Incubus

by L. J. Greene

  After that, I can tell by the shaking of his shoulder and his fitful breathing that he’s tugging at himself, bringing himself to an edge before he stops and sucks down my shrunken flesh. With his mouth full and knuckles massaging behind my nuts, he pleasures himself like that, his eyes closed and his tongue wriggling, trying to swallow me right down his throat.

  A bead of perspiration gathers at his hairline and slides into his eyebrow. He stops before his release with a whimper of self-pity, and collects himself again, his cheek pillowed on my thigh, nose still touching my wilted prick, panting at it.

  “I believe you like it,” I say before I can stop myself.

  “Of course,” he says, and cranes his neck so he can see me. “I mean it, angel. You’re absolutely divine as you are. But—” he rolls onto his knees and crawls on top of me, adjusting my legs to his liking. “—if you’re embarrassed by it, there are ways around that.”

  I want to ask what he means, but he’s plunging into me, barely oiled up so that my skin catches on him, burns and aches as he works inside me. I feel bloated, distended; my soft smallness makes him seem that much larger.

  “Wait,” I gasp out. “Wait a minute. You’re—you’re too big—”

  “Hold out for me,” he whispers as I squirm, and grabs at my wrists to keep me down. I flash back to the Marmont; Cresswickham invading my turf and demanding a performance. At least I was blindfolded. Right now I can’t look away from Leo, from his undiluted expression.

  “Almost in, bunny. Almost.” He’s unrelenting, assaulting my body with his own and demanding my complete attention while he does it. He frees one of my hands, only to grab at my throat. “There we are,” he says at last. His face is full of love, but it’s a sharp contrast to the way his fingers are tightening around my neck. “Can you feel it, sweetheart?”

  He starts to move, hard shallow thrusts that make my listless prick bounce and slap against my belly.

  “Feel that? You’re tight, bunny. Real tight, just like you never had anything inside you at all.” His accent’s slipping. “Just like you never got plowed before.”

  “Leo,” I say. “Leo.”

  “We both know that’s not true, though. Look at you, taking it so nice. Christ, you’ll be the death of me, you’re killing me dead, baby—”

  He’s not the one who’ll wind up dead, not like this. His hand presses in. “Too much!” I wheeze, but his fingers spasm ever-tighter. And to my own horror, my body is responding, coming alive.

  “You feelin’ it? How thick and hard you make me?” he asks, and clenches his teeth. “You’re all mine,” he grits out, and flings his head back. I claw desperately with my one free hand at his shoulder, at his fingers, at his face. The tendons in his throat flex. I reach a terrible, agonized climax and he grunts in delight at the hot torrent that spurts between us.

  I hear the same rushing noise in my ears I heard back at the mansion, and it’s like I’m back there again, lying in a wet pool with dimming sight, Leo’s face the last thing I’m going to see in this world. His fingers crush into my throat as he hits his peak and somewhere, faintly, I’m sure I hear a soprano warbling.

  Chapter 53

  “There you are. I was worried for a moment,” he says when I come to. He’s still hovering over me, and the way my face stings tells me he must have been slapping me. “Alright?” He flops back on the bed next to me and scrabbles for his cigarette case. “Watch it, next time, won’t you? You nearly had my eye out.”

  His half-and-half accent is back in place. He cranes his head up to light the cigarette and exhales the smoke with a long, satisfied sigh of pleasure.

  When I try to speak, I cough instead.

  “You poor old thing. Here, I’ll—” He kicks his legs off the bed, and stretches languidly before strolling out to the other room.

  I push myself up in the bed on my elbows. My head spins, and I collapse back again. I hear a clinking of glass.

  “Here you are,” Leo says. When I open my eyes he’s extending a glass tumbler towards me, chock-full of ice and a caramel-hued liquid. I sit up and grab it—who cares about the ice, after all, or the dizzies?—and drink it all down before I realize what it is.

  “Whiskey,” I choke out.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Not bourbon?”

  “Oh.” He takes a drag from his cigarette and looks as though he’s thinking something through. “They don’t seem to have stocked bourbon in the bar,” he says at last, and gives me an easy smile before stubbing out his cigarette. “I suppose I should bathe you. You’re quite a sight, lying there in your own mess. I’ll have to send for housekeeping to change the bed.”

  “There’s bourbon,” I say. My voice is growing stronger now, but I rub at my throat tenderly nonetheless. “I saw it.”

  “I’ll just bet you did,” he murmurs, and then adds, louder, “Well, I must have overlooked it. Come on, sweetheart. Look lively.”

  I’ll never look lively again, but I obey, and somehow roll myself up. His spunk is starting to ooze out of me. Our first-class cabin has all the mod-cons, including a vast bathroom.

  I let him help me to it, where he puts me on the toilet to evacuate while he runs the bath. When I’m done, I just sit there. My back twinges, and I risk it seizing if I reach for the toilet roll. I need help to clean myself, but I don’t want to ask for it.

  He leans against the wall, his arms crossed, his eyes merry.

  “Come on, lover. Finish up and then you can have a lovely hot bath.”

  I clench my hands into fists where they rest on my thighs and look down.

  “Would you like some help?” Leo asks: the very soul of kindness.

  I nod wearily, blinking away the burn in my eyes. He kneels down in front of me and tips my face up with two fingers under my chin. “You shouldn’t feel ashamed, lover. You know I only want to help you. Care for you. Any old way I can.” He kisses me, a plush press of his mouth on mine, greedy and seeking as he always is. And while he kisses me, he draws paper from the toilet roll; pulls me into a close embrace while he wipes me clean; hums something happily as he flushes.

  “What tune is that?” I ask sharply as he helps me stand.

  He squints at the ceiling and hums a few more bars to try to identify it. “Why, of course, it’s Isolde’s Liebestod aria,” he says.

  “What’s that mean? I don’t speak Jerry.” He all but manhandles me to the edge of the bath, ignoring my question. “Roughly translated,” I demand.

  “The Love-Death,” he says abruptly. “Lift your leg higher, or you’ll have a tumble.”

  “Something must have brought it to mind,” I say, climbing in. I lean heavily on him, enough that he staggers a step under my grip, and I can’t help smirking. He catches it.

  “Sit down.”

  “Hold your horses.” I take my time leveraging myself into the water. I have to savor my smallest victories these days. The water’s hotter than I’d like, but after a moment I adjust to it, and besides, it’s good for my back. I recline against the ceramic and try to relax my muscles.

  Leo grabs at the washcloth and gives my knees a push where they break the water. “Open up,” he says. “You need a thorough cleaning.” He thrusts a determined hand between my legs until he reaches his target, and scrubs at me with the cloth. I’m raw enough that it’s painful, and I jerk once or twice until he smiles and kisses my forehead. “Don’t squirm.”

  So I take a deep breath and I let him humiliate me like this until he’s satisfied. He moves on, soaping up his hand and pumping at my cock like he’s trying to get me hard. I squeeze my eyes shut and look away, my face burning. He leans to kiss my cheek and says, “There’s really no need to be embarrassed. I like to look after you.”

  “What did you mean, before?” I ask abruptly. At his questioning eyebrow, I continue, “When you were…you were talking about ways around me being embarrassed?”

  “Ah,” he says, and rolls his shoulders in an eloquent shrug. “Just an id
ea I had.” I say nothing. If he wants to drag it out, he can, but I won’t be a willing party to my own ignominy. Eventually he continues, washing across my scars slowly, tracing them with his fingertips. “I thought of it because of Reggie, you see. After his accident, he was horribly ashamed. Didn’t want me touching him. That’s how he fell into…into watching. I thought perhaps…”

  He lets it linger there, the idea that perhaps I’d like to see him ravaging some other body instead of letting him have my own.

  “Perhaps what?” I say. If he wants it, by God, I’ll make him say it.

  “Never mind,” he sighs, as though I’m just being obstinate. “In any case, you seem to have enjoyed yourself tonight, yes?”

  I give a shrug and close my eyes, waiting for him to wash me down.

  After I’m clean and out of the tub he dries me and dresses me in fresh flannel pajamas. I should feel lucky he hasn’t tried to put me in a diaper again, like he used to just after I got out of the hospital.

  He maneuvers me into the bed, and I look him straight in the eye. “I think I’ve earned that newspaper fair and square tonight, Leo. Wouldn’t you say?”

  His eyebrows lift. “Oh, my love, that’s still on your mind? My goodness, if I’d known how badly you wanted it, I would have given it to you hours ago. I shall bring it post-haste, right after my shower.”

  I wait, because I can’t do anything else. On his bedside table sits his rosary. He keeps it there, though I’ve never seen him use it. Tonight, for the first time, I look closer at it: the large baubles that make up the prayer beads. Under the lamp light I see something glinting, a golden thread. I lean over to have a closer look, gather it into my hand clumsily. I’ve never been religious, and certainly not Catholic, so it’s a foreign object to me. But I bring it close to my face and see that the thread is not a thread; it’s a few flaxen hairs, caught up between the beads, stretched and snapped.

  I think of the pearl necklace that Bella decried as a garrote.

  I think of Michael and Gabriel, unearthed in the canyons. I think of the movie Cresswickham watched that night he passed out in the screening room, of Leo fucking Michael. Choking the life out of him. I’d looked away before the end of the reel, hiding my face in jealousy.

  And lastly I think of Fred King at Bella’s place that terrible night, and his early knowledge of Cresswickham’s death. Someone had tipped him off that night. Someone had instructed him to start cleaning up the scraps.

  But it’s too late, now. Leo has made my bed for me. I shall have to lie in it.

  I put the rosary back on his side of the bed and lie back in the pillows.

  Leo comes out of the bathroom with the paper and I reach out my fingers—not to the paper, but to him.

  “Please,” I say. “Please, Leo, I’ve been good. I’ve been so good tonight.”

  He drops it in my lap; leans in close to kiss my cheek. “You know you only ever have to ask for what you need.”

  He changes into his pajamas while I devour day-old news from a third-rate paper. It’s not his usual choice, and I wonder at it. There are entirely too many society pages with flashy color photographs and not enough about happenings outside New York City. I go back to the start and search it story by story, determined to find whatever it is that Leo wanted to keep hidden from me.

  He slides into bed next to me and glances over, amused. “Anything interesting?” he asks, and takes up the book he’s been reading. Tender Is The Night. I wonder if he picked it as a dig at me. Who knows? I’m not sure he even knows himself why he acts the way he does.

  I’m ready to give up when it finally catches my eye. I missed it because it was in the social pages, all those pictures of glamorous people drinking champagne and kissing the air and flashing diamond engagement rings. That’s where it was, in the Engagements Announced section, From our correspondent in London: a candid photo of Alice and her beau, an Earl of somewhere important-sounding, a stiff-upper-lipped fellow with stern brows and buck teeth.

  Alice. Engaged to that.

  I stare and stare, until Leo says, “I do hope it’s not upsetting for you, darling.”

  “Why would it be upsetting?” I say hoarsely. She’s not smiling in the photograph. They’re coming out of a restaurant or a club somewhere, down the three stairs that lead up to the door, and she’s looking off-camera, away from her fiancé, her face tight and pale. Behind her, I try to make out a shape in the darkness. I’m so used to seeing Betts with her than it’s as though she’s been severed from her own shadow. But there’s nothing there.

  “I didn’t want it bringing back the night of your accident. And you had your own designs at one time, didn’t you?” Leo says, his eyes on his book. He slides a warm hand around the nape of my neck, rubbing his thumb gently over my skin. “Dreams of being affianced to the fair Alice? You didn’t always want to see her dead, after all.”

  I shift in the bed as though resettling, and try to pull away from his hand. It follows me.

  I mutter, “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Oh?” He lays down his book, putting away all pretense at reading it. “I was under the impression you were rather sweet on her.”

  I look at him then, wondering what it is he wants from me. He studies my face with curious eyes. “No,” I say. “No, my best beloved. It’s you, only you. Always you.”

  He smiles, and shifts his grip to pull me in for a kiss. The newspaper falls from my lap to the floor, scattering its sheets.

  When he pulls back, his eyes search my face and he asks, “What are you feeling, sweetheart? I never can tell these days.” I shiver, and his hand withdraws from the back of my neck. “If you’re cold—”

  “I’m not cold, Leo,” I tell him, though my voice sure is. “Tell me again why we’re on our way to England?”

  He picks up his book again. “You know why.”

  “I wonder sometimes about Reggie’s will. If he died without heirs, say, and his closest living relative did too. What would happen to the estate then?”

  Agitated, he throws down the book and gets out of bed. “Where the devil are my Gauloises?” he says to himself, and glares at his nightstand. The bureau is next; he rummages through the top drawer as though he’d ever put his cigarette case away in there. The cigarette case with its curlicued RC engraving on the top, and the deceitful inscription inside: All my love forever, Alice.

  Leo is a rich man in his own right, now. He could afford a thousand silver cigarette cases. Yet he hasn’t bought a new one.

  He comes around to my side of the bed to search my nightstand, digging through my pill bottles and salves. He obliviously kicks at the newspaper on the floor, and stands right on the photograph of Alice and her buck-toothed Earl.

  I say: “Alice once told me she couldn’t get a dime of the Cresswickham fortune until she married. And now here she is, engaged in London, and us docking just a few days before her marriage, almost like we might be going to congratulate her. Is that it, Leo? We’re going to wish her all the best for her upcoming nuptials? Or are you hoping she’ll meet with a timely accident, and you can take over as His Nibs, the Marquess of Holford?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he snaps, straightening up. “Last time we saw Alice she was trying to kill us. And what’s this balderdash about Reggie’s will? He couldn’t leave his title to me, or the estate; they’re hereditary. The title has already gone extinct; he had no male issue.”

  “But he could leave you the money,” I say, and then it dawns on me that I have a point. I’ve been saying whatever spiteful things I can, just to get at him, but somehow—somehow I’ve stumbled on to something. “And you do so love money, Leo. Reggie knew that, too. So what exactly did he write into his will? What happens if Alice dies, unmarried, with no children?”

  I cringe as he stares at me for a long moment, his fingers flexing into fists like he wants to land them in my face. But instead, he sits carefully on the side of the bed. He takes my shoulders, gripping them a mite hard, but not
so tight as to make me wince. He says, “Listen to me. I want you to be happy. I want you to be comfortable. I want you with me, living the sort of life others only dream of. Don’t you want that too?”

  I nod, my throat tight.

  He says carefully, “I’ll take care of your mother. Your sister. And your sister’s children—I’ll take care of your entire family, lover. Every last one of them. Do you understand me?”

  I understand him. I give a shudder.

  “You are chilly. Let me fetch you a blanket.”

  We settle down to sleep once he’s laid another heavy blanket over me, but I’m not chilly, not at all, though the tremor comes back now and then. It’s a familiar feeling. It’s a feeling I used to get on occasion when I walked out of Jimmy Wu’s after laying on a bet. I’d be so certain, walking in, which nag was my nag, that pony I could be sure of, the one that was going to win me my rent for the week.

  But walking back out, sometimes I’d get a cold flutter in my belly. And whenever I got that shiver, without fail, I’d end up losing. I learned to fear that shiver, and what it meant: that I’d bet on the wrong horse.

  So we beat on towards England in this goddamn boat, and I despair when I think of what’s to come.

  Afterword

  Dear reader of excellent judgement and taste,

  Thank you for reading Incubus. I would say I hope you enjoyed it, but I’m not sure that’s quite the right word. I do hope it has kept you entertained, at the very least!

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  If you just can’t leave this world behind, and want MORE Incubus, please sign up to my newsletter to get an exclusive unpublished chapter set early in the novel. You’ll also get updates on my works and series, and the occasional freebie and sneak peek.

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  Yours,

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