Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

"In the park," he was saying, "the wand had never driven so hard and strong and deep for the ground, but it was driving somewhere else, too. Not just down and back, as we passed over it, and as the rod will do. It ached to enter you. I couldn't blame it. I felt that urge too, but I couldn't let that raw wood violate you. It took all my strength to control it. To keep it away. To keep you untouched. To keep you to myself."

I felt an irresistible object pushing into the most wounded part of me, a no man's land of mystery and perhaps even hysteria, on the soft friction of velvet against silk. Velvet had nap. Silk would give first, as scissors cut paper.

"I hurt," I said. But it wasn’t his impending presence; it was as if a rubber band had shrunk between my legs.

"That's good, Delilah," he murmured, "and I can make it hurt more and less and better."

I glanced up at Ric in the mirror. His face was cast down to watch my body, his hands moving on me but not further invading me until I said so. Somehow that reflected face seemed a truer window than any I'd ever looked through or into for a long, long time. I believed what he said, that the tightening lovely ache inside me, at my innermost gateway, would evaporate with his entry.

"Yes," I said, loving how he waited until my last ssss had faded into a sigh before he did more.

He was murmuring musical, sexy Latin words now. Their sibilant alien sound pierced me to the bone. The swollen ache became an eruption as he rocked into me. Suddenly my interior was a vast tense, spreading plain. The outer limits of my senses stretched, screamed their joy at being explored. Something was gathering, on the high plain fringes, something cataclysmic, storm-laden.

"Let it go," Ric urged in English. "Let yourself go."

I was running with the wolves. Werewolves. Whole-weres. Running like quicksilver or my Quicksilver, under the moonlight, my body a bright full moon aching for observation of its wonders.

I threw back my head, let the earth's silver dowsing rod delve me like a dream lover, and howled my freedom to the star-sprinkled skies.

My face was turned into Ric's shoulder again. We were upright, I pressed against him, he against me, still joined.

What if you didn't know anything about yourself? Not really.

Like most people, I'd grown a protective shell, only mine was thicker than most. Hard as nails. The phrase meant the metal nails that won't bend under the hardest hammering, but I always thought of women's fingernails when I heard it: that odd growing part of us that is such slight protection, brittle enough to break at one wrong glancing word or gesture; tough enough, if we're driven enough or desperate enough, to wound.

Oh, some of us flaunt our fingernails, paint thin clear enamel carapaces over them, sometimes tinted as pink as rare meat, sometimes bold and red as a stoplight, sometimes glittery like jewelry. But they are still a fragile element of our bodies, no matter how thick the shell over the exposed nerves and thin-skinned flesh beneath, and pulling them out was an ancient form of torture.

My nail polish was neutral and effacing, but as impervious as shellac.

The Wichita, Kansas, TV studio had the usual food room: sink, microwave, dishes, silverware, vending machines. Although the on-camera women were supposed to be uniformly slender, the support staff brought homemade pastries and desserts. We gathered around the treats to nibble or gorge, depending on our metabolisms and moods of the moment. One time a woman had exclaimed that some hit of whipped-cream, chocolate-laden sugar was "better than sex." A quick poll named the top better-than-sex dessert: carrot cake. A lone vote for banana cream pie won a lusty group laugh, and the woman who craved those huge trans-fatty glazed donuts was told with giggles and knowing titters that she could combine the two. I'd laughed knowingly too, although I only got the reference now. My own fave had been lost in the hullabaloo: gourmet coffee and chocolate.

Now I knew that little office coffee klatch conversation for an exchange so shallow that even Irma at her ditziest was light years away from explaining the enormous risk and reward of having sex.

The wellsprings of trust involved dazzled me. The emotional liberation of feeling trust on such an intimate level left me with a peace and gratitude for being alive I'd never imagined. All the happy TV commercial couples, the hyper-passionate romance-novel couples, had seemed part of some elaborate play everybody else liked to pretend they were now starring in. What I felt here and now was real. Was it love? That fast and easily? I didn't know. I'd just have to trust that, whatever it was, it was right for us both. That, beyond the first-time mechanics and even though he whispered-warning, apologizing – that I'd be…tender, delicado… the next day, as long as I felt this inner conviction, I'd never be sorry. Trust. It meant that Rick would not hurt me, and if he ever did, I knew the pain would be mortal.

That's how I felt as I beached myself on Ric, feeling his body as a solid breathing wall behind me. His fingers were caressing my inner outer edges. A wall. A wave.

His shirt collar was still open. In the mirror I glimpsed a shadow, blue-black, the only dark place on him besides his hair and eyelashes. My open mouth swiveled to that sole entry to him.

He was still inside me, against me, behind and in front, fingers and one long, hard thick finger, so I felt deliriously surrounded. I let myself sag against him, held up by his invasive prongs like a paper doll on pushpins.

The shadow at his throat, his collarbone, teased my eyes.

My head lolled on his shoulder. "What's this?"

His face was close, focused down on me, eyes slit. I touched his skin under the slightly open collar.

"What do you think you feel, what do you see?" he asked.

I brushed his collar aside. Frowned. "You're…wounded."

He made a humming sound like a purring cat. My fingers pressed against the shadow. Puffy flesh, darkening as I touched it.

"Ric! Did…I do that?"

"Yeah. When you zoned out over the dead zone in the park. You…spasmed. All over. I felt every tremor. Then you turned your head into my neck and shoulder. And bit. You did that."

I stared at his bruised skin just peeking beyond the white starched corner of his shirt.

"I bit you?"

"Yeah."

"No! I'm not a vampire! I hate those bloodsuckers. I'd never do that."

He touched my lips, pushed his forefinger onto the ticklish top of my mouth until I panted with a strange sort of lassitude.

"Maybe you're a werewolf. I don't care. It's okay. It's a totally human thing, called a love bite, a passion mark, a hickey."

What was I?

"A deliciously passionate woman," he told me in the kitchen, where he applied an ice pack and antibiotic ointment to his neck on my insistence.

What I regarded as a scary untreated wound he seemed to consider a sensual trophy. Weird. But what did I know about any of this?

"But I need a little R &R until our next round. Waiting makes all the difference," he added, his eyes hot-fudge warm.

Not me! I resisted, not insisted. I feared, not dared. I was a…nice person.

Not hot.

Ric came close again, pulled me hip to hip. "We could…share a shower. A bed. Sleep. Or we could do what I really, really want to do."

"And that is?"

"I want to drive…you…home again."

Oh. The very thought of that low, leather-lined car with major vibrating road feel undid me. Ric's hands on the stick shift. Right. Drive me home. The reins were back in his hands. Drive me.

By now the semi-reclining passenger seat, sans seatbelt, would have been tolerable, but Ric didn't lower it. Instead, he pulled me down sideways once we were on the road, across the central compartment, my head pillowed on his iron-muscled thigh that any woman would have killed to have.