thought if I wanted it enough, and if we were ‘joined in our desire,’ those were her words, then we could make it so.”
I started walking through the maze, looking for another hiding spot. Veek grabbed my hand and walked with me.
“Because you are the jam bois, the spirit of our land, you can come here. Because I was born here, it’s in me, too.”
“The marais,” he breathed, as we came to the entrance of the maze, where another whole grove of ancient cherry trees bloomed.
“My love?” I said.
He just stood there, staring at the great flat green fertile marsh as if he could eat it with his gaze. “Home.” His voice broke. “I’m home.”
I hooked my arm through his and surveyed our kingdom. A vast-winged heron floated over the canal and landed without a splash. Purple marsh orchids waved at the sky. Cowbells clanked in the distance. “So we will look for each petit bois together.”
“Hm?”
“Your pilgrimage for Baron Samedi. All the places you and Jake stayed? You must consecrate them. And I think I know how.” I smiled wickedly.
“Possibly,” he said in a stuffy Montmorency voice. “But not by freight train. If we can do this—” He scanned the horizon with satisfaction. A great sigh fell out of him. He seemed about to walk toward the chateau.
“Wait!” I reached into a crevasse in the maze’s rock wall and pulled out a plastic bag. “Clothes.”
“You hid clothes in the maze?”
“I put them here when I visited last. After you abandoned me in my papa’s hotel that night?”
“Practical Sophie.” He smiled.
“My dreamer.”
From the bag I took a shift and a pair of sandals. “Get dressed, M’sieur le Vicomte. You must dress to meet your servants.”
“My—” He hid behind a big cherry tree and looked toward the great house.
Wearing proper black and white, the household staff came running out of the house onto the lawn between the formal flower beds. They began to form two rows. All were looking at us.
He ducked back inside the maze. “Merde! Everyone is coming outside!”
I laughed. “I told them to watch for us to come out of the maze.”
He put on the clothes I’d put aside last month, while I was chasing him back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean: beige linen trousers, a silk shirt of discreet design, the belt with its chaste gold buckle, the wing-tips of our family’s pattern, the silk-linen jacket a poem of casual authority. “But these are mine,” he said, climbing feverishly into them.
“I got them from your roommate. You have very many pairs of shoes,” I said in mock severity. “And you scolded me for buying so many purses and umbrellas!”
“I’ll never scold again. How do I look?”
I brushed a blade of grass off his trouser knee. “Exquisite.”
Together we walked out of the maze toward the garden path leading up to the house, where waited two rows of our people. As we drew closer, they set up a cheer.
I squeezed his hand. “Welcome home, M’sieur le Vicomte.”
Acknowledgments
This book took a long time to write. I made a whole lot of decisions that set me back, and got a whole lot of help from many kind and patient people. Any errors of fact or tone are entirely my own doing.
Thanks therefore go to Rich B
ynum for stagehand neep and, well, everything; for writerly hand-holding: Nalo Hopkinson, Mindy Fine, Kathi Kimbriel, Sherwood Smith, Pat Rice, Kelly McClymer, and Kimberly Elsham; Maureen Reddington-Wilde for the ancient history of Aphrodite; Sue Pace, Gaelen Foley and Allison Lane for advice on French title succession; Kate Early, Nisi Shawl, Phillips Stevens and Craig Centrie on matters of vodou; Phil Cooper on sound mixes; beta readers Rebecca Jaxon, Pat Rice, Kathi Kimbriel, Kelly McClymer, Mindy Klasky, Pam Mordecai, Kate Early, Lauren “Heisenpurr” Boltz, Angella Hammel “Stormin’ Stella” Link, Sherwood Smith, and Shirley Márquez Dúlcey; Mr. Marzell Williams of Security Management Group for information about audience behavior at the Arie Crown Theater; Emil Presman at Spystore.com, Sunny at ShoppingCCTV.com, and Reed Aldrich at Leupold & Stevens for information about pan-tilt-zoom camera technology; Isham Collier, co-dean of Stagehands Institute of Technology for the precise Chicago location of Lollapalooza in July of 1993; Martin & Pamela Mordecai on Haiti and Haitian Creole; Denise Thorsen and Rebecca Jaxon for help with contemporary and old-fashioned French; the late great Hedy West for a line from “500 Miles”; Chaz Brenchley for copyedits, Vonda N. McIntyre for formatting, and Bethany Johnson for a great cover.
Copyright & Credits
Walking on Sunshine
A Slacker Demons Novel
Jennifer Stevenson
Book View Café edition August 14,2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-492-5
Copyright © 2015 Jennifer Stevenson
Cover illustration © 2015 by Bethany Johnson
Production Team:
Cover Design: Bethany Johnson
Copy Editor: Chaz Brenchley
Proofreader: Chaz Brenchley
Formatter: Vonda N. McIntyre
All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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About the Author
Twenty-five years or more ago, Jennifer Stevenson was born under a cabbage leaf, dreaming even in the center of those stiffly furled-up leaves of becoming a hack writer for the pulps. After a flustering detour down the rabbit hole of literary fiction, she located a trail of breadcrumbs and followed it here, where she finds new uses for old sex demons and celebrates smart-mouthed women.
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BVC Ebooks by Jennifer Stevenson
Slacker Demons
It’s Raining Men (Book One)
It’s Raining Angels and Demons (Book Two)
Dancing with Cupid (Book Three)
Walking on Sunshine (Book Four)
Hinky Chicago
The Hinky Brass Bed (Book One)
The Hinky Velvet Chair (Book Two)
The Hinky Bearskin Rug (Book Three)
The Hinky Genie Lamp (Book Four)
A Hinky Taste Of You (Book Five)
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The Hinky Brass Bed Sample
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Sample Chapters
Jennifer Stevenson
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Book View Café Edition
September 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-286-0
Copyright © 2008 Jennifer Stevenson
Chapter One
On a sizzling Monday afternoon in July, Jewel Heiss was serving a ticket on a convenience store owner on Walton Street near Michigan Avenue, watching the smog over Lake Shore Drive turn pink, and trying to stake out The Drake Hotel across the street at the same time. Her boss had sent her to watch his wife, who also happened to be her best friend.
The Swiftymart owner whined, “Every time you come here, you ticket me. This is persecution. I’m gonna call the city.” He led her out the front door, looking over his shoulder at his Gold Coast customers paying too much for sliced cheese.
The guilty ones always attacked.
Jewel smiled sunnily. “Every time, your scale still isn’t fixed. Fix it and keep it fixed.”
Sweltering in her polyester pantsuit, she hoped the pink stuff would abate before she had to get on the Drive. The pink was one problem da mayor’s admirable anti-magic Hinky Policy hadn’t been able to wish away.
The Swiftymart owner sweated and lit a cigarette, the dumb-ass. She backed away. Sure enough, a pigeon swooped down out of nowhere and snatched the lighted cig off his face. The store owner screamed, “I hate birds!”
“Look, there’s one!” A gaggle of tourists aimed cell phones and cameras at the pigeon. “They really do smoke! That’s so cool! Man, Chicago is seriously—”
Mindful of Policy, Jewel spoke up. “They don’t really smoke, you know. They just eat the tobacco.”
They all watched the pigeon carry the cigarette to the gutter.
Stakeout was not Jewel’s bag. Stakeout was for cops. An investigator for the Chicago Department of Consumer Services, she rated a badge but no gun. The scariest things in her arsenal were a clipboard and thick book of tickets.
She tore off a ticket now and handed it to the Swiftymart owner. “That scale is condemned. If you’re found guilty, it could be a five-hundred-dollar fine. Get the scale fixed and you can call an inspector out to re-verify it.”
“My customers don’t complain.” He backed into the shelter of his store doorway and lit another cigarette, cupping his hands around it this time.
“Sir, your store is a repeat offender. You know it can be worse.” In her small way, Jewel made the world a decenter place.
“Are you always this cheerful?” he said with loathing.
“Yep.” Smiling down into his weaselly little eyes from five-foot-eleven she said, “Fix it.”
“Oh, look, it’s trying to pick up the filter end!”
The Swiftymart owner sent her a resentful look and mooched back into his store.
Jewel turned to the least fun part of her job, administering The Policy. “It is not smoking. It wants the filter for nesting materials.”
“Omigod, it just stole that guy’s cigarette,” said another tourist who was slow to catch up.
The pink stuff over the Drive had thickened. Something out there caught Jewel’s eye, a streak of iridescence over the smo
g. Groovy. Something new she wasn’t allowed to talk about.
“Pigeons don’t smoke,” she said, quoting lame Policy guidelines. “They’re attracted to additives in the cigarette paper.”
“No, it’s trying to smoke.”
The iridescence formed a teardrop shape and then suddenly shrank, as if something were sucking it down into the pink smog that hung over the expressway.
“That pigeon is smoking! Wow! Get a picture of that!”
Jewel was about to deny again, but even she could see that the pigeon had the filter end in its beak and seemed to be puffing away merrily. Another pigeon waddled over to it and stuck its pointed head into the cloud of second-hand smoke. She sighed.
Just then her quarry emerged from The Drake and wobbled languidly toward a cab. Nina looked fucked and happy. Jewel’s heart sank.
Her best friend was guilty as hell. Ed would blow a blood vessel.
She plunged across traffic. “Nina, wait up!”
Nina Neccio’s trim figure jerked around, her handbag flailing guiltily. “Don’t scare me like that!”
“Going north? I’ll share.” Jewel hated the suspicious look Nina shot her. This was going to be awful. Nina’s hair had a flat spot on the back. Pillow head. Oh God. “I need a drink,” Jewel said truthfully. It wasn’t even two yet, but she was stressed to the max.
“I’ll buy you one,” Nina said in her gravelly voice. She was wearing tan fuck-me heels, a little beige knit suit over her size-two chassis, and no lipstick for once. Kissed it off? Jewel wondered.
Nina towed Jewel into the Coq d’Or on the ground floor of The Drake. When they were seated in front of two tall margaritas, she looked resentfully at Jewel. “Ed sent you.”
“He’s worried.”
“I knew it. I knew that sonofabitch couldn’t let me have some fun. What does he think, I wanna stay home and make lasagna for the rest of my life?”
“You’re having an affair. My best friend is screwing around.”