Engines of Desire: Tales of Love and Other Horrors

by Livia Llewellyn

  The slurping sounds grew louder, and the girl writhed and groaned. Brett’s chin shone with her juices, and he slid his hands up and down the insides of her thighs. She leaned forward suddenly, landing on her hands, and he moved his fingers to her tits, tugging at them as if milking the soft flesh. The girl cried out, and beside the bed, the girl on the floor writhed. I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell by the way her toes curled that she felt the same way I did.

  “Get on your back,” Brett’s spoke, his voice harsh and thick with desire. The girl complied, spreading her legs wide in the air. Brett turned her body roughly, so that she lay across the width of the bed, and a low flush of fear pinched my cheeks. He knew I was in the closet. He must have seen me open the door, because he was positioning the girl so I could see her. Through the slit of the open door, her pussy shone wet in the dim light, the dark red folds of flesh like a wound between her long brown legs. He held one leg high, and bent down slightly, pressing the tip of his cock back and forth against her labia and clit until it was shining with her juices. My pussy clenched around my fingers, and I bore down on them, pretending they were his cock ramming into me.

  Fuck her, I mouthed.

  As if he could hear me, Brett rammed into her, sliding in and out in hard, sure thrusts. Both he and the girl grunted with every thrust, and his shaft grew slick and wide. A small moan escaped my lips, as I worked all four of my fingers into my pussy, violently jerking my arm back and forth. The girl on the floor was doing the same, fucking herself with her fingers, her legs spread wide on the cold floor. I grabbed my breast with my free hand and pinched my nipple hard, and I came as Brett cried out, pushing the girl’s head into the wall with a final thrust as he came. I rested my head against the door frame, panting as I drew my sticky hand from my pussy. It felt like someone had fucked me with a brick, and I could barely move my swollen fingers. Brett pushed the girl away from him, and stood up, staring at his cock as it curved down against his balls. He smiled, and so did I.

  “Did you cum?” The girl on the bed smiled at his question, a simpering and self-satisfied grin.

  “Of course. You were so good, I—”

  “Get out.”

  “What?” The girl on the bed rubbed her head as she clumsily stood up. Brett uncuffed the other girl from the desk, pulling her to her feet, and handing her a pile of clothes.

  “Go on. Get out. Both of you.”

  “You motherfucker! You can’t just treat us like this and tell us to get out!” The girl with the bruised head was screaming as she scrambled to put on her underwear. “I want my fucking drugs! You promised us drugs!” I almost laughed out loud—how old was this girl, twelve? Didn’t they see the look in his eyes?

  They didn’t—Brett grabbed the girl’s hair and pushed her around the wall, and down the stairs. She didn’t fall, but I heard her stumble, and her drunken shouting turned to tears. I stopped laughing. Suddenly I realized what Richard had been trying to tell me, that this man was dangerous, that I didn’t know anything about him. No one knew where I was. If I disappeared tonight, no one would ever find the body.

  The other girl ran down the stairs, and I heard the rest of their clothes hitting the stairs—Brett must have thrown them. Sobbing and incoherent ranting rose and fell as the girls made their way through the dark apartment; then the front door slammed shut, and I was alone with him.

  I stood in the dark of the closet, my fingers drying together, my pubic hair sticking out of my unzipped jeans, one tit hanging from my halter. I didn’t dare move. I heard footsteps, and the door swung open, letting in the light. Brett stood before me, naked and slick with sweat, heat radiating from him in waves. The look on his face was indecipherable. I gave him a crooked smile—I didn’t know what else to do.

  “Trick or treat?”

  Brett began to laugh, the dry, rippling sound of a rattlesnake rolling out of his mouth. “Get out of there. Cover yourself up.” He turned away, reaching for his cigarettes as I hurriedly adjusted my clothes. “I could call the police. This is breaking and entering, you know. Invasion of privacy.” He sat down in the small chair, his legs spread wide. He was still smiling, but he was serious, and I realized once again how dangerous a situation I’d put myself in.

  “I was—I only meant—it was a surprise. I thought you might like—” I made a feeble gesture at the bed, as if I’d planned on surprising him with a vigorous bout of Halloween sexing. Neither of us believed me.

  “What do you want from me?” He stood up, and I took a step back. He was even more threatening without clothes, an animal, completely feral and uncontrolled. “I owe you nothing. I never promised you anything, never lied. And you have no fucking respect for that!” He took the cigarette out of his mouth, smashing it into the ashtray on the desk, then turned to me. The gold hair on his body caught the smoky light, making him look like some kind of werewolf. I caught myself cringing in his glare.

  “I do respect you,” I began to babble. “I respect you so much, I care for you so much—”

  “You don’t know me, how can you care about me? I don’t want that! I don’t need that shit from you!”

  “But you don’t understand, we had something—back when we met, there was a connection!” I moved toward him, even as I realized he was recoiling in disgust. “There’s something between us, you can’t deny that! And you said that you weren’t just any man—I know that! You aren’t just any man, and I want to prove it to you, I want to show you how much I care for you. Just let me do that.” I lowered my voice, trying to keep calm. “Just give me one more chance. I’ll do anything you want, I just want to be with you one more time. And then I’ll leave you alone.”

  He leaned back, a smirk on his face. “You love me, but you’ll be with me one more time, then leave me forever?”

  “I didn’t say I love you.” My words cracked slightly. God, I disgusted myself, but the words and the ugly, naked need for him just kept vomiting out of me. “I just—we had a good time, and I want that again. No strings. I swear to god, we’ll just have one last time together, and I’ll leave you alone forever. I promise. I swear.” I put my hand over my heart, blinking hard. “Promise.”

  Brett looked down, shaking his head as he rubbed his hand over his face. He sighed, low and long, then looked up. I said nothing, tried to keep my face calm. If he just said yes, if he let me do all the things I knew I could do, he’d fall in love. I knew it.

  He looked up at the photo albums, then took the top packet off the shelf, noting the torn edges. My cheeks burned.

  “Yeah.” Brett didn’t look at me, but fingered the paper as he slowly nodded his head. “Yeah. We could have one more time together. You were right, we were good together. One last time, something good. Something to erase all the shit.” He flung the packet onto the shelf, then came over to me, taking my face in his hands. I thought I was going to faint. His bright blue eyes stared down at me, blue like high summer skies.

  “One last time,” he said, and kissed my forehead. “Go home, I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll plan something wonderful.”

  “All right. Thank you. Thank you.” Brett released me, and I stepped back, staggering slightly as I turned and skipped down the stairs. I wanted to believe him, I wanted so badly to believe that everything would be fine.

  The moon was full and high as I crossed the courtyard, and pumpkins glittered like orange stars from all the windows and doors. I touched the scale at my throat, and when I drew my fingers back in a sharp gasp, red dripped from the fingertips. I sucked at the blood, ignoring the warning pain.

  TOMANOWOS

  Yellow dragons bisecting the black, the flash of highway lamps as they swayed and shimmied, and red smears of floating cars in the early evening glow—and I was a deep-sea creature, something luminous and sparkling, pushing through æons of mud into light waters and life.

  “Give me another.” Brett pointed to the glove compartment, and I pawed through the detritus of his travels, finding the slip of an env
elope. I sighed heavily as I placed another miniscule slip of paper on the tip of my tongue. Hello Kitty dissolved as I closed my mouth, and the highway once again became the serpent, flying us into the cold jaws of the north.

  He’d done it, despite my skepticism. Brett had kept his promise, and we were winding up Highway 2, toward the high hills surrounding Leavenworth. The town itself was a popular tourist spot—small Bavarian-style gingerbread buildings in neat rows along the streets, so ridiculously out-of-place in the ancient forests and gorges that people couldn’t help but flock to them. But that’s not where we were going. Beyond the small town, beyond the frilly bed-and-breakfast houses and rough campgrounds, the Wenatchee River snaked through beds of gravel, rough and rapid, and utterly untamed.

  “Just like you,” I murmured as I chewed on the straw in my drink.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.” I shook my head, embarrassed to think my thoughts were so close to the surface. I’d never taken acid before, and I found that it punctured the thin membrane between the inner world and the outer. I couldn’t tell if I was thinking something or saying it, imagining something or seeing it.

  It also bothered me that, after spending the past three months doing everything in my power to spend time alone with Brett, I found I had nothing to say to him. I love you, I want you, I need you didn’t make for much of a conversation, and my attempts to find out more about his past were deftly derailed by Brett. I found myself talking about my childhood, how I’d met Richard, what it had been like to live in London. He smiled and nodded his head as I happily chattered away, oblivious to his indifference until long after we’d steered off the main highway and onto a smaller road. I calculated the numbers on the signs—forty miles of babbling about nothing. I squirmed in my seat, looking back to see if I could find the dark squiggles of letters floating in the air, cursive markers leading the way back to Richard, and home.

  “Changed your mind?”

  “No.” I turned back and began fishing for ice at the bottom of the cup. “It’s getting dark.”

  “There’s still a couple hours of daylight.” Brett peered up at the sky above the trees. “It’s just darker here under the trees. It’ll lighten up by the river. Don’t worry. We’ll be able to see everything.”

  I opened my mouth to say something important, but the impulse faded with the thought. It was difficult to keep my mind in order. The smoke from Brett’s cigarettes wafted through the car, small dragons forming in the white curls. I watched them coil around my hands, delighted and distracted. I knew it was the acid, but it wasn’t. The veil that hung over the world had been pushed aside, and I could see things as they really were. Dragons sailed through the smoky air, traffic lights winked at me, and evergreens thundered and cracked overhead, sending signals to the river: they are arriving.

  She is here.

  “Wake up.” Soft lips brushed against mine, and I sat up, spilling the remains of my drink over the seat. “What? Are we here?”

  “You conked out. Yeah. This is it.” Brett got out of the car while I rubbed my eyes, trying to get back my equilibrium. I’d been watching the trees talk to each other as we sped by on the road, and now I was looking out over a low gravel bank, a thick curve of low white rapids chattering over jagged rocks and rushing past small clumps of trees mid-stream. I got out of the car and stretched, luxuriating in the tangle of wild beauty. Beyond the stream, low mountains crowded the horizon—the first foreboding tendrils of the Cascades—and ancient woods rolled over them in a blanket of dark green. They looked desolate, yet inconsolably perfect. They did not need me. I shuddered, and turned away.

  We ate on the gravel banks of the Wenatchee, on a wool blanket Brett spread out over the warm rocks. I was stunned by his thoughtfulness—he’d brought wine and cheese, long loaves of bread and small ceramic pots of foie gras and raspberry jam, cold chicken breasts, bars of expensive chocolate, and crisp grapes on the vine. The acid made me listless and lethargic, I didn’t want to eat, I wanted to lie on the blanket and stare at the shape-shifting clouds. But several sharp remarks from Brett made me shovel it into my mouth. I didn’t want to displease him, especially today of all days—although some dark oily thought squirmed in the back of my mind, telling me something was obscenely wrong. But what could be wrong? Wasn’t this everything I wanted?

  Other than insisting that I eat, Brett said little. He stared at me much of the time, and I blushed much of the time. Perhaps he was coming around, after all. I wasn’t like those sluts he banged every other day. Every day. I was better than that, I had more to offer him. And it had taken some thought to make up the picnic basket—if he’d just wanted to bang me outside somewhere, he wouldn’t have gone to all this expense and trouble. I ate his food and drank his wine, and he brushed away the crumbs with a gentle brush of his hand, and kissed the droplets of wine from my mouth. I stuck out my long tongue for more squares of white paper, which Brett balanced on its tip with great delicacy and care. I lost count of how many hits I took, or how many joints I smoked. It didn’t matter—I was safe. I could do anything I wanted, and Brett would take care of me.

  After, he set the food aside, and stripped me bare. I barely noticed—each movement of our bodies stretched out as far as the mountains, and I was too busy watching the waters of the river. Silver serpents cascaded over the rocks, rising with short bursts of stunted wings into the air, then crashing back down into the freezing waters.

  “Hey.” Brett stood over me, naked. With the giant evergreens framing his body, and the sun catching his long dirty hair, he looked more like a part of the land than I’d ever seen. If I’d been here thirteen thousand years ago to see the glacier recede, he would have been here, rising up from the dirty waters and shifting land, as unyielding as the boulders left behind. Or maybe—maybe—

  “You’re high as a kite.” He was laughing at me as he lowered himself onto the blanket, stretching his lean body beside me. We lay there together, not touching but staring into each other’s faces. I stared at his clear blue eyes, the fine lines radiating down his face, the golden blur of stubble on his skin, and I realized then that I could love this man forever, that I would love him forever, and nothing would ever cure me—not wind or flood or fire.

  “I was thinking of what you might be like, if you were like a mountain or a boulder, some part of the land that’s been here forever; and then I remembered the meteor—the one that came down to earth.”

  “Which one is that?” He brushed the hair from my face, and ran his hand down the my neck, tracing the curve of my shoulder and arm with one finger, and the wake of his flesh left a glowing blue line on my skin. I sighed in pleasure.

  “You know—the meteor. It fell onto the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, but the Missoula floods carried it into Oregon, to Willamette. They say it’s a fragment of a planet that was shattered by the sun, billions of years ago. It fell to earth thousands of years ago.”

  “Like this.” Brett touched the scale at my neck. I felt it flare into life, and my bones vibrated. I drew away from his touch. It felt strange, like the whisper of radio waves snickering things into my ear that I couldn’t understand. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “You think that’s what I’m like.” He rolled his fingers around a nipple, working my flesh into a hard red button. I felt myself squirm, and my toes curled as the pleasure trickled down my body. “You think I fell to earth like a star.”

  “I saw you that day.”

  “What day.” He leaned into me, wrapped his lips around my tits as I moved onto my back. I closed my eyes, overcome by the pleasure of his lips, the soft wind on my skin and the warm blanket against my back. I slid a leg over his, letting the breeze rush over my cunt—it felt good to be so naked, so free.

  “That day, the day I fainted in the scab lands.” I caressed his hair, ran my hands down to his face, feeling the movements of his jaw as he suckled at me. “The day I found the scale. I heard your car. And later, when I saw you on campus, I knew it had been you
. You were out there.”

  “Clever girl,” Brett murmured in between kisses. He shifted over me, lying flat above me, his pelvis and cock pressed between my legs. I stretched my legs wide, pressing up into his heavy flesh. His skin was so hot that when I ran my hands over his shoulders, little tendrils of smoke rose in the air.

  “I see things,” I said. It wasn’t the drugs, I was certain. This was the way of the world and the lay of the land, and he was crashing into me like a meteor into ice, melting and releasing me like a flood across the world.

  “I’ll show you everything you ever wanted to see.” His lips pressed onto mine, and our tongues thrashed against each other as he ground against me. I arched my back, squeezing my ass as I lifted him slightly. He rose up on his hands, and began humping me, wetting his shaft against the slick folds of my pussy. But his movements were gentle, not hard-edged and abrupt like they’d been before. This was what I’d always wanted, and I threw my head back and smiled, tasting the scent of our sweat and watching it rise in shimmering waves above our limbs.

  Brett reached between our legs and grabbed his cock, and began rubbing the head over my clit in gentle circles. His skin was soft and smooth as wet silk, as soft as his tongue in my mouth. I ran my hands up and down his arms, through the thick layer of hair on his chest, over his hips and ass. The touch of his skin was gold, and when we gasped, bits of glittering fire sparked in the air around our mouths like fireflies. And every moment felt like a century. It took a millennium for his cock to slide into my pussy, and the push and pull of his shaft was an epoch unto itself. His thrusts were slow and methodical, and he bore down against me, his hard skin and thick hair rubbing against my clit until I felt all my muscles tighten around him, and the familiar conflagration of pleasure sweep through my bones.