Bitten: Dark Erotic Stories (20 page)

MASTER SARAH

Patrice Suncircle

M
ASTER
S
ARAH WAS BORN HERE,
just south of Cape Cod, on the wild Atlantic, but she had spent nearly half her life in Argentina. I moved here the year after her return. Sarah was as much a recluse as I was. Maybe my noticing this was why I found myself walking past her house every day. I’d stop to sit on her top step and wander in my own thoughts.

One day she leaned in her doorway to study me. In one hand, hanging by her side, she held a sculptor’s scalpel, moving it from knuckle to knuckle. Her hands were beautiful. There was white dust on them.

By the third visit to her rooms, I knew that I wanted her. I also knew that there was no way to get to her except through her work. So I began to learn to wait.

“How can they bear to stay still beneath the touch of your hands, Sarah?”

I couldn’t help but say it, as I watched her moving her hands across the cold marble breasts and shoulders of her exquisite women, her sculpted creations.

“You’re a genius. Who was your teacher?”

Sarah traced her finger down one marble thigh. She didn’t turn her gaze from the statue.

I waited. It was one of the first lessons I’d learned from her. To have the patience of a hunter.

“Once, when I was ten,” she said, “an angel came into my room and danced for me. She didn’t have a stitch on. I told my uncle this, and he told me to hush.

“Since neither he nor anyone else wanted to hear about this, when she visited me I began to draw her.

“I was wise enough to hide my pictures. They were childish drawings, but sometimes now when I take them out and look at them, I’m reminded of what happened when I turned eighteen.”

She glanced at me and then looked around her sprawling room.

“Somewhere in those crude drawings, somewhere in the clay and the marble here, is the perfect woman. She is always under my hands—and she always just manages to elude me.”

Sarah turned and looked at me fully. “She was perfect. She had wings.”

“The angel,” I said.

“The woman whose flesh I seek,” Sarah said.

She held my gaze until I smiled and looked away.

Sarah let me watch her. She gave me wine and lemonade and cocoa to keep me. Sometimes she talked about the old paintings on the walls of that house. They were done by her great-grandmother and her aunts and her uncle.

Artists have walked Sarah’s ancestral floors since the mating of freedmen and indentured servants. Since the First World War and the Harlem Renaissance.

“You might say that my hands search for her,” Sarah said to me one day. “They know every inch of her body and they will recognize her.”

“What happened when you were eighteen? Did she come?”

“Yes,” Sarah said.

She moved her hand back to the cheek of the beauty that she was nearly finished with. I could almost feel the touch of that hand.

She smiled and spoke in a whisper. “You know, anatomy classes and studying the masters can only begin to teach what the touch can tell you. They can’t teach you at all what a moan or a cry can.

“I want to mold the taste of her flesh. I want to mold the scent.”

“And you remember it all?” I spoke as softly.

“Uh huh.

“Up where the dunes run out and where it gets hilly is a no-man’s-land. My cousins and I used to play there. You could find a place there to play any kind of game. Touching games, fighting games, dissecting games when we’d find some injured creature. Sometimes we would stop in the middle of a game, too scared to go on.

“They grew up and stopped going there, but I didn’t.

“One morning I found an angel there. She was wounded and broken, but still as beautiful as the ones who had danced for me. I didn’t appreciate all of that beauty as a child. Now I recognized the work of a Supreme Master, sleek and contoured …” Sarah held out her palms, but she lowered them before I could reach back. “Skin black as ebony and not a flaw, smooth as black ivory. A full mouth curved as a bow. Hands can describe—words can’t.

“She lay waiting for me in a place as solitary as my childhood room.”

Sarah stood close to me now, and I smelled the faint jasmine scent of her hair oil. Through her wide hazel brown eyes I caught a glimpse of the beauty she searched for.

“Her great black wings moved with the slightest touch of the wind, and they looked soft as down. They had to be touched.

“I remember the heat of the sun on my shoulders. I felt a drop of sweat crawl from beneath my breast. If it fell on the lips of this angel, would she wake? I moved toward her … I say
her
, although this beauty had a prick. But she had breasts round as my own and there was so much of the woman about her. Without any thoughts of what I was going to do, I knelt beside her.

“And, my friend,” Sarah said in a voice that sent a warm tremor through me, “it was then that she opened her eyes and they were as wide and gray as the dawn. I could not move. So I spoke. I said to her, ‘How far did you fall? Are you in pain? I’ve been told by some women that my hands can heal.’

“I dragged my fingers up her arm and across her shoulder until I touched her wing. I let her feathers caress my hand.

“There was no breeze in that little depression, just the still, hot air. The nearest sound I could hear was the thump of the breakers in the distance. I pulled off my blouse. I wore no brassiere, and the warm air bathed me.”

Sarah’s smile became delicious. “Then I straddled her. Out there alone with someone I wanted—and with no one looking—what I did came as natural as breathing. I lowered myself and pressed my mouth against her throat. I held my mouth there as the sweet breaths went in and out, and the rhythm of her blood pumping caressed my lips. I licked up, over her chin and to the corners of her mouth. I covered her mouth, kissed her.

“I pushed my tongue through her parted lips and licked across her tongue and underneath its plumpness.”

Sarah raised an eyebrow. “I see you swallow, my friend.” Then she nodded slowly. “Though you can’t imagine the sweetness. I licked the nectar off her lips and sucked her, nursed on her tongue, drinking her breaths. I moved my leg between hers, and a sharp sweet tingle blossomed down there.

“Who can remember lovemaking when you’re so entirely in it, but I do.”

Sarah knew what her words were doing to me. I nearly reached to touch her hair. But I resisted.

I watched her lips as she resumed her tale, and it was as if I could taste her words.

Then she reached out and curled my fingers into her own, and though it was Master Sarah who spoke, it was as if I remembered her story as well as she did.

“I kissed her half-closed lids,” said Sarah, “and as I did I felt another hand move down my back and press harder into me. My hair fell across our faces, brushing them and draping out the sun. I kissed her again.

“I kissed her shoulders and went again to that long, damp throat, the place where an angel’s song grows. She did not taste of salt as you would, but something like a burst of yellow blossoms or aromatic smoke. I squeezed her breasts together and worked the nipples with my thumb and rubbed my face in them. Where we met below I felt her erection lengthen.

“I reached to unzip my pants. They came off, and my naked and wet cunt began to rhythmically and easily coat her penis with my juices. It pushed and sprang against me seeking, while sharp-taloned nails held me from behind. The stings from those talons made me wetter.

“She sucked at my breath now, and her hands were everywhere on my back, her prick a rod. Then I felt the wings. I felt their size, and they brushed me like a breeze from the middle of May, only softer. Each wing stroke a counterpoint to the joint rubbing against me, urging me to open to her.

“It’s my hands that remember. Her scent is on them and will never leave. I smell it when I touch the clay or rest my hands on the stone. Every wing touch brushes me, my legs, my behind, and all through my hair and the down on my cheek. When I moved onto her face, her tongue entered me like a serpent. Found places inside me only God’s hand had touched before. Slipped out and across my clit and sucked and sucked at my bud while I rocked.

“Before I came, I needed to taste her again and I moved down her body, and I felt like warm water. My mouth opened in a gasp, and I took her to the base where soft hair tickled my lips, my nose.

“For long moments, there was just the quiet of the hot afternoon, and her long drawn-out breaths answering to my tongue massaging the underside of her cock. Every tongue stroke, every suck, I absorbed. Forever.

“I slowly pulled my mouth off her organ and looked up past her breasts and into her eyes holding the light of Heaven. She was real, as real as her wings expanding like a blooming night.

“She turned me over and covered me with those wings and entered me from behind. I was a virgin there. She took my face between her hands and turned my head to her and caught my scream in her mouth. She stayed in me for hours.

“At least until I became a genius,” Sarah said, and her little mocking smile returned me to our autumn evening. Her studio drew back her gaze from the long-ago summer’s day.

“When I feel her under my hands again,” she went on, “then I’ll know I’ve created my perfect woman.

“I do remember that after we were through and her wounds from the fall were healed, as her wings bore her home, she allowed me to look fully into her face. To see her, or his, true beauty. It was a challenge.”

Sarah gave me both her hands to hold. That last sunfall of the day spilled over marble headless torsos, solitary hands, armless shoulders. A bowl held a rounded breast with a nipple like a cream dark berry. It smelled of raw stone and wet clay, sweat, and a little of the sea.

LAY ME OUT SOFTLY

Francesca Lia Block

GIRL

O
NCE, WHEN SHE WAS YOUNGER,
and not yet called Jade, Girl wandered in out of the bright white desert sun, into the dark grotto her father, Caleb, had built to contain the mineral spring that lurked under the desert floor, and, when her eyes adjusted to the change, she saw— floating in the water with its mild stench of sulfur and chlorine—there Girl saw the three heads.

“Take us out,” moaned the three heads. “Lay us out softly. Comb our hair.”

Girl froze. The heads had greenish skin, bloated features, filmy eyes, and tresses tangled with slime.

“Lay us out softly,” the three heads moaned.

Girl backed away and closed her eyes. When she opened them, the heads were gone.

The desert was hot and blinding by day. At night it turned cold and darker than most cities, since all the lights in that town were small and low. The grid of spas was laid out at the foot of the hills that were brown much of the year, and sometimes white with snow. It was strange to be standing under a bright blue sky, in the heat of the desert sun, and to see the white mountains, defiant in the distance behind a shimmering scrim of light. They had so much integrity, Girl used to think. They were so fucking fearless. If she were a mountain, her snow would have melted with just the knowledge of all that heat below.

Girl’s parents had moved here when she was three years old, and bought the Princess spa. It was a cluster of low bungalows covered in orange and pale red bougainvillea and surrounded by rough, squat palm trees. Girl’s father, Caleb, had built the grotto himself, out of quarry rock. The old pools were still there, an aquamarine rectangle and kidney bean half surrounded by glass. But if you went behind the door marked private and took some stairs down—your footsteps echoing on the slick steps, your hands sliding along the slimy handrail—you would find the grotto, dark and dank and secret. No one but Girl had ever seen the heads there.

It was not long after the heads appeared in the grotto that Girl saw the man whom she had lost in two previous lifetimes and whom she had been born into this lifetime seeking. It was almost as if the heads had brought him to her and, just as quickly, taken him away.

* * *

She had been allowed to walk to the store and decided to stop at the diner for a milkshake. Caleb and Clarissa did not like for her to be gone long so she hurried inside, the air-conditioning making her spine and nape prickle. She was flushed, and as usual her dark hair, long then, as Caleb insisted, with too-long bangs, was in her face. She wore a demure plaid sundress that her mother had made for her and rubber flip-flops. Her limbs looked too long and thin, like the legs of a fawn. Her skin was tan. The sun seemed to flash her brown every time she stepped out in it, like meat in a pan. She sat at the counter and ordered a vanilla milkshake in a silver tumbler beaded with the sweat of cold.

The man was sitting on a stool one seat away from her. She kept staring at his profile. He had dark hair under a baseball cap and acne scars on his pale cheeks. He wore a black cotton T-shirt, jeans, and black high-top sneakers. He had a camera with him. She took all this in not because she was someone who always observed the details around her, although this was true, but because there was something about him that struck her as painfully familiar. Painfully because it made her chest hurt to look at him. It made her feel as if she couldn’t breathe properly, and then she had the sensation of leaving her body, of lifting up out of her thirteen-year-old body and hovering, looking down on them from the ceiling of the diner, just above the whirring metal fans. From up there she wanted to control the situation, to make the girl in the badly sewn sundress with the puffed sleeves turn to the young man and say, “There you are! Why did it take you so long?” and for the man to say, “I’ve been trying to get here. Are you ready yet?”