Dream Lover (7 page)

“Oh, hell,” she said and covered her mouth.

He rose and took her hand away, covering her lips with his own for a moment before he pulled back, that lazy grin of his returning. “I like to hear you,” he said. “The first time I heard you laugh, that’s when I knew I wanted you. Fairy women are quiet. Silent. I like to listen. I like to hear what I’m doing to a woman’s body. Yes?”

She nodded. He still had her wrist in his hand, and he tightened his grip on it slightly, those black, black eyes on hers.

“Yes?” he asked again.

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s more like it.”

Lire realized she’d never stood naked before a fully clothed man before with this level of comfort. She didn’t feel shy about her body at all. All she felt was want and need. Her fingers peeled away his clothes, revealing his body. Pale white, so pale he was almost glowing, with muscles that looked both hard and deliciously soft all at the same time. His cock rose in a soft curve at the base of dark, curled hairs, its length matching Thadeous’s tall stature. Lire wanted to eat him, every inch.

A second later, she realized she wasn’t the only one with her gaze on his cock. “Oh, really big man! Veeery big!” Margipe croaked from the doorway, leapfrogging from spot to spot. “Big! Big!”

“Oh, for the gods, can’t you shut him up?” Thadeous asked her, grinning. Despite his tone, it was obvious that he didn’t mind the frog’s comment on his size.

“I can do one better,” Lire said. Stepping away from Thadeous, she scooped Margipe up and dumped him unceremoniously
into one of the clean trash cans. A small
burrp
echoed inside, and then it went silent.

She returned to him, settling the heat of her body against his, their laughter quickly giving way to quiet sounds of lust as their hands explored each other.

“Can I have this?” Lire asked, tracing her fingers along the underside of his cock. The length jumped and pulsed against her touch, the head already growing wet with droplets of desire. It looked like sugar water, and her tongue watered at the thought of tasting him.

“Only if I can have this,” he said, his own fingers dipping again between her thighs.

They made it down to the floor before their mouths found each other, Lire taking his length against her tongue like a honey stick, suckling from him. He tasted of sweet and tang, like the dark chocolate cookies she sometimes dipped in a bit of salt. She would have lain there and suckled from him for days, except that his mouth was tasting her at the same time, making her arch her hips up and buck against him.

He pulled away from her and she felt a loss as he left. “Can’t hear you from down there,” he said as he positioned her over him. Lire straddled him, her thighs parting easily to let him in. He leaned up and kissed her mouth, hard, as he arched his body, his hips making a slow slide upward, entering her and then splitting her. He did vibrate, the whole of his cock, shuddering her insides softly, making her want to grind down against him even harder.

“More, please,” she said. At her words, a soft groan left his mouth, a sound that fed her shudders, forcing them higher.

Her nails dug small furrows in his pale chest, but he didn’t seem to mind, only bucked beneath her harder. One hand reached up and touched the very center of her clit, thrumming
against it. Between the thrusting and the vibrations, she wasn’t going to last very long.

“Slow,” she said. “Slow.”

“Trying,” he said. And she could tell he was. His teeth were tight against each other, the muscles in his neck strained. “You just feel…”

“I know,” she said. “I know. I know.” The words morphed as he drove up into her, becoming “No,” and then “Yes,” and then little more than scattered groans and moans as she came around him, thinking of nothing but how it was like song, rising up through her body in the hum and breath of a hundred notes, a thousand voices. And when he joined her, just as she was winding down, it was an aria, birdsong and butterfly wing and the scent of fresh-baked cinnamon rolls and pleasure, bars and bars of pleasure.

When they were done, Lire folded herself down on top of him without letting his cock slide out of her. “So, why did you? Go, I mean,” she asked.

“Little late now, no?” he teased.

She nipped at the side of his chest.

“Would you believe family?” he asked.

“I might,” she said. She thought she might believe anything right now, caught up in the rise and fall of his chest, in the winged vibrations that still shuddered through her softly.

“My mother,” he said. “She’s one of the queens. I have to ask her permission before I bring someone into the fairy realm for a visit. Especially a human someone.”

It took a second for what he was saying to make it through Lire’s sex-addled brain. “Are you trying to tell me you ran away so that you can invite me over to meet your parents? After knowing me for five minutes? I’m so not buying that.”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you,” he said. “There
was something about you that called to my blood.”

“The sugar, probably.”

“Probably,” he said. And then he bent to kiss her again.

“Go to fairyland?” Margipe asked from within the garbage can, his little voice echoing, making them both jump.

“No,” they both said at once.

“Get out of can?”

“Not quite yet,” Thadeous said. And then he bent to kiss her again, and in the honeyed draw of his mouth, Lire tasted the possible sweetness of her future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

F
aith woke up when her ass hit the floor, which was a good thing. The nightmare hadn’t been exactly fun. Panting, she looked around: just her apartment bedroom, no thunderclouds or vicious, not-quite-human skeletal remains; no floating images of faces like ghosts with staring, sightless eyes. She sat up and peered over the edge of her bed, then gingerly crawled back into it and huddled against her pillows. That didn’t work, so she scrunched her knees up to her chest and dug her chin into them. Had she ever been scared like this in her life? She didn’t think so.

And all over a nightmare. It was just a nightmare, right? Just some crazy, random shit her brain had dredged up from too many weird movies. It was probably caused by the heat, except she was shivering her ass off. Faith rolled over and turned on her bedside light. Once its glow pooled across the room, she crawled out of the bed again and went to turn on the overhead light. She went around turning on every light she could find and the TV
sets in the bedroom and in the living room even though the air conditioner was already chugging and wheezing like a smoker with COPD. She made herself a cup of instant cocoa, loaded it up with extra sugar and tossed a couple of ice cubes in.

Outside, the strong wind was rattling and tearing around like a hooligan kid on roller skates. Despite the heat of the apartment and the half-warm cocoa, Faith started shivering again.

This was craziness. She was scaring herself over nothing. Droughts happened. She only had to go to the library; fuck, she just had to pull up the Internet and read about the Dust Bowl. Whether it rained or it didn’t had shit-all to do with her. The face in the clouds—the face she thought she’d seen—had been imagination, a fantasy.

She’d been at her grandmother’s weeks before, trying to get the laundry in before the rain they’d thought, hoped, was going to start. It hadn’t, of course. But she’d been on the last sheet, tugging it off the line, when she looked up. As if a screen had suddenly been drawn back, she’d seen the face: dark eyes, saddle-leather skin.

She couldn’t visualize his hair now, only that she’d wanted to run her fingers through it, and while she could picture the shape of his lips or his nose, she couldn’t think of how they fit together. They were like pieces of scattered glass in one of those cardboard kaleidoscopes the kids got at the dollar store, except that the pattern never fell quite right.

Maybe it was not a fantasy. She could picture her grandmother, Linda Jade Brewer, standing with her hand on a hip and her lips pursed, disapproving of Faith’s lack of faith.

Rubbing her arms, Faith paced around the living room, parting the vinyl shades to look out into the flashing lightning before letting them fall back and going on to the next window.

“Not a fantasy,” she said aloud. “Not a crazy, cockamamie…
son of a bitch!” She jumped as the lights in the apartment flickered and then resumed while thunder boomed outside and the refrigerator gave a loud belching hum.

“Okay!” she yelled. “Okay, I believe it! I believe it! But what the hell am I supposed to know? What am I supposed to do?”

She didn’t get an answer. The wind just kept on howling, the lightning and thunder kept on raging, and through it all there wasn’t a single drop of rain.

 

Faith tasted the ozone tang of the thunderstorm in the air for days. It lingered like smoke even after the sun came out and the air turned dry and cool. She knew that somewhere, just out of reach, the storm wasn’t over. Because she dreamed it.

Skeletons parched under sun. Strange hollow faces wove through her subconscious like wraiths. They called to her, but she couldn’t answer, and she woke up crying.

Then he came to her, dark eyes and leather skin. He squatted down and held his hands out and she held her hands out through wind that moved like cold water over their fingers.

“I need your help, Faith girl.”

“My help? But I don’t know what to do!”

She didn’t.

Once upon a time she’d told her grandmother about the pictures and patterns she found in clouds and rain and sometimes wind-tossed leaves. Linda Jade had taught her how to tell idle fancy from something that might be important, how to pay attention and see things that weren’t there to be seen. But that had been long ago. She’d been a kid for Chrissake and still believed in Santa Claus.

And it had been years since she’d felt even a whisper of anything. Except for when Elisha got pregnant and tried to hide the fact. Faith had been taking her to school one morning,
and as the sun broke over the mountains and light fell on her cousin’s belly, Faith had seen the baby shape and known. When Elisha protested, demanding to know how Faith had figured it out when she’d only just known for sure herself, Faith had shrugged, answered that Elisha was showing. But maybe it had just been a lucky guess.

Anyway, if it had been real, she couldn’t use it—whatever it was. Not anymore. She didn’t know how to wield it.

“You can,” he said. The man in the dream. “You’ll find a way. We need you, girl.”

He called her name. Not Faith, but her name in a tongue she didn’t herself know. The wind repeated it, whipping around and around, a cat chasing its tail, a vortex spinning faster and faster until she couldn’t hold on, until it sent her tumbling.

For the second time in a week Faith woke up on the floor, swore, and decided she needed to go back to her grandmother’s. She needed someone to talk to about this, before she completely lost her mind.

 

Linda Jade hadn’t said anything on the phone and she didn’t say anything as she opened the door, except to ask Faith how she was. But she looked at Faith from the corner of her eyes.

“David’s here,” she added as she started walking toward the kitchen, and Faith headed for the stairs to put her overnight bag away.

Faith stopped. “David?”

Linda Jade nodded. “Came by to bring me some sod for that side plot the dog messed up. Told him to stay for lunch.”

“But you knew I was coming!”

Her grandmother nodded, as if that explained everything.

“Figured you might wanna see him.”

And before Faith could utter a word of protest, she turned and
shuffled toward the kitchen with sudden agility. Finding herself defeated, Faith gaped at the empty doorway for a second more, then shook her head and went upstairs to put her bag down.

She didn’t want to see David again, not after the last time when he’d stormed out of her apartment, still shirtless. That was when she’d flung her slippers after him and told him to go, that if he was going to behave like a little boy she didn’t need him; knowing she’d been wrong for it. All he’d asked for was the chance to stay longer than a night, to see where it might go if she let it; to be more in her life than her occasional fuckbuddy. For stuff another woman would have been begging or demanding or nagging to have, she’d chased him off with slippers.

Sighing, Faith straightened her blouse, made sure it was buttoned up decently and walked down to the kitchen. David turned from where he sat at the table and raised both hands in a mock-protective gesture, grinning at her.

“Don’t throw anything. I promise to behave.”

Faith stopped, looked at him for a second or two and laughed.

“Shut up!” She came to sit at the table across from him. “I’m not in a throwin’ mood.”

“Good.”

“’Specially not in my kitchen,” Linda Jade added, before promptly shuffling back out.

Faith looked down at her hands, out the window. Finally she looked back at the man sitting across from her. He’d put on a little weight, but his long hair pulled back in a ponytail was still thick and glossy. His chest still looked rock solid under his T-shirt.

“So how’s life treatin’ ya?” she asked.

He shrugged, wide shoulders moving smoothly under the hugging cotton.

“Can’t complain. Was about to ask you the same. You look good, Faith.” He hadn’t lost an ounce of charm either.

“Thanks.”

She fiddled with a potato peeler on the table and wondered what to say next. Images of her dream visitor’s face filled her mind, his voice strange and echoing as if he spoke to her through a tunnel, yet deep and melodic like a flute—the kind of voice that could have made her panties wet, like David’s could…used to.
Damn it.
Guiltily, she glanced up, hoping her body language wasn’t giving her thoughts away because he’d be sure to misinterpret the reason and wouldn’t that be a motherfucking cluster.