Carole Douglas - Silver Zombie

“You need to stop,” Ric told me.

Startled, I assumed he’d eavesdropped on my distracted thoughts. But … no.

“Your sensual back massage is making me too happy. I trust we have something joint in mind,” he went on.

I stepped back, dropping my hands. Still the amateur, I scolded myself, either avoiding or pushing too far too fast. I didn’t know my own powers on any front … physical, emotional, or paranormal.

Ric picked me up in a bride-over-the-threshold carry and brought me into the dim bedroom. He settled me on the bed to a rhythm of kisses and caresses that made making love with one person in a wet suit seem perfectly logical, and my suit’s silver studs flashed tiny lightning strikes from all the room’s mirrored or metal surfaces.

“Electric,” Ric murmured, as he rolled onto his back beside me. Of course, I had to remain on my side. My phobia against lying on my back kept me with my head braced on my crooked arm, gazing down into his beloved face. Ric turned his head away from me, so I couldn’t see the silver iris. “Delilah, I need your mouth on me.”

I ran my hand down his muscled, slightly furry thigh. “No problemo, amor.”

His hand on my wrist stopped me.

“No. Here.” He turned his head farther, his brunet profile etched against the blue satin pillowcase the color of my eyes. I consumed the sight of his dark, thick hair, slanting forehead, slightly aquiline nose, deeply arched lips … the image as breathtaking as one of Michelangelo’s ultramasculine sculpted angels.

His motion had brought my focus to the strong, exposed column of his neck with the new knot of scar tissue resembling a miniature star gone nova.

“No,” I said.

I couldn’t miss how shallow, excited breaths lifted his bare chest up and down even as he kept his face and throat immobile for my view. The provocative contrast was playing crazy with my libido.

“No, amor, ” I coaxed. “This isn’t a game anymore. That Sonoran desert bat bite left two tiny marks on your neck. I could play ferocious vampiress and leave you unchanged before. Now, real vampires have used that same spot as a spigot. They sucked your blood out. I can’t ‘pretend’ to do that anymore.”

“It was a vampire bat bite, Delilah, on the neck, a natural site for the tiny beast. I can’t help that undead beasts favor the spot too, or what I feel. Your mouth has made the welts on my back into a road map of pleasure points. Think what your lips could do for the new scar here.”

Help me, Irma! I couldn’t plead that I didn’t do oral sex. I couldn’t deny that we all had idiosyncratic turn-ons and turn-offs. I’d overcome my distaste of early attacks from predatory half-vamps to feed Ric’s harmless thirst for a bat bite rerun. He’d led me to overcome a lot of my hang-ups. How could I deny his one little long-standing kink?

“Por favor,” he whispered. “I can beg …”

I studied his beautiful, beloved features. Like I shouldn’t be begging him to let me touch him, love him.

I launched the most passionate kiss of my being at the damned vampire scar, pouring love and tears on the wound, as I had before when I had healed, sensing the pleasure shivering through his entire body and mind and soul, breathless at the power I had to shake him … and at his power to make me abandon myself and my fears.

IT WAS ONE of those paralyzing nightmares, where you know you need to move, change the scene, wake up … and you can’t.

Yes, I was reliving my old alien abduction scenario. Me pinned on my back to an examining table, or an autopsy table, like Lilith. Me in the glare of a sinister overhead light hovering like a pale manta ray. A trio of vampire nurses fencing me in along each side of the table.

Vampire nurses? Howard Hughes’s various Vegas venues had finally crept into my old Wichita nightmares.

An alien figure still stood at the foot of the table, ready to inject me with … some giant needle device. Yes, the alien was the black-and-white CinSim of Dr. Frankenstein, who wore far too much gel on his thick black hair.

And then he became the gold-glimmering black figure of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the underworld …

Really, I had too many alien entities to worry about to stay frozen in this dream … and so I awoke. I couldn’t move for several seconds, my heart beating as if the captive-on-my-back abduction experience had been real.

And then I remembered that … it had been. I’d actually lived through scenarios like this since hitting Vegas. I’d already experienced this in real life, surreal as Vegas was.

Was I finally outgrowing my childhood phobias by living through them?

Beside me, I noticed Ric thrashing on his black satin sheets. I softly stroked his upper arm. Where I feared to lie on my back, he’d made a habit of doing it to hide the whip scars of his childhood. Now he lay on his stomach, his exposed back and hips twitching with the phantom lashes of his deepest memories and nightmares.

“Ric,” I whispered into his ear whenever his head thrashed my way. I ran my fingertips over the pale scars, each stroke quieting his shudders.

He awoke groggy and purring at last.

“You can’t leave a man alone, Delilah,” he murmured. “Magic Fingers. Put in a quarter.”

I smiled, recognizing a reference to massage beds in cheap motels.

“Are we really going to stay in motels on our road trip?” I asked.

He turned over onto his side. Revealing his back had been a big achievement. Someday we’d make love in the missionary position, my own phobias no more too. Who’d believe a modern woman would want to be on the bottom. Oh, yes.

“God, I had a horrible nightmare, Del,” he said, blinking as the memories flooded back.

“Tell me.”

“Unlike you, I haven’t dreamed like this in years. Mama Burnside pretty much reprogrammed me.”

“I wish I’d had someone like her in the group homes of Wichita.”

“We’ll get back there and look them all up, paloma. And give ’em heck.”

“What did you dream?”

He laid his head on my shoulder. “I saw El Demonio, the chief slave-labor smuggler south of the border. He was using his bullwhip on me again—”

I clutched his head to my breast.

“Del, you’re gonna hook me on bad dreams.”

I unclutched.

“But, Del … in the dream, he turned into … you.”

“No!”

“Yeah, and your crazy silver familiar had taken the form of twin silver whips and then became tendrils of your silky dark hair and they were slashing like black-satin ribbons all over my body and I was really into it …”

“Oh, shut up. You just want a pity fuck.”

He laughed.

“Any time. No, honestly and truly. I dreamed that old dark dream and then you appeared and drove it back down into the deepest corner of Nightmareland. The day you dream your alien abduction scenario and I’m the one menacing you with the phallic implement from the foot of the table, we’ll know we’ve got both our kiddie nightmares deep-sixed.”

“You think that this trip back to Wichita will do that for me? Turn the bogeyman at the alien abduction table into Prince Charming with a hard-on?”

He turned sober.

“I believe that digging to the bottom of our nightmares always pulls up the truth, Delilah. And the truth will set you free.”

“That’s the reporter’s credo, but not an original thought, Ric.”

“That’s why it’s so true, mi amor, ” he said, pulling my face down to his in a deep, soothing goodnight kiss.

“FAR BE IT from me,” said my landlord, Hector Nightwine, the next morning while I squirmed on the carved wooden chair opposite his office desk, “to insert myself into the course of true love, but you and the Cadaver Kid have been absent from the Strip for too long.”