Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

"Querida." Ric pulled me closer, put his forehead to mine. We began swaying to a slow dance, a slow-motion floating island amid a stream of frenetic salsa-dancing couples.

"Forget that. Forget Haskell. You're with me now. I'll make it better."

"It just might have triggered my old phobia. I might not be…what you expect or want. Too much trouble."

"You're trouble, all right. The kind that makes me very twitchy. Let's get out of here. I know just the place to soothe all your cares and woes."

"Really? Where?"

"My place."

We left before the werewolves had really begun to dance, but it wasn’t a full-moon night anyway.

Ric opened the Corvette's passenger door. The car was a low-riding hammock with rocket power. The seat was already half-reclined by design, but at least he didn't bother snapping the seat belt for me. Not being belted in didn't worry me. Ric drove as if he was one with the car, fast and powerful, outrunning everything… Juarez, Haskell, my old nagging fears.

The low car thrummed along the asphalt as it wove its way out of the mountains, clinging to every curve with a dreamy sense of deja vu. Again the powerful engine vibrations massaged my spine. Again Ric's hand moved on the stick shift, up, down, across, and I felt my body sway with the motion. After a while, all my cares and woes had been outrun. I was only here, only now, only with him.

He seemed to sense my evolution from edgy fear to edgy interest.

No full moon flirted with us through the Vette's blue-tinted glass roof. No werewolves haunted the hills as they ran through the freedom of their change.

It was just us and the night, and this time he wasn’t taking me to be dropped off primly at my cottage door.

This time he was taking me home with him.

Ric's car stopped, purring. The end of motion disoriented me. Ric opened the car door, pulling me up and out. My ankles wobbled as my hands returned to his shoulders, his to my hips. We had cruised past a gated entry and were in a newer housing development, nice but not palatial. He waltz-walked me inside, past a courtyard where wind chimes and a huge central fountain made aural love to each other.

Inside the house was dark, quiet. It wasn’t that large, but everything about it felt chosen, sensual, perfect. A huge stainless steel refrigerator purred against one wall. Faint light glinted off dark granite countertops and other stainless steel appliances. Ric paused at a long kitchen island, where he caressed the granite, black with glittering silver and blue veins, like precious ores. "It's called blue pearl. You. Me. Here."

"Horizontal," I protested. Besides, it looked like a sacrificial altar.

We were in another room where I heard water flowing, clinking like tiny coins in fountains. It was cool there, humming with an air-conditioned serenity. Ric sat me down on the hard edge of an interior fountain. He slipped off my Cinderella slippers, set my feet in cool water. I hadn't known my dancing-princess soles were burning until then. My soul, burning. His fingertips dribbled fountain water on my chest, which he licked off until his mouth had pushed my neckline down. My nipples blossomed in his mouth and exploded at the touch of his teeth.

He pulled me up and onward, pushing me down on a velvet sofa to put my shoes back on. Why? He was taking me apart and putting me back together, and all the while the dark, soft sound of his unseen rooms ate away at my composure.

Bedroom. Music. It was a smart house. Sound had followed us through, tinkling, glittering, humming. Celtic? Spanish? New Age? All of the above.

I noticed a low bed on a pedestal, satin sheets. Mirrors.

"Is this a vampire's lair?" I joked, afraid of the way everything about him was pushing into me. Claustrophobic again, in my own body and not remembering why.

He danced me into another room, pushed a light switch, flooding us as if we were in a photo studio.

The master bathroom. I saw a blue pearl granite hot tub sunken in a rim of unlit candles. Mirrored doors, windows, a big mirror over the double sinks.

"See my reflection?" he asked. "Do I look like vampire to you?"

He looked like dark hands moving over my pale skin, a lowered angled face making love to this woman in the mirror, my double with her clothes half off and still hidden, still private.

He finger-walked my skirt up to my hips. In the mirror. His feet pushed my shoes apart, spread my legs like a cop doing a very personal arrest. A shattering memory of Haskell drowned in a sudden liquid shot of desire. Ric wasn’t, never would be, Haskell, and I was finally able to make distinctions between my fears and my desires.

"Glad you wore those hot mama shoes again," Ric said. "Make you just the right height for me."

I was pretty non compos mentis by then, but I liked being just right for him and I knew what he meant. We'd been brushing against each other all night, hip to hip, so I just purred a little.

"This is the way we stood in the park. You remember? In daylight. This is what you ambushed me into wanting, into feeling, into wanting to do with you. It was just the usual water-witching demonstration, except you were so soft, so moist, so cool, an oasis of flesh. I owe you an orgasm."

So I'd felt more than a hard-on back then. I leaned my head back on his left shoulder, watching his hands on me, playing at the extremities of our mirror image, not quite revealing myself to me, or to him. I saw faint auras, mine ice-blue, his hot and yellow. They melded to make green and purple where they touched.

"Nice cologne." I inhaled deeply. I'd first scented it in the park when all my senses had sharpened. "What's it called?"

"Night," he murmured into my hair.

"Is that with a K?"

"No. I'm definitely not that noble."

Below the line of the mirror, his fingers slipped into me, toying with my inner silk, a movement so easy, so natural. An action only in the mirror, where neither of us could see while his fingers delved where we both could only feel. His left forefinger reached up to tease the spaghetti straps off each of my shoulders in turn, using just his nail. That roving fingernail edged my camisole neckline down in eighth inches until only the swollen precipices of my nipples held up the soft fabric.

"You like to tease yourself," I managed to say.

"You too."

"I teased you?"

"You didn't know it but what do you think it was like, this strange lush woman in my arms in a public park, writhing against me in broad daylight?"

"It was night to me. All dark, all dancing in the dark."

Even as my insides heated to the boiling point, a small cold voice I'd always had in my head, along with Irma, uncoiled. You're ruined. You can't escape the past you don't know. And I remembered every nerve-wracking, uncertain, humiliating failure of my so-called life. The Reporter stirred, came forward, said objectively…

"Forty percent of women are non-orgasmic."

And, as far as I could remember, which wasn’t much, I was personally batting zero percent in my personal life when corpses and ex-FBI guys who could dowse for the dead weren't involved. There were no dead bodies here now.

Ric looked so good in the mirror as he made love to me, his dark lashes sexy shadows on high cheekbones. His fingers pulled out of me. Warned maybe. They lifted before me in the mirror, slick and shiny. He brought them up to my face and painted my lips with their transitory glisten. I inhaled his fingertips, pulled them into the hot cavern of my mouth.

"I live in Las Vegas," he breathed in my ear. "I don't believe in odds. My whole life has been bucking the odds."

He pushed my skirt up in back, pushed me over until my hands under his grasped the smooth gilded faucets. We were dowsing for the depths within ourselves. I heard the hiss of a zipper, the notched touch of metal teeth, felt the brush of silken linen, then pure soft silk, and velvet flesh stretched taut to push home into me.