Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

That seemed like a good impulse, so she acted on it, pouncing. He made a little surprised grunt and then a much happier little gasp. Her breasts nuzzled his chest and her face was right up in front of his, and she was straddling his stomach, her feet on either side of him and her ass just nudging his cock. He started laughing, and so did she, and she leaned over and kissed him and chewed on his lip too gently to break the skin.

She was tingling all over, even her scalp and her elbows, and she felt a kind of madness taking her over that was better than any spell or concoction ever.

She almost put him inside her without a condom — she wouldn’t get pregnant, unless she chose to. And she was sure neither of them had an STD. But doing it bareback this first time felt like too much, like they would be making some kind of declaration that they were fluid bonded, practically married, instead of just trying this shit out. Which is what they were doing. So she groped for a foil package.

“I keep expecting you to do like a spell or something.” Laurence thrust into her with an even tempo, occasionally syncopating and twisting, in ways that startled her with pleasure.

“Do you want me to do a spell?” She smiled up at him, her hazel eyes going sideways for a moment as she tried to think what spell she could even get away with, and then rolling upwards as he thrust harder and faster for a second.

“I don’t know.” Laurence leaned forward and kissed her between her own ankles. “Nothing fancy, or, you know, tricky.” She winced a little at the mention of tricks, but he was still smiling, it was all good. “You don’t have to, I was just kind of half-expecting it in a way.”

“Okay,” Patricia said. “But remember, you asked for it.”

“I didn’t,” Laurence said. “I merely speculated about — ooh.” And then he lost all train of thought because his already-quite-sensitive left nipple had developed a few million new nerve endings, and she was blowing on it. He damn near passed out from the sensation, and his brain shut down, and then he was pouring out of himself into the condom inside the woman he loved.

He hadn’t quite let himself think that before, but now he realized it was true. He found himself saying it aloud, sort of by accident, before his brain’s normal functioning could quite be restored: “I love you.”

“Oh.” Patricia was staring down at him, from where he’d fallen into a puddle on the bed. “Wow.”

She was obviously processing this. Like, a non sequitur.

“I can take it back,” Laurence babbled. “I’m taking it back. I never said that.”

He looked up at her green eyes (wide with surprise), her glistening eyelashes, her half-open mouth.

“No, don’t take it back.” She shivered, but not in a bad way. “It’s just. Wow.” And then she looked at him straight on and said, “I love you, too.”

Even as Patricia said it back to him, she felt like her whole history was taking on a whole new focus, the landscape of her past rearranging so that the stuff with Laurence became major geographical features and some other, lonelier, events shrank proportionately. Historical revisionism was like a sugar rush, flooding her head. Her mind flashed on Laurence saying she had saved him, Laurence promising he would never run away from her again. It felt like something she had known a long time.

“Oh my god, I love you. I love you so much,” she started chattering, and soon they were pressed together and kissing the tears out of each other’s eyes and laughing. She touched his cock and even she couldn’t tell if she used magic to lift it up again or if it was just her mere touch, but soon he was inside her again. This time, they were fucking and talking at the same time, and caressing each other’s faces. They kept rolling over and over so neither of them was on top.

“I don’t even know how I lucked out so damn much, you’re the most beautiful ever,” Laurence was saying.

“Let’s just never stop holding each other.” Patricia was laughing and crying. “Let’s just hold on like this forever and people can come and ask us questions through the door or bug us on the phone or—”

Patricia’s phone rang, having switched itself back on.

She pulled away from Laurence long enough to see that it was her parents calling. She hadn’t spoken to them in ages. She knew at once what this was about — Roberta had finally gone off the deep end, in spite of all her straight-edge resolutions.

“What’s wrong with Roberta?” Patricia blurted.

“Your sister is fine.” It was Patricia’s dad, sounding weary. “We just spoke to her. She’s safe, she was outside the impact zone. Unfortunately, we had just gone to Delaware for one of your mother’s seminars and we weren’t able to get out in time.”

“Wait. What happened? What’s going on?”

“It’s all over the news, we thought you’d seen. Allegra, it came ashore,” said Patricia’s father. “We’re in the basement of the convention center. They herded us all down here when the tidal waves hit. We can’t get the door open, and we think the building collapsed on top of us, plus the whole area is underwater. It’s a miracle we’ve got cell phone signal.”

“Hang in there, Dad.” Patricia felt her face soaking. Between the tears and the white flashes, she was blind. “I’ll find a way. I’ll get you out of there.” There had to be. There had to be a spell to get her to Delaware in a hurry, like a way to bend space. She just couldn’t think what it was, or just whom she could trick enough to pull off such a thing. Maybe just telling her father that she could save him was paradoxically a big enough lie that it would give her the power to save him. Maybe there was a magician in Delaware who could help — except anybody on the ground there was probably dead, or had their hands full. She couldn’t think, she couldn’t breathe, she choked.

“It’s okay, PP. I just wanted you to know that even though we were hard on you, and we disowned you after you ran away from home, we always loved you, and I’m … I’m … I’m proud that you became your own person.” Patricia’s heart shattered. She heard Isobel in the living room upstairs, shouting for Laurence to come and see on the news the scope of the destruction, streets become canals, air choked with debris. Like the heel of God’s hand.

“Do you want to talk to your mother?” Patricia’s father asked. “She’s right here. She broke her arm, but I can hold the phone up to her. Hang on.” There was a scuffling noise. The line went dead.

Patricia hit the callback function a dozen times, and nothing. Part of her thought maybe she should just stay hung up in case they were calling her back too and they got her voicemail, but she couldn’t stop hitting redial-redial-redial, she was bawling and shaking and her naked body was freezing and Laurence put his arm around her and she slapped him and then clung to him and the sound that came from inside her was like all the wounded animals she had ever fixed in her life.

Then she pulled herself together. Her parents weren’t dead yet. The destruction was still happening. She could get help. Someone was doing this, someone was making this happen, and she could make them pay. There was some evil witch or most likely witches, and they had found a way to supercharge a storm system, and they were fucking going down.

She was pulling her cargo pants on, her shirt, fuck her bra and panties.

“Where are you going?” Laurence was still naked.

“I have to go.” She put her shoes on. “Find Ernesto. Find the others. We can fix this. We can make them pay. We can save them.”

“I’ll go with you.” Laurence leapt for his pants.

“You can’t,” Patricia said. “I’m sorry, you can’t.”