It Sleeps in Me (11 page)
Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear
Just as the stunning intensity began to lessen, he whispered, “Forgive me. I can’t hold back any longer,” and the curtain of his hair trembled around her while he groaned against her throat. Sora worked to wring the last instants of pleasure from his body.
Finally, they lay side by side, staring up into the falling rain. The
drops tumbled as they fell, flashing and winking like gray veils dropped by the Star People.
drops tumbled as they fell, flashing and winking like gray veils dropped by the Star People.
He lightly stroked her hair. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Dear gods, I don’t understand this, but I feel as though I just loved my husband. That’s all.”
It did not matter that he was no longer her husband—that, in fact, her husband was probably looking for her at this very moment, wondering where she’d gone.
“And I loved my wife.” He rolled over, took her breasts in his hands, and began kissing them. “Tell me the truth. When we were joined, were you dreaming about me or Skinner?”
The words sent a shiver through her. “What are you talking about?”
“I know you wanted him at one time. I saw the way the two of you used to look at each other when you didn’t think I’d notice.”
The incongruity stuck her as bizarre. This could be Skinner, testing her, trying to find out if she really wanted him.
She said, “I was dreaming about you.”
“Are you lying to me?”
He smoothed the raindrops from her neck, and his fingers stretched two-thirds of the way around her throat. His fingers tightened, pretending to strangle her. They had often done that while loving each other. It was an erotic game. When she neared climax, he would cut off her air, and then, when it was his turn, she would cut off his; it intensified their pleasure enormously.
“Why would I lie to you?”
“Because you’re worried about him. I can tell by the way you say his name.”
“Yes, of course I am. If I could just speak with him for a few moments, I—”
“No.” As he tucked his hair behind his ear, the damp ends pulled across her chest; they felt silken and cool. He had a faraway look in his eyes.
“Why not?”
Ominously, he said, “He loves you, too, Sora. He’s dreamed of coupling with you for eighteen winters. If he can get rid of me, he’ll have you to himself.”
That strained tone that signaled poorly concealed jealousy made her sit up.
“You told me Skinner didn’t mind carrying your soul.”
“He didn’t at first; then he started screaming and wouldn’t stop.”
Sora stared at him. “When did this happen?”
“When I saw you on the chunkey field.”
Almost too terrified to ask, she said, “Was he screaming in fear?”
“Rage. I think.”
He flexed his fingers, then reached inside her open dress front to caress her breast. “Let’s go where people can’t possibly hear us, Sora. What about the cove near the shell midden?”
“No, I have to get back.”
For several heartbeats, he ignored her to suck her breast. To her disbelief, she felt herself responding again. His mouth was warm, his lips soft. When he lowered his hand and tucked two fingers inside her, she said, “Please, Flint, I have duties.”
“You’re not going to run away with me, are you? You’d rather stay with that feeble old man.”
His fingers probed deeper.
“Don’t ask me. Not yet.”
He kissed her while his fingers moved in long and languid strokes, as though he was petting an animal’s soft fur.
“I’m sorry. I know it’s too soon.”
He lifted his head, and a strange light entered his eyes. After more than a decade of watching him, she had learned to recognize that light. She had to leave. Now. Or he wouldn’t let her go.
To calm him, she said, “You asked if I still loved you.”
“Yes,” he softly answered, and tucked a third finger inside her. His rhythm changed; he used short stabs to strike fire along her nerves.
When her body began to quiver, she arched against his hand. “I long for you nearly every moment of my life. I do still love you.”
He gripped her shoulder with one hand to hold her in place, and drove his other hand into her like he was repeatedly ramming a stiletto into the body of an enemy warrior.
How could I have forgotten this?
Every part of her body flamed. She half sat up, gripped his hand, and forced it deeper. She felt nothing else. Saw nothing else. The ragged cry that burst from her lips rang through the forest.
“
Shh!
” he urged, and quickly covered her mouth with his own.
Shh!
” he urged, and quickly covered her mouth with his own.
She fell back to the ground, panting, staring wide-eyed into his handsome, knowing face. His fingers continued to move inside her until she stopped shuddering.
Then he removed them, cleaned them in the damp grass, and smiled.
“Are your souls completely here now, Sora?”
Panting, she said, “Yes, and I—I must leave.” She rose unsteadily to her feet. “I have to get back to town.”
He picked up her cape. As he draped it around her shoulders, he whispered in her ear, “I’ll be waiting for you tonight. Midnight. At the eastern end of the bluff.”
“I don’t think I can meet you. Not tonight.”
“Nonetheless, I’ll be there.”
She backed up the trail.
When he made no attempt to follow her, she turned and walked away, but every time her sandal landed, she listened to see if he was behind her, stalking her—as he had the last few moons they were married.
She walked briskly past Wink’s mound and across the plaza toward the stairs that led up the face of her own mound. Rain had drenched Blackbird Town. Even the slaves had retreated inside. Puddles filled every low spot, shimmering like hundreds of wide-open eyes.
She rounded the corner of her mound and stopped.
Old Teal sat on the bottom step. He’d been sitting there for some time. The rain sheeting from his hat and cape had created a glistening ring around his body. He stared at her with naked understanding.
“Teal,” she greeted as she walked forward. “What are you doing here? Did you need to speak with me?”
He tipped his skeletal face up, but for a long time, he didn’t speak. His white-filmed eyes looked opaque. Finally, he said, “I thought perhaps you needed to speak with me.”
“Why would I need to speak with you?”
He rose to his feet and adjusted his rain hat to shield the back of his neck. As he propped his walking stick, he said, “You’ve already started calling him Flint, haven’t you?”
She could barely manage to breathe. “Who?”
Teal peered directly into her pupils, as though searching for something. “So far, you’re alone in there, but you won’t be for long, Chieftess. I can already see the nest he’s making for himself.”
“What nest?”
“It will happen in an instant. You’ll barely have time to realize you’ve said yes. You’ll be talking with him, feeling happy for the first time in moons, and somewhere inside you, you will wish you could feel this way forever. You may not have intended to grant him permission, but in less time than it takes you to blink, he will seep inside you.”
She just stood there staring at him, unable to speak.
Teal pointed a bony finger at her heart. “There are ways to keep him out. If you decide that you want to fight him, come to me. You don’t know it yet, but I am the last friend you have in the world.”
He walked away into the mist like a ghostly wraith.
SORA RUSHED DOWN THE HALL TO HER BEDCHAMBER, UNTYING the copper Birdman pendant as she went. When she ducked beneath the door curtain into the firelit stillness, the pendant rested in her palm. Beautiful, the forked eyes flashed as she carried it across the room to her personal basket.
A yellow dress with blue diamonds woven around the collar rested on top of the basket. She pulled it out and tucked the pendant into the folds of a pale purple dress.
“What’s
wrong
with me?”
wrong
with me?”
She tugged her soiled dress over her head and threw it at the floor.
Blessed gods, I just betrayed my husband.
If her clan ever found out, they would remove her as high chieftess and order her never to set foot in a Black Falcon village again. She would lose everything—yet she didn’t care. Her body lingered in euphoria, and she knew if he ducked beneath the curtain right now, she would lie down with him in the very bed she shared with Rockfish.
As she slipped the clean yellow dress over her head, she looked
around the bedchamber. Two copper-covered wooden celts, ceremonial clubs, hung side by side over their hide-covered sleeping bench. Symbols of office, they had belonged to her mother.
around the bedchamber. Two copper-covered wooden celts, ceremonial clubs, hung side by side over their hide-covered sleeping bench. Symbols of office, they had belonged to her mother.
Chieftess Yellow Cypress had detested Flint, but she’d finally given in to Sora’s pleading and conferred with Flint’s mother—a common weaver—to arrange their marriage. Perhaps believing that Sora would get over him, or get bored with him, her mother had ensured that the marriage preparations lasted six moons.
“Six moons of quivering,” she whispered to herself.
It was customary to wrap the young couple in a blanket every morning before the instructions began, symbolically joining them, but Flint had taken advantage of the cover to sneak his hand beneath her dress. While they listened to the sacred words of the elders, he had stroked her. He always seemed to know when she was on the verge, because he’d slip a finger inside her to feel her muscles twitching, then deeply probe her until she finished. How they got away with it, she never knew.
As a smile curled her lips, she suddenly felt sick, as sick as she had right after Flint divorced her and she’d been consumed by these same memories.
Sora knelt before their sleeping bench and pulled out the wooden box where she kept her ritual jewelry. A large circular rattlesnake gorget stared up at her with one huge eye. Carved from a conch shell, the stylized serpent coiled back and forth, forming spirals around its central eye. “Brilliant lookers,” they were called, because their bright unblinking eyes had the power to kill. Priests coiled enormous spiritual snakes around the houses of sick people to keep Raven Mockers and evil Spirits away, leaving only a narrow space between the head and tail for relatives to enter and exit. They used rattlesnake fangs to mark the spots where they would place their buffalo-horn sucking tubes to suck out magical amulets shot into the bodies of the sick people by witches.
Teal had given her this gorget a moon after Flint left.
“Wear this.
”
”
“Why?”
“It will protect you from his witchery.”
“You think he’s a witch?”
“A very Powerful one.”
He’d slipped the necklace over her head and ordered her never to take it off.
But when her mother died, she’d put away the rattlesnake gorget and began wearing elaborate copper breastplates that befitted her new status as high chieftess of the Black Falcon Nation.
Smoothing her fingers over the cool conch shell, she wondered if she should have obeyed Teal and never taken it off.
She tied the necklace around her throat and turned to—
Rockfish stood in the doorway behind her, holding the curtain aside. Raindrops glinted in his gray hair. Shocked to see him, she sucked in a breath.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I frighten you?”
“Yes. A little.”
He stepped into the chamber and let the curtain fall closed behind him. “I was hoping to speak with you for a few moments.”
A curious expression lined his elderly face, and for one stunning moment she feared someone might have seen her and Skinner in the forest and told him.
“Of course.”
She went to sit on a mat before the fire. Instead of sitting beside her, as he always did, he crouched on the opposite side. The wrinkles around his mouth deepened.
“Sora, I’ve made my decision.” He glanced up at her from beneath stubby lashes.
“What decision?” she asked, confused.
“You told me I had your permission to go home to my people to try to pull together a raiding party to go after the jade.”
“You’re going?”
“Yes. I’ve spoken with Wink about it, and she told me that if you did not object, she didn’t either.”
After their conversation earlier, Wink probably thought it was Sora’s way of getting her husband out of town while she dallied with Skinner. No wonder she hadn’t put up a fuss. She was trying to “protect” Sora, just as she’d promised to.
“I’m going to leave today, if you don’t need me for more pressing concerns.”
A hollow ache spread through her chest. She’d been so stupid to tell him he could go. Those few careless words might cost the Black Falcon Nation dearly.
Trying to sound calm, she asked, “When will you return?”
“Three days, maybe less. I’m taking four men with me. We’ll alternate, paddling day and night.”
Neither of them spoke for a time.
Finally, she said, “Give Chief Tenkiller my fond regards and return as quickly as you can. I’ll miss you, my husband.”
Surprised by the affection in her voice, he hurried around the fire to embrace her. As he kissed her hair, he said, “I’m doing this for our good, Sora. I swear it. You’ll see.”
Tenkiller is a wise leader. Surely he will say no to this insanity.
She patted his wrinkled hand. “I know you wouldn’t do anything to harm me, or my people. I just wish we agreed on this matter, but since we don’t”—she gestured her frustration—“do what you must and come home.”
Relief slackened his face. “I’ll pack my things and go now. That way I’ll be home sooner.”
As he rushed around their bedchamber, stuffing things into his pack, he periodically turned to smile at her, and a weightless sensation filled her—as though she were not quite in the chamber. Her souls had drifted out to the forest, and she could feel Flint thrusting inside her.
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