Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

“Uh, well, I was hoping you’d want to stay with me. I know I don’t have a luxurious place or anything, and I’m not much of a host yet, but I think we could get along. Besides, I really need you.”

She looked at him the way his fourth grade teacher had, the time he’d come back from when his father died. Then, the look felt like sympathy. Now he saw it as pity.

“Look, I don’t know what you want, but I’ll do anything. Anything.”

She projected the image of herself on the forest floor, crumpled and alone, then standing with the nameless woman, embracing her. Somehow, Frank sensed how terribly important the meeting was. Maybe, he thought, he would take her, let them meet, then take the angel back with him. Cooperate. Gain their trust. Let them both know he wanted to care for the angel.

She frowned. He felt the tug of her distress. Like Denise. Andrea. Sharon.

“All right, I’ll take you back. But I just want one thing.”

She floated around him, wings shuddering, her delight conveyed in the phosphorescence of her skin. Anything, she told him, anything he wished.

The image slid into his mind as easily as muffins off a greased tin. She and him, in bed, making love, him giving her something so good, she’d never leave him. Marking her with his semen. Truly making her his angel.

“Maybe God wouldn’t want it, though.” He was shy. Awkward. “I mean, I’m not pure like you. Maybe I’d pollute you. You know, make you unclean.”

She cocked her head, her eyes becoming black holes, drawing him in. With every cell in her being, she was letting him know it was all right, that he would be made clean by her. He felt himself losing his peripheral vision, then saw stars, as if he was fainting. Then there was nothing.

He regained consciousness slowly, swimming up from a syrupy deep sleep. He was naked on his bed. By the glowing numbers on his clock radio, he saw it was the middle of the night. He reached over for the lamp, his panic palpable, certain she was gone.

There, in the amber light, she was asleep beside him. He reached down and felt his flaccid cock. It was puckered with dried jism. His mouth tasted strange. As if he’d been sucking on roses. He remembered her lack of orifices, save one, and leaned over her. His fingers deftly probed the surface of her mons. Nothing.

He closed his eyes. In flashes, it came to him. Her floating ahead of him into the bedroom. Her bathing him, pampering him with her hands, her mouth. His wanting to ravage her, but her insistence on passivity, and his inability to refuse her. His paralysis. How she seemed to make all the parts of his body feel like his cock, erect with an unrelenting trapped heat that demanded release. And her providing it. Even his hair follicles knew orgasmic pleasure.

And then he recalled something stranger, more unsettling. Her taking his hand and putting it to her lips, then sucking it in, first fingers, then hand, to wrist, his arm up past his elbow. Then, there he somehow knew to strum a place inside her, flesh stretched like catgut, smooth as velvet, vibrating like the strings of a harp. The sound she made was like a choir, singing up to the Lord. As she reached her crescendo, a place inside her wept. When she released him, his arm slid slowly from inside her. He knew to lick off all the moisture that remained—moisture with the scent of roses.

Why he’d been put into some kind of coma to experience it, he didn’t know, but he felt different now. Redeemed. She had cleansed him. Forgiven him the horrible results of his temper, his intolerance, over the years. The little deaths, and the important ones.

“I love you.” He spoke to her sleeping form. He’d never said those words before and meant them. From the bottom of his miraculously rescued heart, he meant it now.

He slid off the bed to his knees and, for the first time in twenty years, prayed.

The hotel where Frank worked was not happy to learn that he needed the day off to show an out-of-town guest around, but Frank’s assistant could easily handle the Monday baking demands.

Frank showered and dressed as if for church. His angel watched. His mind was silent, empty of her thoughts. What the hell was going on with her? He resigned himself to the fact that women mystified him. What went on inside them seemed more trouble than it was worth to learn. Hell, he thought, he had enough to say for both of them. He talked to her of how he wanted to care for her, what kind of a life they could have together. She gave him no sign she was listening.

The angel drank an enormous amount of water, but otherwise ate nothing. Frank was so hungry he almost ate the gnarled apple. Instead he devoured the animal crackers, gone hard as wood. He wanted a beer, but a wonderful feeling infused him, giving him a deep feeling of satisfaction. As if he’d already had the beer. Quite a few of them.

“Let’s go.” He took the angel, wrapped in his raincoat, to his car. He saw Mrs. Levin peeking out her window, as usual. If he ran into her in the laundromat, she’d ask him who the girl was. Where she’d come from, as she had with all the others. The woman was nosier than his mother. Only more dangerous.

The highway was busy with Monday traffic and the road out to the quarry full of double trailer trucks hauling granite.

“We’ll have to drive through the quarry works. You have to hunker down then, or I’ll have to explain about you.”

The angel seemed to shrink until she was a lumpy pile of raincoat on the floor of the car. Frank turned up his tape of Buchanan’s “When a Guitar Plays the Blues,” as the sound of gravel under his wheels began to make him nervous.

No one paid him any mind until he reached the far end of the quarry works and the dirt path began. A truck blocked his way and he had to get out and ask that it be moved.

A man in a business suit stood nearby, talking with a worker.

“Hey, you the driver?” Frank asked the worker.

The suit turned. “Can I help you?”

“I need that truck moved.”

“You can’t go down that path, man. It’s quarry property. A dirt road. We don’t want to be liable for what could happen if…”

“I was here yesterday.” He thought fast. “Hang gliding. I left some of my gear there. Too heavy to walk it all out with me. I’ll be in and out. Promise.” He smiled reassuringly.

The suit checked his watch. He frowned, looked up to the sky, then down at his watch again.

“In and out. You have ten minutes.”

“Thanks. That’s all I need.”

The suit instructed the worker to move the truck and Frank was off.

“Boy, that was close. We almost got stopped.” She oozed back up onto the seat, her hair covering her face.

For the first time all day, he sensed her apprehension, anxiety. He felt her growing distress.

“Don’t you worry. We’ll get there. I lied to the guy, but I don’t think they’ll come in and get us. He’s probably too busy worrying about some granite problem.”

She looked at him plaintively. He patted her knee. Her wings fluttered a tiny bit under the raincoat.

He stopped the car at the end of the road at the felled trees. Another car, a huge sedan, was parked just off the road. Maybe that was her. The stiff, professor-looking woman, he thought.

“Let me scout ahead. I don’t want anybody to hurt you.”

She sent him her feelings of trepidation, then acquiesced. He sauntered down the mountainside, slipping in his Sunday shoes. He could see someone in the small clearing where he’d found his angel. A tall woman, dressed soberly, her pale hair tied into a severe bun. She began to turn toward him, so he hid behind a tree.

Just then, he felt a subtle vibration, a quaking of the air. His skin itched ever so slightly. While he was still staring at the woman, she looked up. Frank’s eyes followed hers.