Anne Rice - Servant of the Bones

“I have you in my arms. My lips touch your forehead, your cheek, your chin, your shoulder, your hand…” I said. Truth was, I could hardly resist her. I wanted to loosen her fancy clothes, release her in my power.

I softly locked my hand around her fragile wrist. She really was dying.

“Don’t fear me, beloved,” I said, “unless it eases the pain. Sometimes it does, to fear one thing instead of others.”

In answer, she turned and kissed me again, tugging my head down close to her, so that she could push her tongue into my mouth. It was a luscious kiss, full of passion and utter yielding. I kissed her longingly. I felt her hips lift against me. I felt my own body hard for her.

I had to have her, I had to make her happy. And the world would let me know my power in this as it had let me know in everything else. If I lost all power in her arms, so be it.

There was too much human heat here for anything but love-making now. The sky itself, the dreamy stars, the high white clouds—these things as well—decreed it.

21

She pulled weakly at the buttons of her blouse. “Undress me, please, help me,” she said. I quickly removed all her clothes as she wished. She guided me and assisted me. She sank deep in the pillows, pale, but with a body as firm to touch as a young woman’s body.

I kissed the calves of her legs, her thighs. The garden rustled and sighed behind me. For the first time I heard a waterfall, its gentle trickle, and then I listened to the sound of water touching leaves, but my body was an engine of desire, and what drove me was her naked breasts, rather small, with the pink nipples of a girl, and the smell of death, rising sweet like a crushing lily. It was not that the death attracted me; it was that it made her all the more precious, something to be lost in a moment.

She lay back, heaving a deep sigh. The angles of her face were tight and delicate and precise in the dimness.

“Let me see you without your clothes,” she said. She reached for buttons, but I gestured there was no need. I stood up and back from her.

Not an electric light burned in the place. It was the dreamiest darkness.

I stretched out my arms and looked up at the sky. Though suddenly aware of a fatigue from all the night’s tricks, I nevertheless told my clothes to assemble themselves nearby and await my command. I would be naked.

It worked even more swiftly and completely than last time. I looked down for the first time on my own chest, pubic hair, erect organ. I was too happy for humility, and to feel the sinews in my arms tighten was to be among living things, and surely some of those things must be good things.

She sat up on the bed, her breasts amazingly firm, and the pink nipples turned up. Her silver-and-black hair made a rumpled mass down her back and displayed a long neck.

“Splendid,” she whispered.

A rain of doubts descended on me.

But I had to do it. What was the point of warning her that I might dissolve in the process? I was going to do it.

I sat down beside her, embracing her. I felt the moist thin silkiness of her skin, not healthy in a woman too thin, yet delicious. Even the bones of her wrists were beautiful.

She tugged at my hair, and kissed me with her eyes closed, all over my face, and quite suddenly I realized with a shock that my beard and mustache were on my face.

She drew back, staring at it. I told this hair to go away.

“No,” she said. “Bring it back! It makes your mouth sweeter and damper.” I felt the hair return as if it wanted to! I couldn’t quite figure this out, why the hair had come of its own, but that was the whole story so far, my body came on its own, and in its own form. One lapse in my will, one drifting into pride in my physical self, and the hair had come.

Well, she loved it. I took a long breath, feeling the toll of all this changing and magic, but I was as hard as a statue for her. I wanted to pounce on her. Instead I let her bury her face in the hair of my chest, and kiss my nipples, and the pleasure went right to my loins.

I took her breasts in my hands, enchanted by their smallness, their delicacy. So pink, girlish pink.

“It’s all drugs, my love,” she said, as though feeling my wonder. She kissed my beard, kissing it along the bone of my jaw. “It’s hormones and modern science; I have a woman’s chemicals inside me, that’s all. They can make me look young, but they can’t save my life.”

I kissed her and held her, my hands free and rough over her thighs and stealing into the secret crevice, to feel there the firmness of a young woman’s secret body. Chemicals, was it? Modern science?

“Those things preserve,” I said, “but you make the beauty.”

“Sweet God,” she whispered, kissing me all over my face. I had my hands beneath her small backside, and cuddled it.

“Yes,” I said, “God, capricious as He is; he lavished his blessings on you and on your daughter, Esther.”

“And you were the last thing,” she breathed into my ear, her hands clawing gently at my back. “You were the last thing she saw. How good that was for her.”

A savage strength rose in me, the realization that I had her completely at my mercy, this precious creature, and that no words from anyone could command me away from her. Only her words would hold sway with me now, and only because I would defer to her.

It was like fruit between her legs, like peaches or plums, it was just wet enough. I brought my fingers to my nostrils.

“I can’t hold back, my love,” I said.

She parted her legs, and lifted her hips, and this was paradise suddenly, to be inside her, inside this hot throbbing fruit, and to have her mouth at the same time, to have both her mouths, to cover her, with hair and strength. I began the manly rhythm. Alive, alive, alive. I was blinded. Pleasure drenched all my senses.

“Yes, now, yes, do it,” she said. She lifted her hips against me. I rose up on my elbows so as not to hurt her with my weight, and looking down at her, I felt the seed explode inside her. My jerking motions surely hurt her. But then I saw the blush I wanted in her face, I felt the throbbing in her throat, and knew she was as happy as I was. The tight little core of fruit squeezed the last drop out of me, and I fell over on my back, whole and alive, staring at the ceiling of this room, or staling into airy dark.

Whatever had been my life, spirit or man, I could not recall a pleasure as delicious as this one, as totally humiliating in the way it took over, in the way that it made me feel the slave and the master simultaneously. I didn’t ask myself what men felt.

Her head turned from side to side; she was blood red. “Come to me again, please, now,” she said.

Overjoyed, I rolled back on top of her and entered her. I didn’t need a rest. The fruity secret part was more luscious, tighter than before, throbbing more fully. Again I came and her face flooded with blood, and then finally she scratched my back hard with both her hands, she beat on me with fists, and when I lifted up to thrust, she came with me just far enough, and then lay back, to make it ecstasy.

“Harder,” she said. “Harder. Make this a battlefield, make me a boy you’ve found, a girl, I don’t care.”

It was too inviting. I slammed against her, harshly, over and over, feeling the seed spill again, the sight of her red face filling me with an all-too-human sense of power. Yes, to have her, to make her come, to make her come, yes, again, and again.

I filled her up. I was so tight inside her, I dragged her hips up off the bed with me, and then in her wetness she let me slide back and forth, and like a brute soldier, I came down, driving her into the silken pillows, and I saw through my half-closed eyes that she smiled.