Brides Of The Impaler (17 page)

Her mind reeled, all her thoughts a stew of lust. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she panted. Still straddling him, she grabbed his hands and forced them to her breasts, which now felt so full of blood and desire that they seemed alien to her, twice the size they should be. “Squeeze them, squeeze
hard
,” she pleaded. When she tensed her thighs, the well of semen drained out of her. She intricately plied her sex in unison with his kneading fingers, then shrieked again and climaxed. The series of spasms first clenched every muscle in her body, then collapsed her to the floor, wracked. Her own sexual fluids had seemed to pour out of her.

“Oh, baby,” he groaned when he got enough breath back to talk. “You’re an
animal
…but of course I mean that in a good way.”

She lay limp against him, one thigh draped over his stomach. “Well, this animal has been thinking about you all day long…even when I was still hungover. Her thigh nudged his spent genitals. “And, don’t worry, I’ll be taking advantage of you again before long.”

Paul chuckled. “Honey, you’re gonna kill me but…so what?”

When Cristina felt more of him trickle out of her, she suddenly lurched. “Oh my God! The carpet!”

“Probably the biggest wet spot of all time,” Paul laughed, still flattened.

“It’s from Uzbekistan!” she exclaimed. “You paid thousands for it.” She started to jump up, to grab some carpet cleaner and rags, but Paul just pulled her back next to him.

“Cristina. I’ll buy another one. Let’s just…lie here a while…”

Cristina relaxed.
I wore him out, all right
. But in truth she only felt half-sated even after her own orgasm. He appeared to be drifting off to sleep right now. “Honey? Honey?” she said, gently jostling him. “You’re falling asleep on the floor.”

“Mmm,” he replied, then blinked back some alertness.
“Since you’re responsible for completely immobilizing me…how about some coffee?”

Cristina giggled and kissed him quick, then slipped off to the kitchen. She made coffee and puttered in the kitchen a bit, not even really mindful of the fact that she was still naked. She felt brimming in sensations, her nipples still buzzing, and the soft afterglow between her legs working its way through the rest of her. “How was work?” she called out.

Paul answered groggily. “Not as good as
after
work but not bad. Jess landed a retainer renewal worth about two-point five mil, and I just closed a deal worth about half that.”

Good Lord
! “You call that ‘not bad’? Paul, that’s fantastic…”

“It’s all this great sex you’re wearing me ragged with,” he replied. “It’s good luck. It’s an Oriental thing: sexual harmony brings prosperity.”

“I suppose you read that in a fortune cookie,” Cristina joked.

“I’m just…very lucky,” he muttered but kept glimpsing a slice of her nakedness in the kitchen. “Uh, you know it’s great having a gorgeous fiancée make me coffee buck-naked but make sure those blinds are closed all the way. Wouldn’t that be a riot if there was an evening service letting out of the church and they all looked over
here?
”

Good idea
, she realized. The blinds
were
opened slightly but she knew no one street level could see in. “Father Rollin told me he doesn’t even have a congregation anymore,” she explained, darting into the bedroom to select a robe. “Said the church is mainly used for special occasions and meetings.” She pulled on a caramel-brown robe but momentarily shivered when the soft silk slipped across her nipples.
I can’t believe this. I’m charged up like a battery tonight
. “He said he’s going to come over sometime for coffee so he can introduce himself to you.”

“You can bet he was just being polite,” Paul said tiredly from the living room. “I doubt that he wants to meet the shifty attorney who clipped the New York Diocese out of a couple million bucks because they didn’t bother to find out how much the property was worth in the long term.”

“You didn’t really
clip
them, did you?” Cristina asked, but she was still distracted by the robe’s silkiness.

“Technically, no,” Paul chuckled. “I was just doing my job better than their guy. Rule Number One in real estate law. One man’s carelessness is another man’s fortune.”

Cristina was grateful for a career that didn’t involve such tactics. She was about to come back to the kitchen, though, when—

“
Serveste pe domnul
…”

Cristina froze in the short hallway. Had she really heard the bizarre utterance? It sounded foreign and…muffled.

Then she heard a creak of some sort. She stood right beside the door to the basement. Cristina opened the door and looked down…

“Honey?” Movement in the other room, and hushed footsteps. “Where’d you go?”

Cristina looked over, concerned. Paul came forward, pants back on but belt buckle and shirt still undone. “I could’ve sworn I heard a voice, and—I’m not sure—but I think it came from down here.” At once the obscure fear she’d expressed to Britt slammed back: that someone else was in the house.

Paul rolled his eyes. “I heard the same thing the other night, only upstairs. It’s the people in the condos next door. They’re all retired and hard of hearing; they turn their TVs up.” His arm touched her shoulder. “Relax. It’s nothing.”

Cristina remained poised, eyes wide on the open doorway.

“Just to set your mind at ease,” Paul said and snapped on the light switch, “I’ll go look.”

“Oh, please,” she mumbled. “It was just so strange. It sounded foreign.”

“So, they watch foreign
shows
next door. A lot of those old people are immigrants who made a lot of money starting businesses in the fifties.” But Paul descended the basement stairs just the same.

What if
, Cristina fretted,
someone really is down there?

What would she do? And what if she really were right in what Britt dismissed as paranoia and overreaction, that last night in her stupor
someone else
had scrawled on her breasts and stomach?

For a moment, all the invisible blonde hairs on her arms stood straight up like filings under a magnet.

“Nothin’ there, baby,” Paul said, trudging back up.

“It just sounded so—”

He put a finger to her lips. “Don’t worry your little heart about something that’s impossible anyway. Every single exterior door and window in this house has not one but two alarm triggers.” He snapped off the light and closed the door. “Come on.” He put his arm around her and returned to the kitchen. “Now where’s that coffee?”

Cristina poured him a cup, sluffing the incident off. “Sorry I’m such a nut today.” She couldn’t even begin to tell him everything else. “It’s late. Have you even had dinner yet? Let me fix you something.”

“Actually, with all the excitement at the office today, I’m not the least bit hungry, and besides”—Paul yawned—“I’m exhausted now, thanks to you. I’ll have something delivered for you. Grace’s delivers.”

“I”m not hungry either.” Now that her hasty fears had been allayed, she felt oversensitized again. “I’m never hungry after great sex…except for
more
great sex.”

Paul laughed with a shake of the head. “Let’s give the Captain a little time to get back to shipshape.”

Shortly thereafter Paul had gone in to take a shower but
evidently Cristina’s voracity had taken a bigger toll than he’d let on. She’d lounged on the couch for a while, reading through a book on Max Ernst and the “irrationalism” art movement, but when she peeked in the bedroom she found Paul already asleep. Her more greedy side felt let down but then she admitted,
He is forty, for God’s sake, and
his job’s a pressure cooker
, so she resigned to bed herself, presuming to awake fresh in the morning, but—

Here she lay now—hours later—wide awake. She pressured her mind to recover anything she might have dreamt that would waken her so abruptly but found to her relief that there was nothing, just a pleasant
blankness
chaperoning her slumber. Suddenly that aggravated confusion permuted to satisfaction. She smiled in the dark.
No nightmare
this time. No evil nun, no bowl full of blood in a dungeon with
a man on a slab
. Paul lay sound asleep beside her; she touched his shoulder as the dirtiest inkling suggested itself: that she should excite him in his sleep and let him wake to find her atop him—she was certainly aroused enough—but then she elected not to.
I practically raped him
tonight
. She traced her fingers across her sex and winced at the gust of plea sure.
Sex maniac
, she scolded herself and gently edged off the bed, slipped on her robe, and left the room. The clock ticking followed her to the kitchen, and it somehow amplified the rest of the house’s silence. Even from outside—no sounds at all.

She lemoned some ice water as she reflected on the day. She’d gotten quite a bit of work done once her hangover had ebbed out; that and her ludicrous mishap with the magic markers.
Jeez, what a ditz
, she thought. It was funny now.
Sometimes I’m so on edge
, she realized, while other times not at all.
Maybe everyone’s that way but I just don’t see
it
. She wandered the living room, sipping her water. A lewd smile came to her lips when she spied the expensive carpet that she and Paul had sullied; then she found herself turning out all but the light above the stove and peeking
out through the wooden blinds. The church’s upper windows were dark, though she couldn’t imagine why she’d even be looking.

But of course: the priest. Father Rollin struck her as a very nice man, but his spirit seemed
crimped
by something, like a nerve pinched. But she’d only thought of him in the first place via the abstraction; she’d just begun on a
priest
, of sorts, for the second set of figures in her
Evil Church
line. At once her artist’s inclinations sparked, and she was heading upstairs for her studio to tweak her day’s work. Her feet took her quickly up the plush crimson carpet to the bare hall that led her to her studio.

She snapped on all the bright white overhead fluorescents, then turned on her computers. Several preliminary sketches, old and new, lay arranged on the drafting table. She eyed the most recent one—the Vampirical Vicar—then eyed the configured drawing model on the computer screen.
No, no, no
, she realized at once. It was the “tone” of the figure’s dress that was off.
Too English
, she realized. She wanted antiquated and Gothic but more European. Even the name now—vicar—struck an out-of-tune chord.
Too obscure
. She got to sketching again, keeping the figure’s dark eyes, prominent nose, and thick, straight-across mustache, but appareled him in religious raiments more reminiscent of early-Renais sance Eastern Eu rope. Her excitement surged.
It’s so much more
on the mark
! she exclaimed to herself and kept sketching.
No more Vampirical “Vicar
,” she resolved. Her thoughts ticked.
Kids today don’t even know what a vicar is, but
…A quick glance to the first figure in the line—the Noxious Nun—and she thought,
Every nun needs an abbot,
right? So
…

She wrote the words on the pad to see how they looked lettered out: THE ABOMINABLE ABBOT.

Yes. Much better
…

Was this why she suddenly couldn’t sleep? Her muse
stirring her to make this change forged in her subconscious? It didn’t matter. The image and the name was much more interesting.

She tinkered another half hour, growing more and more satisfied as her conception of the character grew more and more complete. An hour later she felt as mentally exhausted as a ditchdigger must feel physically. She spun in her chair, lounging back. Her feet reeled off the floor and she knew that one of her moods was returning—a
sexual
mood. Suddenly she felt pressed in by her needs, thinking back to her spontaneous escapades with Paul right on the floor. When she glimpsed his picture on a bookshelf, she bristled with more pent-up excitement.

I can’t believe I’m doing this
, she told herself. She felt childlike, about to raid the cookie jar, but in this case they were very
adult
cookies.
I know it’s here somewhere
, she thought, rummaging through several boxes of supplies she hadn’t yet unpacked.
Ahhh
…She didn’t pack it with her clothes for fear of Paul finding it; instead she’d secreted it in this box of power strips and extension cords…

Her vibrator.

It had been the instrument’s style that essentially caused her to buy it—a stout plastic handle that tapered to a rubberized wand not much wider than a cigarette. She distilled her thoughts of Paul’s body after she retook her seat and let the device’s tip buzz over the pinpoints of her nipples. The sensation defied effective description, save to say that it seemed to stimulate nerves she didn’t know she had and in ways that no other such device—or man—could effect.
You naughty girl
, she thought, cringing as she removed the buzzing tip from her nipples and stroked the shape of each breast entirely with the wand’s curve. She imagined Paul’s mouth on her sex as she continued, eventually sweeping the wand slowly across her belly and up and down the insides of her thighs, but—

She had to be honest with herself.

It wasn’t so much Paul she was thinking about but instead the lustier aspects of last night’s dream: the queue of women stroking her body with their hands and mouths alike. She tensed more in the soft chair, her belly sucking in and out as she now brought the maniacal tip closer and closer to the hood of her clitoris.
If Paul walked in right
now…what could I ever say in a million years?
But the rankling thought was too weak to banish the fantasy. The images thickened in her head, and at last she let the tip find its target. She breathed through clenched teeth as the lesbian fancy summoned all those rising sensations at once and set them off like a bombshell. One orgasmic wave after another claimed her, leaving her helpless to spasm off in the chair, all the while those forbidden images in her head seeming more and more real as though she were
genuinely
being cocooned by several women.