“You look incredible,” he said, pulling his blue t-shirt up over his head.
Her smile broadened. “No need for flattery. I'm a sure thing, remember?” She seemed relaxed and playful, a far cry from the previous morning.
“I'm not kidding. You're really beautiful, and sexy as hell.” He went to work on his belt and button fly.
“For a guy who shunned women for thirty years, you certainly know the right things to say,” she said, sounding genuinely pleased by the compliment.
Naked, he stepped toward her, his desire obvious. “Tell me how to...” he started, then stopped. No commands, he reminded himself. “I want to know how to please you. How to make it feel good for you. So far I've been all take and no give, and that isn't right.”
“It did feel good, Jim, every time. The feel of you inside me is incredible.”
“For me too, but I want to give you the same kind of pleasure that you give me. I want to know what to do.”
She regarded him silently for a moment, then scooted forward to sit on the edge of the bunk, her thighs spread and feet on the floor. She held out her hands palms up and when he grasped them she gently pulled him down so he was kneeling between her widespread knees. She lay back and propped herself up on her elbows, looking down the length of her body into his eyes.
“Taste me,” she said in a quiet voice.
He looked down at her smooth mound and puffy slit. The scent of her arousal was sweet and he breathed it in deeply as he put his hands on her thighs and lowered his mouth to her sex.
Not knowing where to begin, he pressed a hot kiss onto the rounded swell of her mons and a satisfied sigh escaped her lips. Encouraged, he extended his tongue and licked slowly over the soft skin, then dipped his head lower and ran his tongue along her labia.
“Fuck, that feels fantastic,” she breathed, “Keep going.”
He used his thumbs to spread her lips, exposing her wet, pink flesh. He couldn't wait to sample it and dove in with his lips and tongue, lapping indiscriminately.
She sat up, gently cupped his face in her palms and guided his mouth higher, almost to the top of her slit, then held him there. He took the hint and focused his ministrations on the hard nub of pink flesh he could feel with his tongue. She sucked in her breath, then let it out in a loud moan.
“Right there...not too hard. Go easy at first,” she whispered.
“Mmm. You're my new favorite flavor.” He eased off her swollen clit, tickling and teasing instead of lapping at it.
He continued to savor the scent and taste of her arousal and to enjoy her gasps and moans. Her breathing quickened until she was panting. Her pelvis began to lift, greeting every stroke of his tongue, seeking greater contact.
“Faster...don't stop.” Her hands gripped his hair urgently, pulling him into her sex. He obliged, swirling his tongue more rapidly over her clit, loving her groans, the writhing of her hips.
Then the air was forced from her lungs in a half-moan, half-scream. The muscles in her abdomen began to spasm. Her thighs quivered. Her whole body began to vibrate as an orgasm shook her. Finally she pushed him away and lay back on the bunk, breathing heavily. Jim stretched out beside her.
“You're...a quick study,” she said between breaths.
He chuckled. “A motivated learner, that's all.”
“I hope you're not done. You still need to fuck the Curse out of me. Your mouth was heavenly but didn't take the edge off.”
“You seem tired. Why don't I drive?” He sat up and repositioned himself at the foot of the bunk.
She smiled up at him, then spread her legs. “All yours.”
Aware that it would be their last time together, he was slow and deliberate. He settled between her knees and carefully slid his cock into her. She was soaked and dripping with his saliva and her delicious juices. Their coupling was unhurried and intimate and after he climaxed deep inside her they remained entwined for a long while, not speaking but savoring the closeness, the gentle touches and affectionate caresses.
Too soon it was time to continue the journey. Their inevitable destination awaited them.
“Somehow I figured it would take longer to unload,” she said.
“Those guys knew their stuff,” he said with a shrug.
They sat at a picnic table outside a rustic coffee shop on the shore of Carey Lake, just outside Hearst, sharing sandwiches and coffee. There was more chill in the air than was comfortable, but the fading evening sun and brilliant colors from the autumn leaves more than compensated.
Conversation was strained, with both of them careful to dance around any mention of what would happen next. They chatted about the weather, the scenery, how great the coffee was....then lapsed into a dreadful silence that neither of them could find a way to escape.
“This...is hard,” Lisa said, meeting his eyes for a moment and then looking away, over the water.
“No regrets. Meeting you is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“That's awful! And...beautiful. Thank you.” He could see she was trying not to cry.
“It's true. I wouldn't trade the last 24 hours for another 20 years of my old life. Thank you, Lisa.”
With nothing left to say and only tears in their future, Jim decided it was time.
“Follow me to the rig,” he commanded in a quiet but firm tone, then got up and led the way, certain that she would follow. The Curse allowed her no other option.
Once in the cabin, he directed her to sit on the bunk and remain still and silent. He put her backpack next to her on the bunk, then fished out the gun and slid it into the side pocket of his coat. The expression on her face went from confusion to alarm, but she remained still. He saw the look on her face and chuckled.
“Just a small change of plans,” he said, then opened a cupboard and pulled out an envelope. “I've been saving for almost thirty years, with nothing much to spend the money on. So consider this bank draft to be my donation to the 'kill every Luther you can find' fund.” He slid the envelope into her backpack. “There's probably not a lot of money in what you do, after all.”
He knelt in front of her and caught her eyes.
“Murder is messy, Lisa. Police, forensics, lengthy investigations. You've managed to get away with it so far, but someday it's going to catch up to you. But suicide? Nice and clean. No questions, no fuss. A rubber stamp in the coroner's office and that's that.”
He rose to his feet and took a step back.
“Look at me.”
She tilted her chin up. Her eyes were brimming, but she could utter no sound, and Jim was grateful for that. His own emotions were strong, and close to the surface, a heartfelt goodbye would only make him weepy as well.
“When I snap my fingers, you will take your backpack and you will go into the coffee shop. You'll smile pleasantly, order some dessert, take a seat inside and eat it. You'll order a refill of coffee. You will sit and drink your coffee until 6:30pm. When you do leave, you will knock over the rack of postcards just inside the door, then apologize and help them clean it up. Everyone will remember you were there. An excellent alibi. Nod your head if you understand.”
She nodded miserably.
He smiled, then bent and kissed her forehead.
“Goodbye.” He snapped his fingers and stood aside while she climbed down out of the truck. He sat in the driver's seat and watched her walk into the coffee shop without looking back, then he fired up the engine and slowly pulled the rig onto the road.
He didn't know much about guns. Didn't know the brands or the model names. Didn't know how to care for one or even how to load one. But he knew what everyone else knew – take the safety off, point the barrel, pull the trigger. For his purposes, it would be enough.
He checked his setup. The truck was on the side of the road, hazards on, reflective triangles laid out behind. The ignition was off, keys on the passenger seat. The interior lights were on to brighten the cab; dusk was creeping in and whoever discovered the scene afterward would need to be able to
see what was going on. The windows were open; no point leaving an ungodly smell behind. Classic rock anthems played on the satellite radio – not too loud, but enough to provide some company in his final moments.
His suicide note was on the passenger seat, under the keys. Simple and to the point – he'd written it many times over the years in his head and knew just the tone he wanted to convey. Not bitter. Not melodramatic. Not angry at the hand that fate had dealt him. It was concise, no-nonsense and unambiguous – he was leaving this world because there was no good reason to stay.
A shame to mess up the interior of a pretty good truck, for sure, but he'd spent twenty-two hours a day inside a truck for the last twenty-seven years or so. It seemed fitting to end his life there.
He sat on his bunk and set the gun down beside him, then held up the Polaroid of his family and really looked at it for the first time in years. He'd been a happy kid in a happy family. The Curse had come in his fourteenth year and made a mess of everything, but up until that point the memories were good – Christmas mornings in front of a decorated tree, prowling the neighborhood on Halloween, sandcastles on the beach. Good times. Leaving it all behind at fifteen had been hard – really hard. Staying would have been worse. Worse for him. Worse for his mother and two sisters.
Having heard Lisa describe the type of men she'd killed, Jim knew how things might have turned out – what he might have grown into – had he taken the easy road and stayed. Oftentimes, the hard decision was the right one.
The thought of Lisa buoyed him. In a different life, she'd have been the right woman at the right time. She had a tough job. He was glad he could lighten the load for her this way.
He flipped the safety off and hefted the gun. It was heavy. Solid. Serious business. He raised the barrel to his right temple and took his time finding the best angle. He paused and took a slow, deep breath.
Jim squeezed the trigger.
Lisa sipped her coffee and checked the time on her phone again. Ten after six. He'd been gone for forty minutes. That was plenty of time, and she figured he'd either done it or had changed his mind and was fleeing south in his rig.
She hoped he'd gone through with it and pulled the trigger. It would be heartbreaking to have to track him down again and put a bullet into him, but if she needed to, she would. No matter how soul-crushing it would be to knowingly kill a good man, the alternative was worse. To allow any other women to suffer the way she had in Luther's power would be a greater injustice than the murder of just one man.
Death was quick. What she had endured from that sick bastard would be with her always.
She checked her phone. Six-twelve. Fuck!
She thought maybe time would speed up if she re-inventoried her backpack. A change of clothes. Wet wipes. Plastic bags. Baseball cap. Sixty-four dollars in cash. Thirty-six new doses of Lanzapine. And Jim's envelope – a bank draft for almost five hundred thousand dollars.
She stared at the figure, still not fully believing in the kind of man she'd spent the last two days with. Gentle. Earnest. Noble. The best man she'd ever known, by a wide margin. A man like that could be trusted to do the right thing.
She desperately hoped he'd pulled the trigger.
She stuffed everything back into her pack. Six-eighteen. Almost time to go. She took another sip. Then she heard it.
The roar of the engine. The rig. Loud and lumbering, rolling to a halt outside the coffee shop in the twilight.
She began to quiver. Wanted to get up and run to the door, but the damn Curse kept her seated. She could only await him.
The vehicle door slammed. Heavy footfalls approached on the gravel parking lot. She could make him out through the window. Already she recognized his outline and his gait.
He opened the door, stepped inside and nodded politely to the young man behind the counter. Jim walked over to stand in front of her table. She took another sip of coffee. Her muscles tensed.
“It's empty!” he said, his tone outraged.
Lisa reached into her coat pocket and her hand closed over the bullets she'd removed from the clip that morning while he was in the bank. She'd felt she could trust him, wanted desperately to believe she could. She'd gambled that he was the kind of man who would rather die than betray his moral code. The kind of man she could trust with her heart, with her mission. But the stakes were so high and she needed to know for certain. Would he allow her to pull the trigger, when the time came?
He'd pulled it himself. Even better.
She smiled up at him. He grumbled, threw himself into the chair opposite her and signaled the counter for another cup of coffee. They had a lot to discuss.
About Richard North
Richard North lives in Canada and spends his spare time writing in a variety of genres. He enjoys cheap Merlot, hiking, football and..believe it or not...economics.
Of Fog and Fire
By Jennifer Bene
Text copyright © 2015 Jennifer Bene
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Sometimes an entire story hits you at once, and sometimes you get one scene and the rest flows from there. That’s what happened with this story, I got the prologue, and then Phee started talking, and the story just happened. Many thanks to Tara Crescent and the others in the Erotic Collective (especially our editor) for being completely badass, and for letting me join these anthologies so that shorter stories like Phee’s have a home.
Prologue
There are two questions I want to start with.
First, when you were little – did you want to be special? To be the kind of person who would do things in the world, to be the kind of person that would rise to be someone important even if you were born into obscurity? My mother taught me to want those things. She told me stories about fairy princes and kings of fire, and little girls who battled with swords and commanded armies by speaking the words of the trees. She filled my life with magic and she urged me to be someone special, to believe I could be. If I wanted to wear purple tights and yellow jean shorts and a paisley shirt, I could. If I didn’t want to go to school, we went and danced in the park. We ate candy, and snuck into movies, and stole sunglasses to stroll down the street hand in hand. That’s what she was like when she was happy, and at those times, to a seven-year-old girl, she was the best mother in the world.
When she wasn’t happy, things were – difficult. My mother was convinced The Cabal of Freedom, our government, was poisoning the water to kill the poor. She said they hid things in our apartment, in the cabinets and the walls, so that they could listen to her. She said they knew her thoughts. When she was like that, I remember being afraid, and I worried about her. I remember braiding her hair when she lay on the living room floor and cried, and I’d tell all of her stories back to her. Ancient warrior queens, and mermaids in the lakes, and hidden mazes in the woods that led to lands of snow and ice that never made you cold.
My grandparents took me away from her because of it. They made me dress in the uniforms. They made me go to school. I had to eat real meals, and I wasn’t allowed to see my mother except on certain weekends. My mother faded until she wasn’t vibrant, and her happy days were farther and farther apart. And my grandfather told me to be realistic instead of special. Special was for the people in the high rises made of glittering glass and steel, and not for girls South of downtown. Not for girls that lived in the fog.
Which brings me to my second question – have you ever wanted someone you knew you couldn’t have? I like to think that if my mother hadn’t rai
sed me to believe that anything was possible, that there’s a chance I might not have ever looked at Bryant Holbrook. Even with his chestnut brown hair, and his turquoise eyes, and his perfect white teeth. There could have been a chance. A chance to live a regular life.
But when you’re raised to imagine yourself as a golden warrior goddess, as a queen of fire and ice, as a fairy of the wood and an unnamed superhero – a regular life is a death sentence.
Chapter One
It was just another Tuesday.
Another stupid, long, exhausting day where Phee rushed around the Elsinore Café and served food and coffee to the rich and powerful. A day like many of the hundreds of others she had spent taking a train and two buses to the low-paying waitress job in the middle of downtown. All so she could stand beneath the glittering towers. So she could look up and see them scraping the sky, imagining for just a moment there were dragons wrapped around their spires, roaring at the birds flying by –
“Phee, what the fuck are you doing? I rang the bell twice! Come grab table nine!” Alex made a noise of irritation as he rolled his eyes, threw his hand in the air, and stomped back into the kitchen from the window.
“Sorry, Alex, I got it!” She pushed a hand through her hair and grabbed the plates, smiling at him as she apologized. “Come on, don’t be mad at me. Alex… come on.” Watching his irritation soften she winked and he laughed. All it ever took was a smile to make Alex forgive any of them. He owned the Elsinore and while he had started out South of downtown with the rest of those in the fog, now he lived in the city. In one of those towers of glass. And he was barely thirty. He was the kind of success story that gave kids in the fog the hope to dream of more.
“I swear, Phee, you’d lose your head if it wasn’t attached. And you’re about to lose that tip if that food gets any colder. Move it!” Alex waved a spatula at her, and she stuck her tongue out at him before laughing and carrying the plates past the end of the long counter. The man and woman at table nine were so wrapped up in conversation they barely noticed as she slid the plates in front of them and offered to refill their drinks. They waved Phee off, too intent on their conversation to bother actually answering her. That was normal, but then she turned to see another table in her section occupied and she flinched. She hadn’t checked on them yet.
Twist (A BDSM & Romantic Erotica Boxed Set) Page 41
