"Harder, rougher. Rape me, do it! Use your power."
He lifted her so that her head fell backwards, her hair tumbling down beneath her, her eyes closed, hands parting her sex, parting her thighs.
"Come in to me, hard, make yourself a man for me, a hard man!"
The mouths drew harder on her nipples, the tongues lapping at her breasts, her belly, the fingers pulling at her backside and scratching at her thighs. "The cock," she whispered, and then she felt it, enormous and hard, driving into her. "Yes, do it, tear me, do it! Override me, do it!" Her senses were flooded with the smell of clean, hard flesh and clean hair, as the weight bore down on her and the cock slammed into her, yes, harder, make it rape. Glimpse of a face, dark green eyes, lips. And then a blur as the lips opened her lips.
Her body was pinned to the carpet, and the cock burned her as it drove inside her, scraping her clitoris, plunging deeper into her vagina. I can't stand it, I can't bear it. Split me apart, yes. Laid waste. The orgasm flooded through her, her mind blank except for the raging flow of colors like waves as the rollicking sensation washed up through her belly, and her breast and her face, and down through her thighs, stiffening her calves, and through the muscles of her feet. She heard her own cries, but they were far away, unimportant, flowing out of her mouth in a divine release, her body pumping and helpless and stripped of will and mind.
Again and again, it exploded in her, scalding her. Over and over, until all time, all guilt, all thought was burnt away.
Morning. Was there a baby crying? No. Only the phone ringing. Unimportant.
She lay in the bed, beneath the covers, naked. The sun was streaming in the windows on the front of the house. The memory of it came back to her, and a hurtful throbbing started in her. The phone, or was it a baby crying? A baby somewhere far off in the house. Half in dream she saw its little limbs working, bent knees, chubby little feet.
"My darling," he whispered.
"Lasher," she answered.
The sound of the crying had died away. Her eyes closed on the vision of the shining windowpanes and the tangle of the oak limbs over the sky.
When she opened them again, she stared up into his green eyes, into his dark face, exquisitely formed. She touched the silk of his lip with her finger, all his hard weight pressed down on her, his cock between her legs.
"God, yes, God, you are so strong."
"With you, my beauty." The lips revealed the barest glint of white teeth as the words were formed. "With you, my divine one."
Then came the blast of heat, the hot wind blowing her hair back, and the whirlwind scorching her.
And in the clean silence of the morning, in the light of the sun pouring through the glass, it was happening all over again.
At noon, she sat outside by the pool. Steam was rising from the water into the cold sunlight. Time to turn off the heater. Winter was truly here.
But she was warm in her wool dress. She was brushing her hair.
She felt him near her; and she narrowed her eyes. Yes, she could see the disturbance in the air again, very clearly actually, as he surrounded her like a veil being slowly wound around her shoulders and arms.
"Get away from me," she whispered. The invisible substance clung to her. She sat upright, and hissed the words at it this time. "Away, I told you!"
It was the shimmer from a fire in sunlight, what she saw. And then the chill afterwards as the air regained its normal density, as the subtle fragrances of the garden returned.
"I'll tell you when you may come," she said. "I will not be at the mercy of your whims or your will."
"As you wish, Rowan." It was that interior voice she'd heard once before in Destin, the voice that sounded like it was inside her head.
"You see and hear everything, don't you?" she asked.
"Even your thoughts."
She smiled, but it was a brittle, fierce smile. She pulled the long loose hairs out of her hairbrush. "And what am I thinking?" she asked.
"That you want me to touch you again, that you want me to surround you with illusions. That you would like to know what it is to be a man, and for me to take you as I would a man."
The blood rose to her cheeks. She matted up the little bit of blond hair from the brush and dropped it into the ferny garden beside her, where it vanished among the fronds and the dark leaves.
"Can you do that?" she asked.
"We can do it together, Rowan. You can see and feel many things."
"Talk to me first," she said.
"As you wish. But you hunger for me, Rowan."
"Can you see Michael? Do you know where he is?"
"Yes, Rowan, I see him. He is in his house, sorting through his many possessions. He is swimming in memories and in anticipation. He is consumed with the desire to return to you. He thinks only of you. And you think of betraying me, Rowan. You think of telling your friend Aaron that you have seen me. You dream of treachery."
"And what's to stop me if I want to speak to Aaron? What can you do?"
"I love you, Rowan."
"You couldn't stay away from me now, and you know it. You'll come if I call you."
"I want to be your slave, Rowan, not your enemy."
She stood up, staring up into the soft foliage of the sweet olive tree, at the bits and pieces of pale sky. The pool was a great rectangle of steaming blue light. The oak beyond swayed in the breeze, and once again she felt the air changing.
"Stay back," she said.
There came the inevitable sigh, so eloquent of pain. She closed her eyes. Somewhere very far away a baby was crying. She could hear it. Had to be coming from one of these big silent houses, which always seemed so deserted in the middle of the day.
She went inside, letting her heels sound loudly on the floor. She took her raincoat from the front hall closet, all the protection she needed against the cold, and she went out the front door.
For an hour she walked through the quiet empty streets. Now and then a passerby nodded to her. Or a dog behind a fence would approach to be petted. Or a car would roar past.
She tried merely to see things--to focus upon the moss that grew on the walls, or the color of the jasmine twined still around a fence. She tried not to think or to panic. She tried not to want to go back into the house. But at last her steps took her back that way, and she was standing at her own gate.
Her hand was trembling as she put the key in the lock. At the far end of the hall, in the door to the dining room, he stood watching her.
"No! Not until I say!" she said, and the force of her hate went before her like a beam of light. The image vanished; and a sudden acrid smell rose to her nostrils. She put her hand over her mouth. All through the air she saw the faint wave-like movement. And then nothing, and the house was still.
That sound came again, the baby crying.
"You're doing it," she whispered. But the sound was gone. She went up the stairs to her room. The bed was neatly made now, her night things put away. The draperies drawn.
She locked the door. She kicked off her shoes, and lay down on the counterpane beneath the white canopy, and closed her eyes. She couldn't fight it any longer. The thought of last night's pleasure brought a deep charring heat to her, an ache, and she pressed her face into the pillow, trying to remember and not to remember, her muscles flexing and then letting go.
"Come then," she whispered. At once, the soft eerie substance enclosed her. She tried to see what she was feeling, tried to understand. Something gossamer and immense, loosely constructed or organized to use its own word, and now it was gathering itself, making itself dense, the way steam gathers itself when it turns to water, and the way water gathers itself when it turns to ice.
"Shall I take a shape for you? Shall I make illusions?"
"No, not yet," she whispered. "Be as you are, and as you were before with all your power." She could already feel the stroking on her insteps, and on the undersides of her knees. Delicate fingers sliding down into the tender spaces between her toes, and th
en the nylon of her hose snapping, and torn loose, pulled off her and the skin breathing and tingling all over on her naked legs.
She felt her dress opening, she felt the buttons slipped out of the holes.
"Yes, make it rape again," she said. "Make it rough and hard, and slow."