Ellen Datlow - Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

“Sure.” Her arm tingled painfully. She used her left arm to push herself back up. “Where’s the bathroom?”

A strong hand took her elbow. She got to her feet, then across the room to a door. Geoffrey switched on the light and gently propelled her into the small porcelain chamber.

She did not throw up. Her stomach churned, but nothing happened. She washed her face, relieved herself, and emerged feeling more awake. Her arm felt almost normal.

Geoffrey waited on the edge of the bed, a white bartender’s jacket beside him, smoking a cigarette. He let the ashes fall to the floor.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yes… you were downstairs?”

He nodded. “Saw you come in, but I didn’t get a chance to say anything to you.”

Geoffrey held her arm descending the staircase, a pleasant pressure she missed immediately when he released her at the bottom. A few people still lingered in the main ballroom. The floor was covered with debris—streamers, paper napkins, broken glass. One bartender slept in a chair behind his station. Conny did not see Brian.

Geoffrey drove her back to their borrowed house. Not for long now, she thought muzzily, we’ll have to move again. He pulled up by the front door and shut the motor off. A single lantern shined by the door.

Conny stared at him. “You were in Newport. We took a cottage in Swansea near the end of the war and I thought I saw you there, working in a dry goods shop. Then we went to London for a month, after the Armistice, and you were driving a hansom. We moved back to Newport, then to Bristol, now here to Brighton. I always felt you were somewhere nearby and now you turn up. Are you following us, Geoffrey?”

“You should get to bed. It’s nearly dawn.”

“William doesn’t expect me.”

“Maybe not.”

His arm lay across the back of the seat. Conny looked at his hand, inches from her shoulder, a dark mass of contours, faintly outlined along the knuckles from the lantern light. Between that and his nearly invisible face his white shirt looked like a mass of evening fog.

“I think he’s asleep,” she said.

She traced the shape of his thumb, the raised tendons, the blunt shafts of fingers. The texture fascinated her. She lifted it and turned it over and touched the callouses that ridged the top of his palm, just below the base of his fingers. The skin was very warm and dry.

Conny undid his cuff and pushed the sleeve back, pressing her own palm against his forearm. She could feel his pulse in the thick vein that ran from tendon to elbow.

“Conny—”

“Shh. Don’t.”

She slid her lips over his thumb and teased it with her tongue. He did not pull away. She licked his callouses, the center of his hand, his lifeline, the tendons that tented the skin of his wrist.

Conny twisted around in the seat to face him, kneeling, and fumbled for the buttons of his shirt. He grabbed her hand. She tugged once, twice, pulled loose, and continued unbuttoning until her hand came against his belt. She leaned forward. He smelled warm and sharp, as if he had been working out in the sun all day. She pushed aside the open shirt and laid her hands against his chest, surprised at the feel of hair. William’s body was nearly bald and the contours of his torso were the shapes of ribs and collarbone and sternum.

She heard Geoffrey’s breath deepen. He had not moved to touch her and she realized that she preferred it that way. To touch and not be touched—the idea fascinated her.

His nipples went hard and round under her fingers. She licked his stomach, from navel to solar plexus. Geoffrey’s head rolled back.

“Damn…” he whispered.

She was afraid he might stop her, that she might stop herself. He tasted salty, skin slippery with sweat. She mouthed his neck and worked at his belt, his button, his zipper. Then she laid one hand on the arm still stretched along the top of the car seat and pushed her fingers beneath the waistband of his shorts. His penis bent down, thick and awkward, and she hooked two fingers beneath it to bring it carefully up, afraid of hurting him. The fabric held it until it sprang loose.

Then she looked down, certain now that he would not prevent her from doing anything she wanted. Her body blocked what little light came from the lantern by the door; she could not see his face. What she saw were fragments—a shirted arm, a yellowish glint off the car mirror, part of the door against which Geoffrey lay—but her mind supplied the missing detail from the hundreds of dreams prompted by William’s letters. She pulled back a little and grasped his penis. Touching and not being touched… a new experience. She laughed at the idea. Married all these years and so few times—when William wanted her, gathered the energy and the will to fuck her, that was all he did, and she accommodated him. He seemed not to like to be touched, as if embarrassed with his own body, as though he did not deserve it, and over time she had become adept at a kind of encouraging passivity and a congenial access. She squeezed Geoffrey, ran her thumb along the underside of the shaft, and wondered why she had allowed it for so long.

He shifted beneath her and her heart slammed, certain that he was about to say enough and push her away. She let him go and yanked at his pants. He grunted and raised his hips. The trousers slid down to his thighs and she had no more room to back up and get them the rest of the way. She reached behind her and groped for the handle. The door opened and she kicked it wide. Standing on the gravel of the driveway, she drew his pants down to his ankles, then untied his shoes and flipped them off.

Now the wan light fell across him and she saw his legs, the hair around his penis, the geography of his belly and chest, and, for the briefest moment, the broken quarters of his face.

Conny grabbed him behind the knees and yanked until he came across the seat, out of the car, and sat down on the runner. She gathered her skirt up around her waist and lowered herself onto his lap. He seemed to flow up into her and she gasped. She found his face, his mouth. He sucked at her fingers. Her knees banged the edge of the running board. She wanted to move elsewhere, but she did not want to give him a chance to end the contact. She wrapped her hands tightly around his neck and brought first one foot, then the other, up onto the board. Geoffrey’s arms joined across her lower back and held her while she see-sawed against him. For a moment she was aware of the harsh sounds they made, counterpointing their thrusting, and then she forgot everything but the exquisite contractions, the taste of flesh, and the panic filling her.

APRIL, 1931

Conny wiped William’s mouth and shivered at the thin smear of blood on the rag. Huddled beneath a quilt and two blankets, he trembled, his skin dry and papery. Outside the rain continued, as it had for the past three days, and Conny silently cursed their coming to Norwich. She had not wanted to leave Cambridge. Before that she had wanted to stay in Bedford and before that Reading and before that… the place names stacked in her memory, a succession of borrowed houses, lent rooms, trains, and taxis.

They always seemed to find a place, someone who thought it was sophisticated or chic to help support an aspiring writer, even one who could not seem to publish anything—perhaps especially one like that. The charity rarely lasted, especially when they realized William would not attend their parties to be shown off. She still missed the house in Brighton, but, as she had expected, Brian had tossed them out.

William coughed weakly. He had been sick since Cambridge, but in the last six days he had grown worse. Conny touched her fingertips to his forehead. Hot. She glanced at the bottle of laudanum on the bedside table. William hated it, but it did help him sleep during the worst of his fevers and coughing fits.