Velvet 7

For earlier episodes of Velvet, see the Story So Far page above.  

Velvet lunged forward, grasped the girl’s arm and flung himself at the window.  He crashed out through the glass and turned as he was falling.  The girl screamed and through her flying hair, he saw Jones standing at the window, shouting over his shoulder.  

Velvet twisted, holding the girl against him with one arm.  Her eyes were tight shut.  He aimed his boots at the side of the building and grabbed a ledge.  The girl screamed again as they came to a hard stop.  Velvet looked down and saw Jones’ men swarming up the side of the building. 
 

‘If you want to get out of this, get on my back and hold on.’  

She didn’t react for a moment, then crawled around, eyes closed and fingers digging into him.  She wrapped her arms around his neck and he leapt sideways as the first of Jones’ men grabbed at his legs.  He made the roof of the smaller building next door and ran. He heard the sound of the others hitting the roof behind him but didn’t look back.  As he reached the edge of the roof, the girl’s arms jerked against his throat as someone grabbed her from behind.  He gripped her hands and jumped to the next building.
 

He knew in a flat out foot race with a burden on his back that he had no hope.  He swerved to the side and leaped into the street, causing car horns and screeching tyres.  He ripped open the door of the closest car to him and threw the driver onto the road.  The girl scrambled in behind him and he was driving before the door slammed shut. 
 

He smashed a cab out of the way and accelerated hard to the next corner.  As he turned, he looked back and saw two of them cutting across the sidewalk towards him.  He swerved sideways and crushed one against a building.  Blood washed over the side window and thirst bloomed in his throat.  The girl tried to climb over him to get to it but he shoved her back into her seat.  Her head cracked against the window.  The other man leapt onto the trunk as he accelerated away.  He kicked in the back window and came in feet first.  Velvet jumped on the brake and the man flew forward, his legs shooting between the front seats.  Velvet seized his belt and flung him through the windscreen before driving forward.  The car rocked over his bulk and Velvet sped away, with the sound of sirens in his ears.  He glanced at the girl.  She was staring at him, eyes big in her dirty face. 
 

‘Where is my daughter?’ Velvet said.

On the Storm

The radio said there was a killer on the road.  People had been lost in the bends and dark curves.  They had disappeared under the overhanging trees in the rain.  They had been taken from the wet slide of storm polished blacktop.  People couldn’t stay home, so they were careful instead.  In the wet night, standing in a straight stretch between curves that whipped left and right like a fleeing snake, I knew I was in a bad place. 

Cars passed me; flying, lashing water in my face.  Blind metal cages and warm dry oblivion.  I held my arm out as far as I dared, thumb raised in a plea for salvation.  I watched the lives pass me by on their way to better things, or worse.  I saw small faces pressed against the glass, watching the rain and the night blur by.  Maybe they saw the white oval of my face as a pale flash of something unknown. 

Despite experience, to spite it or myself, my heart filled with hope with each new car taking the first curve.  Each dirty wake took hope with it, splashing in the red taillights as they braked for the next bend.  I don’t know how long I stood there but my clothes lay cold and wet against my skin and my hair plastered in my face.  My pack pulled down my shoulder and my outstretched arm drooped against its own weight.  My chin was resting on my chest and I believe I was almost asleep when I heard the squeal of wet brakes.  For a moment, I remained stiff, hand still out.  The car had pulled in onto the gravel at the bottom of the rocky wall, its red eyes making stars in the downpour.  I started to run towards it and my legs almost betrayed me.  I ran stiff and old, though I am neither.  I slipped as I went around the back of the car and grabbed at the rough roots of trees sticking out of the bank.  A window came down a few inches and a woman’s voice shouted to me to get in the back. 

I grabbed open the door, my fingers frozen and stubborn.  A blast of heat and cigarette smoke hit me and I felt my chest close as I struggled in.  The driver flicked a glance at me and pulled out as I was slamming the door shut.  His face was pock marked, the pits thrown into stark relief by the dash lights.  The woman beside him twisted in her seat to grin at me.  Her hair was beautiful, shining smooth and falling in sheets like water on either side of her face.  She wasn’t pretty but that hair redeemed her. 

‘I’m Sally.  That’s Tom.  The baby is Alice.’

I looked at the child in the car seat beside me.  She was beautiful.  Something about her suggested her mother’s genes but she was lucky.  She was peaches and cream.  She smiled at me and I saw four perfect little teeth.  When I smiled at her, the child laughed and it turned into a cough.  The air felt yellow with smoke.    I turned back to the woman.

‘Jim.  Where you guys headed?’

‘Wherever the wind takes us, Jim.  You coming along for the ride?’

She reached out and put her hand on my wet knee.  I looked at it and then at her.  She laughed and I heard the child in it. 

‘Sure,’ I said.  I had nowhere to be and no-one to be there with.  Sally turned around in her seat and slapped the radio on.  The Doors filled the car, some shock jock’s idea of a funny joke after the news about the killer.  Tom’s eyes met mine in the mirror and I tried to smile to reassure him.  His eyes were narrow and hard blue in the light of passing cars.  Sally’s hand eased back between her seat and the door and scratched along the seam of my jeans.  She pinched me and took her hand back.  I saw the flare of her lighter in the windscreen. 

We travelled in the enforced silence of the music and the rain for enough miles to dry my clothes a little.  The child fell asleep, her soft mouth open, breathing her mother’s poison.  I watched her and I guess she put me to sleep because I woke under the orange lights of a diner parking lot.  Sally was looking in at me, the baby in her arms. 

‘You hungry?’

I nodded and unstuck myself from the seat.  Facing them across the splintering formica, I half listened to Sally talk and Tom eat.  I ate a sloppy burger and drank a soda.  In the harsh light, Sally’s face was ugly.  A rash of pimples tracked across her forehead and her skin looked thick.  Her mouth was large and mobile, twisting with each new story and emotion.  Tom only looked up once and he kept his eyes on the child.  His lips didn’t smile but the rest of his face softened. 

Back at the car, Tom got behind the wheel and Sally made me hold her bag while she put Alice in her seat.  She bent over to do it and pressed against me.  I didn’t move.  When she took the bag from me, she brushed her hand across the front of my jeans and smiled close to my face.  She smelled of meat. 

Half an hour down the road, she started to moan and clutch her stomach.  She writhed in the seat and cried out to Tom to stop the car.  He slewed it sideways and pulled up, his wheels close to a drop above a wash.  Sally threw herself out of the car.  He made no move to follow her.  I got out and found her at the back of the car, getting sick over the edge into the wash.  I took her hair back from her face and tightened my hand in it.  Even feeling as bad as she did, she recognised my intent.  She started to straighten up, but the knife was quicker.  Her skin looked thick, but it parted at the throat like butter.  I threw her into the wash.  It was too dark to see her blood colour the fast water. 

I tapped at Tom’s window and he put it down, the glass moving with exquisite slowness.  His cold blue eye beckoned the knife.  He screamed and the child screamed with him.  When Tom was silent, I watched the child.  She cried for a while and put herself to sleep with the tears.  I wiped the steel and touched the side of her face with it.  She stirred in her sleep and I cut a lock of her hair before she could wake. 

There was a cell phone in Sally’s bag.  I used it to call the emergency services for the child then threw it after its owner into the wash.  I walked on into the night and when it seemed safe, I put out my thumb again.

Love Remains

Friends, thank you for your best wishes and concern.  I'll post a little about the situation I'm in at the weekend once I know more.  

My great friend Kathryn asked for this type of story.    

Her muscles jerked and her eyes rolled.  In her dream, she ran from something.  Small sounds of distress escaped her, but she didn’t wake.  She was running through a field of long grass and the seeds were catching in her flying hair.  She tripped on a hidden rise in the soil and tumbled forward, thumping her breath out of her.  She twisted her head to look for her pursuer.  It fled towards her, huge, unmistakeable, rushing death. 

She woke and rolled her eyes to search the room.  She felt darkness at the sides of her vision and the room was monochrome, grey.  She closed her eyes and shook her head.  When she looked again, nothing had changed.  She raised her head and was assailed by a heavy wet blanket of scents.  She smelled mouth-watering steak, all mixed up with sweat and chemical perfumes.  She rubbed her nose hard, but the movement just wafted more smells into her face. 

She lay still, eyes closed, trying to breathe through her mouth.  She could hear voices, birds, cars, the wind.  A mouse moved inside the wall.  She was afraid to open her eyes. 

Then the voices changed and she could hear someone walking towards her.  A door opened and fresh air rushed in, bringing the scent of the outside and the unique smell of the person.  She took a deep breath.  Her heart began to thump faster and she felt a sizzle of adrenalin surge through her, making her feel weak and energised all at once.  She opened her eyes and stood up. 

The child at the door was the same grey as everything else in the room, but his smell was pink and warm.  She ran towards him, her movement strange but fluid.  The boy put his arms around her and she thought her heart would burst with love.  She kissed him, unable to express the strength of her love.  He laughed and pushed her away.  She followed him to the couch, happy to be in the wake of his lovely scent.  He flopped onto the cushions and turned on the TV. 

She sat beside him and looked down at herself.  She stiffened and a cry of distress escaped her.  The boy put his hand on her head and she felt the warmth of it sink into her and felt better. 

She didn’t know who she was before but she knew who she was now.  She lay down and put her head on her paws to think.

The new days went slowly until the boy came home and then rushed past in a haze of games and love.  She never left his side.  Thoughts came to her of a different life, where she spoke and wore clothes, worked and worried.  She still worried, but only about the boy.  She waited by the window until it was time for him to come home.  There was a woman who gave her food and talked to her during the day but she wasn’t the same as the boy.  

She grew used to her sensitive nose and ears and learned to see colours in the world through the way they smelled.  Then one day the boy came home, smelling different.  He was pink all over except for a yellow smell from inside him.  She yelped when she smelled it.  She almost forgot it when they were playing but when he got tired and sat down, she remembered again.  She tried to smell him all over but he told her to stop.  She had to wait until he was in bed and then she sniffed him carefully.  She found the yellow scent in his leg and raised her lip at it. 

As the weeks and months passed, she smelled the yellow sliding through him, slipping into his bones and sneaking its way around his body.  She wanted to tear at it, rip it out.  She growled at it once, but the woman shouted at her.  The woman’s scent had changed too and stank of fear, bitter and gritty. 

She woke up in the middle of the night with the howl in her throat before she was conscious enough to think.  It rose in the darkness of the room and made all the lights come on in the house.  The boy didn’t move and she began to bark to rouse him.  People pushed her out of the room and she sat in the hall, unable to stop little howls from trembling her lips. 

Other people came and she could smell more sweat and panic on the air.  She heard the boy say her name.  The door was opened and she ran to his side.  He put his hand on her head and she felt the terrible heat of it sink through her fur.  She bore it and when the hand slipped, she tried to push it back with her nose until she felt his sudden absence. 

She twisted her head and saw the pink of him around her.  She felt the same rush of love as always and wagged her tail.  The people started to cry, but she knew it would be okay.  She had his scent and she would find him when the time came. 

Roses, gathered for a vase,
In that chamber died apace,
Beam and breeze resigning.
This dog only, waited on,
Knowing that when light is gone
Love remains for shining.
 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 

Dedication

Time is a sneak thief, clever at stealing years.  You don’t notice and you don’t notice until one day you look at a face that you might have assumed would always be the same and suddenly see the difference that time has wrought.  This is a face that you have seen all your life from the years you don’t remember.  It is a face made small and crumpled by age and pain.  The once plump smooth skin is paper thin, the lips shrunken, the eyes deep.  But it is the same face in the wedding photograph, firm white teeth, warm brown eyes, radiance.  Time is the only difference.  It is impossible to believe that this same person is physically diminished by disease and flattened by damn time.  She is the same inside; the same child who took her shoes off walking to school in the forties, feet sticking to the melting tar in the hot summers.  She is the same girl who went to the movies on Sunday and couldn’t wait for her favourite magazines, the Oracle and Miracle to arrive.  She is the same young woman who went abroad and trained and fell in love with a man from her home town.  She is the same woman who gave everything she had to those she loved without a moment’s hesitation.  She is the same woman who would never start a row or continue one.  She is the woman who loved the way a mother loves; utterly and without condition. 

We have come to the moment where I am trying to give to her as she gave to me and I know I can only fall short, because she gave so much and so well.  While she is still here, I can tell her that I love her.  If there was power in words to heal, then I would dedicate all the words I know to that cause.  As it is, I dedicate this to her. 

I love you Mam.

Omega

She put the violin back into its cushioned case when he came into the room.  He was utterly normal, a man in his early thirties with an ordinary face, a shade towards good looking, ordinary hair and clothes.  But now, after the ceremony, she could see the blaze behind his eyes, could see little else.  She threw a fevered glance at the Stradivarius before turning fully to him, her head bowed. 

‘Look at me.’

She raised her head and met his gaze. 

‘Do you like your gift?’

Although she did, she couldn’t say so to him.  She had played the violin until her fingertips were ragged, despite years of training calluses.  She had played more sweetly than she ever could have before.  Before him.  But with him in front of her, the bargain suddenly seemed too real. 

‘That’s right,’ he said, though she hadn’t spoken.  ‘It’s real.  And now, to start, you can give me the first thing I asked you for.’

Her mouth opened without her volition and she said the name.  When he had asked for it first, she hadn’t thought of anyone, but over the many hours of holding the violin tucked under her chin, breathing the instrument’s breath of the ages, it had come to her, repeating, whispering.  The name of a good and decent man.  A man she was destroying with the act of speaking his name. 

When she was alone, she plucked the violin from its case and held it against her chest.  Marcus was next, but she wasn’t sorry.  Not yet.

*

Old Ethan finally let Leo lead him to a wash and the last bed.  He followed Leo with the peculiar hitch in his gait that made one of his shoes shuffle on the linoleum floor.  Step, slide, step, slide.  Leo was silent, not wanting the old fellow to get scared and leave.  After his bath, Ethan hurried under the covers, snatching his feet up as though afraid that something under the bed would grab his ankles.  Leo saw a few more into bed and checked Ethan before he left.  The old man’s breathing had deepened and settled into a muffled snore.  Leo checked the heating, closed the door and went across the street to his apartment. 

*

Marcus only wanted one thing.  Every day, when he looked in the mirror and saw his father’s face looking back, he longed for it.  He did his job and took care of his wife and family.  Life was pretty good.  He knew he should be happy, grateful even.  But when he saw the grey starting to wind through his hair and creases etch beside his eyes, he swore that he would give it all up for what he had lost.

As a young man, he had spent the summer at Venice Beach; a summer filled with parties and great girls.  He had plenty of money from his grandmother’s will and was tanned and fit and popular.  Most of all, he had felt like he would live forever.  All the rest of it came from that feeling. 

But time had soured everything.  He married one of the great girls and they had two great kids.  His job wasn’t too boring and he enjoyed the company of his friends.  Still his father’s face looked back at him from the mirror.  

So he made the wish and opened himself to what he wanted.  The dream flooded in and crushed reality.  He remembered a man and something about a deal, but he couldn’t focus on it. 

Instead, he looked down at himself and found the hard brown body that the surfboard and the sun had given him.  He looked into the mirror and saw the unfaded eyes and smooth skin of his nineteenth year. 

For a day, or a week, or a month, he enjoyed it.  The feeling of eternity burst upon him and he was young again. 

But it ended.  He found himself in front of the mirror again, the old eyes looking back at him.  He turned and saw the man who had given him what he had asked for, waiting for Marcus to fulfil his side of the bargain.  Smiling and waiting.  Marcus put his hands over his eyes but the other’s gaze burned away his resistance.  His son’s name came into his mind and he swept it aside, seeing the face of his son’s friend Jamie instead.  After the name was taken, everything else was.   

*

Leo finished his meal and read for a while at the table over his empty plate.  He glanced up sometimes at the cold beads of hail that touched the window. 

*

Jamie killed the last of his opponents and turned off the game.  He wanted a smoke before he put on something different.  He picked a good butt out of the ashtray and lit it, scorching the yellow tips of his fingers.  The weather was good and he could hear the little kids playing in the street.  His mother had stopped nagging him to go out.  She had pretty much stopped talking to him at all.  She spent most of her time at her job or volunteering at some shelter.  Jamie usually waited until she went to bed before going downstairs and eating leftovers straight from the fridge. 

He went to the window to look down on the outside kids.  Snowflakes of red fell from the butt and he brushed them away from his shirt.  When the man turned onto his street, Jamie saw him right away.  The little kids fell silent and still at the stranger’s approach.  When he passed them, they cried and ran home.   

The man reached Jamie’s house, opened the gate and walked into the yard.  He looked up, smiling, his eyebrows raised in question.  Jamie nodded.  He knew what he wanted.  Enough money to not have to do anything.  Easy.  And all he had to do in exchange was give a name and something that he didn’t believe in anyway.  He thought of some guy his mother used to talk about, when she still talked to him, some do-gooder at the shelter.  A nobody.

*

Leo tidied the bare apartment and carried his dishes to the kitchen where he washed his plate and cup.  As he was reaching into the cupboard, he felt the presence behind him and carefully put the plate down before turning.  He knew who the intruder was right away.  The tiny hairs all over his body stood up in the static between them.  The man smiled at him and spoke in a pleasant voice.

‘Someone mentioned your name to me, so I came.  Aren’t you going to offer me something?’

Leo reached to one side without taking his eyes off the man who had invaded his home.  He pressed the switch on the kettle. The intruder laughed, a real laugh, his head thrown back.  Leo saw his back teeth.  When he stopped, he let a little smile play about his lips. 

‘I don’t want coffee, Leo.  I want...’  He spread his arms wide and searched for a word. 

‘You want everything,’ Leo said.

The man pointed at him.

‘That’s it.  You got it.  I want everything.’  He turned his pointing finger towards the kettle.  The metal buckled and bubbled onto the counter top, forming a silver pool.  Leo looked away from it and saw the fire and the desire in the other’s eyes.

‘And you’ll give it to me, won’t you Leo?  Everything you have to give.  And you get whatever you’d like in return.  Everybody wins.’  The man shrugged, grinning. 

Leo turned his mind from the things he wanted, so that he couldn’t be read.  He put his hands by his sides and met the furnace blast of the other’s eyes. 

‘So what do you want, Leo?’

‘Nothing from you.’

‘Sure you do.  You just don’t know it yet.  But I can wait.  I’ve got all night.’  Tickled again, he laughed and walked out of the tiny kitchen into the main room.  Leo waited for a moment, but there was nowhere to go.  This had to be faced.  Every since he was a child, he had known that a moment like this would come; a moment of terrible temptation, a violent crossroads in the simple path he had always walked.  He stood for one last moment before the crossroads and then stepped forward. 

‘I’ve told you.  I don’t want anything you have to offer.’

The words swirled around him and he looked down.  His feet projected over the edge of a chasm and the darkness down there was moving.  He raised his gaze and worlds stretched ahead of him to the horizon.   The voice reached him from a long distance, but rang like crystal in his ears.

‘It’s a simple choice.  Everything or nothing.  Which is it to be?’

Leo shook his head.  ‘Nothing from you.’

The chasm disappeared and Leo sank into a chair.  The table before him was set with a sumptuous feast.  All his friends were there, smiling, eating, talking.  Beautiful girls poured wine and looked at him with dark eyes. 

‘No.’

The chair changed under him, turning to gold.  His clothes changed to robes in royal purple.  A vast court attended him.  The room had no end and the courtiers abasing themselves were a multitude.  Leo turned his face away from it and shook his head.  He felt the cold night on his cheeks and looked forward again. 

The street was before him.  An old man was shambling along, walking with that odd hitch.  As Leo watched, the old man was swept up by an unseen hand and dashed like a puppet against the wall of a building.  His blood cascaded onto the dirty sidewalk. 

‘I won’t hurt them if you give me what I want.’  The voice was reasonable and indifferent, a cool sales pitch. 
Leo felt a new pulse in him.  It beat at his temples and wrists until he thought he couldn’t bear it.  He stood up and the image in front of him disappeared.  His tormentor stood there instead, watching him with interest. 

‘You won’t hurt them because I won’t let you,’ Leo said.

The other laughed again and Leo tasted the bitter stench of it. 

‘You?  What can you do to me?’

Leo took a deep breath and looked to the picture of his father.  He knew what he was and what he was alive for, but for many years, that moment had seemed far away.  But now, the moment had come to him as it always did. 

He let his life drop like a coat to the floor.  Everything that he really was surged forward and he felt the tremendous power that was his birthright.  He was made of light.  The apartment filled up with it and the intruder cowered away from him, his face changing to show the corruption beneath the skin.  His back hunched, the son of the morning fled from the light to gather his armies about him. 

Leo stood still for a long moment, the Lion of Judah before his destiny.  Then He began. 

Evolution of a Story

'Where do you get your ideas' sometimes becomes 'where do you come up with this stuff' when the story is horror.  A few people have asked about my ideas, so I thought I'd break down the thought process behind one of the stories. 

Writing the novel taught me not to wait for the muse but just to write every day.  Writing the stories for the Page was habit forming though.  Now I get the feeling that I need to write a short story every second day.  If I can, I respond to it, although lately time and circumstances are preventing me from doing so. 

So, I get the feeling that I need to write a story.  I put my earphones in and open a new document.  It works one of two ways.  Sometimes, I write four or five questions to myself about what sort of story I want.  Do I want some sort of ghost or vampire?  If it's a ghost, how can I make it different?  What if it was....?  It usually only takes around five lines for the idea to materialise. 

But sometimes and often, I write a sentence, which leads me to another and another and then there's a story that I didn't plan and hadn't had an idea for, other than the tiny seed of that first sentence that comes from nowhere.  It's magical but it never happened when writing wasn't a part of my daily life.  The more I write, the more I write.  I love that. 

There are stories that form in a different way.  Tell Her was one of these.  I was busy and didn't have time to sit with the laptop on my knees on the sofa and write the story into being.  It's a freaky little tale and this is how it came about. 

I was standing outside, waiting for my mother's dog to finish her business.  It has been a very dark month and I never think of a torch.  I walk blindly, finding my way only from knowledge of the path.  I thought that if there was someone else in the dark night close to me, that a whisper in my ear would be a lot more frightening than a scream.  The following day, I was driving home from the hospital on my own.  For some reason, I thought of Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies, peeling a disc of skin from his body and saving it, although tempted to eat it.  I thought of someone eating their own skin.  This is obviously the part that makes me crazy.  Why would someone think that?!  Anyway, I thought of why someone would do it.  I thought behaviour like that might start in childhood. 

What would make a child's skin peel?  Sunburn.  How would a child have skin peeling from all over their body?  They were left too long outside.  What sort of mother would leave a child to be burned all over, so badly that, having recovered, the child would be shedding drifts of skin?  A bad one.  So the bad childhood came to me in the image of the kid being shut outside.  For a child to begin eating his own skin and for such aberant behaviour to go unnoticed and unhindered would require a disturbed child and an uncaring mother.  Could the behaviour become a sort of security blanket for the child?  When the peeling stopped, would he need to tear his own skin to continue?  Would this then become akin to self harm, when at least the pain could begin and end where he chose and where the skin would be bloody?  One thought led to another in a few moments, leaving me with a very disturbed character.  What would I do with this poor fellow?

I threw some more rocks at him.  I put him on the street and gave him another horrible experience in which he discovered he didn't have to use his own skin to satisfy his need.  A serial killer is born.  Remember that dark night waiting for the dog to finish?  He stands close behind a woman and whispers in her ear, before biting..

The stepping stones came to me in the car.  The journey takes half an hour.  I don't think it took that long for the story to evolve, but it took no longer.  I came home and wrote it down. 

Thank you for reading my stories.  I really hope that I can do this for the rest of my life.  I want to be published and make my living from my writing but I am already rich in magic and joy, irreplaceable treasures. 

Of the Night

She stepped out as he drove by, polished chestnut hair glinting red in the glowing pool of the street light.  His heart hitched and his foot slipped.  The car slowed and then jerked forward.  He saw her smiling in his rear view mirror and he stopped in the middle of the street.  She walked towards him, her hips moving in a familiar appeal.  His work brought him to the centre of the city, where the discarded rolled and came to rest.  He had seen hundreds of girls calling to him, walking with that hip-slung feline advertisement.  None of them had ever succeeded.  Word had spread and they had stopped trying.  He brought what he could, shared a joke and left.  If he was tempted he didn’t let them know.  He managed his temptation and his loneliness the way he managed everything else in his life.

But there she was, alabaster and bronze, coming to his window.  He lowered the window and she leaned down.  Her top gaped and he tried not to look.  She laughed softly and her breath and perfume were night scented flowers.  He looked up into her sculpted face and was lost.  She leaned in and kissed him, her soft lips pressing against his, her tongue teasing him.  It felt like his heart was flying out to meet her.  She broke the kiss and he watched her walk around the front of the car.  She got in beside him, put his arm around her shoulders and put the car in drive.  He drove, barely looking at the road.  Sometimes, she pointed to a turn and he took it.  The press and shape of her against him burned.  He drove until she told him to stop.  Her voice, in a whisper, made the hairs on his arms stand up. 

She got out of the car and he followed her.  There was grass under his feet and moonlight on her hair.  She turned to him and pulled her top over her head.  She was silk and stone under the white moon.  He stared, afraid to touch her until she took his hand.  After that, it was all about sensation and blind desire.  She wrapped him up and took him in.  If the night was cold, he didn’t feel it.  If the grass was rough and damp, he didn’t notice.  All he saw and touched and tasted was her.  At the end, it felt like the whole essence of him was drawn out.  He heard himself scream as a stranger, distant.  He buried his face in the haven between her hair and her throat and pressed a kiss there.  He felt her return the kiss on his own throat.  He dreamed of pain but didn’t feel any.  He dreamed of pleasure, of losing himself in her again, of turning her white skin red with his blood.  He dreamed of the night passing in sensation and was unable to name it as pleasure or pain.  He dreamed.  When he woke, the sun burned him and he sought the shade and darkness of a wood.  When at last the night came, he went back to the city, to the places and people he knew, bringing them what he could.