Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

Each approach of the head waiter and underlings, each sweep of new people being seated, gazing at us as they passed and were ushered to a lesser table, wondering how we rated the primo spot, locked us into public behavior that only intensified our hidden private agenda: calculated seduction.

When dessert was finished, I passed on the after-dinner coffee. While Ric sipped his, I slipped the rhinestoned lipstick case holding the small bottle of Lip Venom from my purse and brushed it carefully over my lips. It was almond-colored and super-shiny, like my gown.

Ric's eyes, coffee dark, devoured my every gesture. I was becoming quite the femme fatale where he was concerned, but this femme had butterflies as well as fine food in her stomach.

"Something new?" he asked, eyeing the gown.

"This is a wedding gown."

"I can see the something blue," he said, gazing into my eyes. "What's old and borrowed?"

"The gown is old."

"I guess I'll have to find something that you can borrow."

"I can think of something of yours I'd like to borrow already."

After our highly visible dinner on the Strip, Ric drove me onto the highway and its river of headlights. We headed north of the city until it became dark and deserted. No one was going this far. I'd never gone this far. We turned onto a narrow straight road like the one to Los Lobos, except there were no mountains. We were deep into the desert itself. The car stopped on this path to nowhere. Ric opened my car door. I unclasped the cloak. He escorted me out, eying the modest front of my ivory satin gown in the moonlight.

He lifted my left arm, studied the twelve satin buttons closing the sleeve from wrist to elbow.

"I've decided tonight that you're a really promising sadist, my darling Delilah."

I lifted an eyebrow.

"I'm even more afraid that I like being your masochist," he conceded.

Well, that revved my engines! Ric mine, to do with what I pleased. What pleased me, pleased him. And vice versa.

He rested my hand on his shoulder and began undoing the buttons along my left arm.

It had taken me forty minutes to do the sleeve buttons and the back of the gown except for six inches between my shoulder blades. For that stretch I'd needed the kitchen witch. She had cackled over every button and had made me describe Ric in lewd, loving detail. Poor thing had been dead for several centuries and was now a domestic drudge. A little vicarious kick seemed the least I could do for her.

When the sleeve was undone, Ric did the Latin lover bit and kissed my knuckles, my wrist and my arm up to the elbow. Then he relinquished that arm and lifted my right hand to his shoulder. I managed to brush my knuckles across his lips before he started to undo that sleeve.

"What is this thing, really?" he asked.

"Gown from the thirties."'

"They did hand-sewing as late as that?"

"Oh, yeah. That's about all. The depths of the Depression. This wedding dress was rather…cheap at the time, really."

"Not my depression. Wedding dress. Well. We'll have to make this like the first time."

"It isn't."

"No reason it can't feel that way."

He began undoing the buttons on my other arm, painstakingly working the nooses of twined ivory thread off every stubborn satin-covered button, patient as a spider, as wired as a rodeo bull, his control building his excitement, as it built mine.

As my skin grew supersensitively charged with sexual electricity, I could no longer feel the location of my former silver thong. I fretted about where and how it might show up during this unveiling. Not to worry. The thought is mother to the act. I felt a fleeting shiver down one leg and under the arch of my right foot, almost making me giggle, a mood-destroying itch if ever there was. Something icy thin curled around my big toe. I was now the possessor of a terribly discreet toe ring, and free to let every other inch of my body luxuriate in Ric's slow, elaborate love-making.

He repeated the Continental kisses from my hand to my elbow and braced both of my arms on his shoulders. Then spoke.

"Now…for the fucking forty-eight buttons from your hot naked little ass to the sweet, soft virginal nape of your neck."

"You counted them. I'm flattered."

"Several times, like counting the number of beads on a rosary. You sure know how to get to a Catholic boy."

"I didn't go to Our Lady of the Lake convent school for nothing, but it was an all-girls institution and we wore navy and green uniforms. The only time we had a chance to dress up was when a senior girl got to wear her sister's wedding dress to crown the statue of the Virgin Mary with flowers for the May procession. I, of course, wasn’t a candidate for Virgin crowning."

"And you had no sister to loan you a wedding gown anyway."

I hesitated. Was I an only child? Then what or who was Lilith? I hadn't told Ric about that part of my mission and now seemed a little late.

She who hesitates is lost.

Ric's fingers moved adroitly between the cheeks of my butt. "I'm going to take you apart from the bottom up, and then from the top down. Any objections?"

"Only if they turn you on."

"We don't need that, do we?"

I shook my head, leaning against him as his ringers began the long, delicious, interminable climb up my spine. His hands slipped inside of the satin gown as he opened it inch by inch, and my hips soon were pressed to the hard vertical divining rod of his erection.

An almost full moon was rising over his shoulder, showering us with warm white light.

"This satin matches the color of your skin," he said into my ear, my neck. "It's a real rush." He kissed me for the first time, and jerked back.

"Wow, that stuff is still like an electric shock."

"Lip Venom is guaranteed to please."

"Painted hussy. Then bite me again, baby."

We kissed while Ric wrangled slippery satin buttons through loops of twined thread. It would be tricky work even for a lady's maid.

The cool desert air ran up my spine along with the motions of his fingers and knuckles. I got really hot goose bumps. Ric finally undid the top button at my nape and pulled down the open gown in one sudden sweep, satin spiraling away into sand. I had what I had wanted, my naked body encompassed by his clothed one. It was the ultimate form of trust and a lot of other, less abstract needs and wants and emotions.

"You are so bold and beautiful," he said, his hands soft as silk against my bare skin. He pushed me away, looked at me. I'd seen lust a few times, but never such shattering love.

From far away I heard the music of an iPod in the car playing dance music, slow dance music. He pressed me to him, started those liquid Latin motions that were all hip and heart, his hands moving over my bare torso, molding me to his soft, expensive clothes.

They were his shelter, those clothes, their softness. I knew now that he'd felt a lot that had been hot, harsh, cold, and brutal. My body tried to soothe all that away. I was living satin in his arms, and the roughness I felt-of buttons, a cold gold belt, zipper, trouser welt-it roused and hardened me to meet him as an equal.

We stopped moving, stopped dancing. In the hills and mountains I heard wolves howling for home. We both wanted that.

I stepped away from him and felt the desert wind chill every inch of my naked skin. He stopped moving. Bereft. Out of control. Feeling the cold night wind, not for the first time.

I put a finger to his throat. "You. Señor. I want you up against the car. I'm going to open you up from here…" I pressed my nail against his throat and ran my finger down the buttons of his shirt, past his guardian gold belt and down the swollen welt of his zipper to where it ended between his legs. "To there. Any objections?"

"God, no."