Dream Lover (25 page)

“Just sealing the wound,” he said. “You didn’t know I could do that, did you?”

“No,” I croaked.

“There’s plenty you don’t know. But I’ll leave you now, to find out in your own time.”

He grinned, ghoulishly. I was chilled with fear. It took a long time for me to warm up.

I didn’t call him again. He’d terrified me and I didn’t like that. I threw myself into work and career and relationships. Eventually I fell in love with a man and married him.

Sometimes I’d send Zack mental messages, like, “Look at me in my pretty wedding dress,” or, “I’m going to have a baby!” He didn’t respond, so I stopped. After a few years, it was like I’d dreamed him. As if the drugs I’d taken had resulted in some weirdness with some guy named Zack, and all of it was behind me now.

Years passed. My cherubic babies loved me so much I barely noticed that my husband had stopped. When I did notice I took solace in the innocent kisses that children shower upon their mothers. But the teen years came and they didn’t touch me anymore. My effusiveness was an embarrassment to everyone. They let me know I was “needy.” My husband, in particular, allowed his lack of love for me to atrophy into contempt.

I survived turning forty without leaving my husband, unlike many of my friends. But I couldn’t make it to forty-five. We divorced. It was ugly, as divorce always is. The kids didn’t care much for it. Anyway they’re busy living their own lives. They reside in other countries, all three of them, working hard, focused on careers, so there haven’t been any weddings, no grandchildren. My parents are gone.

Zack “left me to it” all right. Was it his disdain for life that made mine unfold so poorly? Or did he simply know that the dreams of the young always fail to materialize? Or was it something about me, a greediness for more than my share, that made me unable to survive on the scraps of love and pieces of joy that came my way?

I don’t have the answer. I don’t have any answers, anymore. I’d have called Zack a hundred times in the last few years, if I weren’t middle-aged. He abhors age. I know he wanted me when
I was unlined and fresh as a spring rose. Even if my spirit were as untamed as it once was, which it most assuredly isn’t, the package it comes in, my skin, is weather-beaten. I have calloused heels and rough elbows. My hair is only yellow because I color it. My green eyes have dulled. Sometimes I groan when I rise from my chair. I’m perimenopausal.

I could stick around and get cancer or lose my mind but I think I’m done. I think I’m brave or weary enough to end it but I can’t help recalling Zack’s words as he feasted on my blood. “So good…so good…” Surely my blood is fresh, though the rest of me has aged?

“Zack!” I do it, I call his name. “Zack!” It is night. I wear white. I’m groomed and made-up as good as I can be, but with little hope it’s good enough.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I might feel foolish, although it had occurred to me that he might not come. I’d dismissed that thought but now it rattles around my mind.

“Zack! Zack! Zack! Zack!” I’m screaming, standing in the middle of the living room of my apartment, at midnight, screaming his name.

“Quiet! You’ll wake the dead!”

“Zack.” He’s behind me. I spin round. He’s as young and beautiful as always. “You look the same,” I whisper.

“I’d like to return the compliment but that would be disingenuous.” His words sting but his smile is kind. His fingers trace the lines around my mouth, move to the crow’s feet by my eyes, the wrinkle that runs across my forehead. “Tsk.”

My eyes well with tears. “Sorry,” I murmur. “I should’ve—”

He holds up an elegant finger. “None of that should’vecould’ve nonsense. You wanted marriage. Babies. All that. I must say your daughter is beautiful.”

Retorts leap to my lips. I hold them back. I’m not in a position
to be angry, or jealous or even fearful. The urge to beg is much stronger than any other emotion, even motherly concern. I’m done with all that, now. One way or another, it ends tonight.

If only he would take me in his arms. But it wouldn’t work. Even if he were willing, which I don’t believe he is, I’d feel ridiculous: an old cougar, pressing her thinning lips against that plump baby mouth. He looks younger than my youngest son.

“I know I’m old,” I begin. “I’m not asking you to take me. But my blood is fresh. Once you loved the taste, so I’m offering it to you now. Take as much as you wish. Just please, don’t close the wound when you’re done.”

“Such a sacrifice!” He laughs. His canines elongate. How had I ever managed to convince myself I’d hallucinated such a thing? “Leave you to die, is that the idea?”

I nod. “Unless—can you make me young again?”

“Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. I can make you older if you wish.”

“No. I don’t want to get one day older than I am right now. I hate it. The wrinkles, the aching joints, the sag in my breasts, the stretch marks. Age is obscene.”

“Indeed. I could’ve told you that—oh! That’s right. I
did
tell you that.” He circles me slowly, acquainting himself with all my flaws. “Zilly Lisa.” He’s behind me. My hair is short, in that boring hairstyle older women wear. He doesn’t have to brush it out of the way to place his hands at my throat. I hear his voice in my ear. “Zilly, zilly girl.”

“Zack.” All I can do is say his name. My love for him radiates from me like heat. As I feel his lips at my throat my lust shudders awake from a long sleep. It creeps up my loins, making my legs weak and my groin heavy.

Sharp teeth scrape my skin as his mouth travels to my softening jawline and to my lips. My eyes are closed. I keep them
that way, losing myself in a sensation I thought lost forever. I don’t need to open my eyes to see the bands of color around our bodies. I know they’re there.

“Open your eyes.” His mouth mumbles against mine.

I do as I’m told, though I don’t want to. The gasp that escapes me makes him laugh.

“What do you think?” He steps back so I can see him. His shape is thicker. That glossy black hair is winged with gray. There are wrinkles, like mine, around his dark eyes and his eyelids, always heavy, now permanently hood them. He’s fifty if he’s a day. “You’d better be pleased because it can’t be undone.”

“But—but what about your—your beauty? Your youth?”

Zack shrugs, as if this transformation means little, though I know,
I know
, it means everything.

“I traded it for a more distinguished style. Debonair, no?”

“Oh yes. Handsome. Wonderful. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Be mine.”

“Yes. Now. Please. Take me.”

His lips draw back. His pointed teeth glint. I’m not afraid, not even when the pain of penetration shoots through my neck, not even as he moans and grunts and sucks me weak. It’s a heady feeling, like I’ve drunk a goblet of good champagne.

I like it.

When he stops I mewl in protest. Zack holds me up with one arm while he gnaws at the inside of his wrist with the other. Once his blood flows he presses the wound to my lips.

“Don’t be afraid,” he says. “It will make you a strong woman. A wild woman.”

Our eyes meet.

I’d smile but I don’t want to lose any of my hot, thick, precious mouthful, so I gulp instead.

This makes him laugh. He bends his head to my neck again, but before he resumes feasting he whispers in my ear. “My woman.”

I am not afraid.

I’ve seen the future. Without him, it’s a killer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

K
ieran stroked down the length of her body, tracing her curves, resting his fingers on her hip bone, drifting down to brush at the silky hair between her legs, then moving back up to touch her cheek.

Lele had fallen asleep, as she always did, tucked into the shelter of his body, one of his arms wrapped around her shoulders, while he stroked along her skin with the fingers of his free hand.

The first week or so, it had woken her, but that was when she had still been angry with him. It had been a fight then, every single time she had fought him, and not with tears and pleading, not this woman. He had the scars on his arm and the one on his chest—she’d given him that with his own sword—to prove she was no meek thing.

His hand drifted to her shoulder, dropped to the top of her breast, then touched like silk upon her nipple—that made her smile in her sleep—then he brushed the dip of her waist, ran his fingers up the slope to her hip bone.

In truth, it wasn’t just to please her that he did it. She knew that, in the wise and frightening way she knew so much about him, and had taught herself to sleep around his touches.

He did it for himself, to know every inch of her, to hold her alive in his memory against the time when he would no longer have her.

Against that moment when the demon would come to collect his soul, and he would no longer have anything at all.

 

“Kieran!” she calls in her dream. “Kieran!”

Lele hasn’t seen the demon, though Kieran says it has come twice in the time since he took her. She’s afraid now, to her very bones afraid, that it has come for him while she slept unaware, that the fight is over before it has begun.

She leaps from their bed naked, catches up his sword and runs through the house with it, screaming his name, desperately looking for an enemy that isn’t there.

 

A hand slid across her stomach, and she came awake with a gasp, heart pounding.

Kieran whispered into her ear, “Do you dream ill, love?” He caught her from behind, one arm moving between her breasts, his other hand stroking down between her thighs, to slide his fingers inside her, pushing deep.

She groaned and arched her back, trying to push his hand deeper still. He pulled her closer, tightening his hold, making that noise deep in his throat that she was coming to love, low and guttural like a growl.

The sour taste of her bad dream faded; he held her helpless against his body like a vise, slid his finger in slow circles around and over the tight bud of her clitoris. She let her head fall back, her hands over his, and sighed.

“I love you, Kieran,” she whispered into the dark. “How is that possible?”

He laughed against her hair. “Loveliest flower, your petals are sword blades…” he said, and poised his manhood against her softness, slid himself inside her the barest inch, eased out again, while she cried out for him.

“Tell me what you want, love.” he demanded, sliding in, just barely, sliding out again. His finger continued tracing slow circles around her clitoris.

She panted. “You. Please, Kieran. You.”

“What do you want of me?”

“All of you…god!”

He thrust himself into her, so deep, so strong, his strength was unreal; and she cried out with the pleasure of his possession, with the helplessness of being caught in his arms; she who was never helpless, feeling his muscles bunch and ripple under her fingers as he held her, driving himself into her, desperate with need.

The heat rose inside her, “Oh, god…” She dug her fingers into his skin, as he thrust faster, harder….

Her entire body spasmed into powerful, convulsive waves of pleasure, and she sobbed his name. He cried out, gave one last thrust into her, cried out again and stayed rooted in her, his body shaking as he spent himself.

She let her head fall back to his, felt against her cheek the network of scars that was the right side of his face and whispered, “I love you, Kieran. I do. I love you so much I think my heart will explode.” Then, softly, “How much more time do we have?”

“Not much now.”

“Weeks? Days?”

“Not even days, love….”

She didn’t ask him how he knew, only turned her face to his and cried, as quietly as she could.

He would not loosen his hold on her, and so she fell asleep with his arms still wrapped around her.

 

At breakfast, he asked, “Do you remember that first moment?”

Lele paused, her oatcake halfway to her mouth. He meant, of course, their first meeting. It was endearing that he dwelt on his first sight of her. She leaned to him, reached out with her fingers to tuck a strand of his long hair behind his ear, stroked the pointed tip of it as she had liked to do since they had stopped their fighting and let themselves love each other.

“You were ruthless,” she said, then sat back and took a bite of her oatcake.

“I was practical,” he answered.

“Because,” she said, and was smug about it, “you knew I’d kick your ass if you didn’t charm me into a stupor.”

He laughed.

 

He remembered: