Lustfully Ever After (11 page)

“You!” he said.

“What the fuck?” said Gilchrist, staring at Vee in amazement. “Oh shit, are you having a fit? Do I call an ambulance? Don’t swallow your tongue! That’s all I know. Don’t swallow—”

“Give me my coat,” yelled Vee. I wanted to run but Vee had hold of me, arms around my thighs. “She’s got my coat!”

I fell to the ground, wriggled and kicked. “Get off, you’re hurting me!”

“Oh fuck,” said Gilchrist warily. “How do you do that? In that girly voice? Mate, you’re scaring me now. Ouch, ah! Who the—” Gilchrist frowned at Vee’s wild antics, eyes flitting in search of something.

“She’s invisible,” said Vee. “Get the coat off her, you’ll see.”

Gilchrist dropped to his knees, and I then had a seriously hot time as the two men grappled to undress me, their confused, eager hands flying all over my body, ebony and porcelain tugging at this, pressing on that. Before long, the coat was off and I was on the floor between them, visible, disheveled, and breathless, my dress torn, my arousal threatening to melt me.

Gilchrist stared. “Gina?”

“Well, don’t just kneel there,” I said. “Fuck me!”

“Lily!” he said, clearly relieved.

“Is it obvious?”

Gilchrist grinned. “I never forget a blowjob.”

“But I thought you thought I was—”

“Gina? As if,” he said. “Anyway, I can see it in your eyes, Lil. Your dirtiness twinkles.”

“Doesn’t it just,” agreed Vee.

“Now get on all fours,” said Gilchrist in a bossy tone that made me weak, “and show my new friend your skills.”

Gilchrist pumped his length, working himself back to stiffness, while Vee hurried out of his jeans. I swiveled on my hands and knees, ready to take both men, and take them hard. I wasn’t going to waste time pretending I wasn’t sure this was a good idea because at that moment I was hot and wet, and it seemed like the best idea in the world. Gilchrist flipped up my dress and yanked down my knickers. He circled his hand over one cheek while Vee presented himself for my mouth, his boner jerking up from a thatch of rich, copper curls. I tongued his tip and slurped on his end, squealing around him when Gilchrist landed a glancing blow across my butt.

My cheek juddered, a sting flowering to heat, growing hotter and hotter as Gilchrist continued with his eager, erratic spanking. “Great ass,” he said.

I slid my lips to the root of Vee, groaning in frustration as
Gilchrist ran a soothing hand over the pain he’d generated. Vee reached for my breasts, rolling their heaviness in his palms and gently squeezing my nipples. My desire to be fucked consumed me. I pushed back in search of Gilchrist, then had to stop myself because I didn’t want to lose contact with Vee. My poor body was torn in two, and they hadn’t even started on me yet.

I heard Gilchrist chuckle, amused by my torment. He continued to tease me, stroking my skin with those supple, slender hands. I’ve often thought how his hands are like those of an artist or pianist, and under his touch, I felt he was making something of me, transforming me from a mortal body into a shimmering Sistine Chapel or a glorious sonata. When he slid his fingers inside me, his other fingers on my clit, my consciousness became a mess of music and trippy, pulsating images. I was lost, wanting his cock, wanting to come, pleasure waltzing with sanity until I barely knew who I was.

Then, oh, he pulled away when I was on the brink and his cock nudged at my wetness, so firm and stout. I lifted my head from Vee, wanting space to gasp, but Vee drew me back. “Keep my dick in your mouth,” he warned, clutching my head.

As Vee surged past my lips, Gilchrist plunged into my depths, and I was strung between them both, on ecstasy’s edge. I reached for my clit, circled and rocked until I was coming over and over, my body buffeted by two guys as they thrust and froze, trying the keep their rhythms in synch as mine scattered into orbit.

With a gasp, Vee snatched himself from my mouth, jerked his fist along his length then offered himself to me. His come was light, swift and fluid. I drank willingly, happy to consume his bliss, and then tenderly he kissed the remnants from my lips. Gilchrist was a stayer. He didn’t come for a long old time, by which point I’d peaked again and so had Vee. I’d been turned this way and that; I’d taken one guy in my mouth while another
had feasted between my thighs; I’d straddled Vee and sucked Gee; I’d sucked Vee while he’d sucked Gee; I’d bobbed from cock to cock, and on and on we’d gone, relishing all the hot, sticky permutations available to us.

Together, we were like a new creation, working in harmony to take ourselves to dizzying new heights. I went to heaven and back, and so did they. We loved our own peaks, and we loved each other’s. In our easy, instinctive choreography of lust, there was a unity, trust, and understanding that transcended fucking. I felt we were a team, and we had a secret to cherish and nurture, far away from the world.

Afterward, we lay in a tangle on the green tiles, lips and fingers maintaining languid contact. When the smug glow of contentment began to fade, I said to Vee, only half-concerned, “You’d better not put this in the papers. I don’t want my dad thinking I’m a tramp. Although he probably does anyway. Who do you write for?”

“I don’t write for anyone,” he said. “I’m just a huge fan of yours, Lily. You’re beautiful, you’re funny, you seem—”

I sat up, alarmed. “Oh hell, I fucked a fan. Don’t stalk me, please. If you do—”

“No, I’m cool, I swear.” He reached to tweak a nipple, making me laugh. “I just wanted to…to talk to you. To say hi.”

I smiled down at him. “Hi.”

He grinned. “Do you come here often?”

Gilchrist guffawed, taking the filthier meaning.

“Every sodding night,” I said. “I’m like Persephone, forced to spend half my life in the underworld. It sucks. We’re famous for being famous. My sisters love all that crap, and so they’ve created this big mystery to make it seem like we’ve got something worth hiding and being famous for. But we haven’t. There’s nothing to us except people’s fascination.”

“I’m sorry,” Vee said guiltily.

I sank back into their loose embrace. “I’m sick of it,” I continued. “I’m going to pack it in soon. I want to go to college and do media studies. I’ll make a pair of shoes last a year, no repairs.”

“Oh god,” said Gilchrist, pressing a hand to his forehead. “What are we going to do about Gina?”

“Gina’s cool,” I said. “She’s hooked up with Leander. I think they’re a better match. And so are we. Don’t you reckon?”

Gilchrist laughed darkly. “I’ve always thought that.”

I slid my hand across his chest. The thud of his heart beat in my palm like something hatching in a dawn of new possibilities.

Vee sat up and shrugged. “Well, hey, this is all very nice but you know what they say. Two’s company and—”

“And three’s even better company,” I said, pulling him back down. “Twelve, however, is pushing it.”

The three of us fell into light, lazy conversation until Vee asked, “So what next?”

“Same again tomorrow?” suggested Gilchrist.

I laughed. “I’ll be fucked to pieces. But okay, I’m game. Let’s see how it goes, shall we? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

Somewhere in the distance, the stoned cloakroom attendant giggled.

“Save the last dance for me,” said Vee.

“And me,” said Gilchrist.

I reached out to caress them both. “And me.”

 

 

 

 

T
hey called the girl, Elisse, clever. Her fingers were the nimblest on the shuttle for seven villages round, the work of her loom without flaw. She won first prize each year at the fair, and the traders filled her father’s pockets for the scarves she painted with scenes of dappled leaves over the mill stream and hollow hills beneath towering oaks.

The miller complained all the same when he bought her a pair of spectacles that she might keep up her work.

“Can’t marry you off like this,” he lamented. “What man’ll have you looking like a hunchbacked crone?”

She said nothing. Only dipped her brush into blue paint and swirled it across the sky on her flaxen canvas.

And so the years passed and might have passed forever, until the trader came. He had heard of her work in a distant port, he said, and come seeking her art. He spoke their tongue strangely, and his clothes were quite fine, but she only nodded and asked what he would buy.

When he had made his selections from the rainbow piles of
scarves, haggled with her father, and finally disappeared into the dust raised by his wagon wheels, she thought no more of it. That is, until the leaves turned from green to flame and gold and overripe apples fell from laden branches. That was when the king’s summons came.

 

“How is it…,” demanded the king, “…that I have an artist of such skill in my land, but I must buy her goods from a foreigner’s cart?”

Elisse watched her father stutter and stammer and grovel before the throne, tongue-tied with fear. Then she stood straight, pushed her spectacles up, and met the king’s cold, green gaze.

“I thought my humble work too poor for Your Majesty’s taste,” she said. “The error is mine. Let me repay the royal household with what craft I can muster.”

The king looked at her for a long moment, and she saw that behind the lines of duty his face was yet young, his body still hard with muscle. His eyes, green as the forest, were bright as they appraised her faded dress, the plain scarf bundled around her straw-basket of hair.

“This is nonsense,” he replied at last. “Your work is the finest I have ever seen.”

“Yes, yes!” cried the miller. “The finest indeed. She is a true genius, Your Majesty. The best in the land. There is nothing of skill she cannot do.”

She watched the king’s jaw clench as he turned.

“Yes?” he said, and she prayed her father might hold his tongue, but the miller rattled on, as if once his words had begun to fall he could not stop them.

“And tell me,” interrupted the king. “Can she, this genius daughter of yours, better my own alchemists? Can her magical spindle transmute my straw into gold?”

“Aye. Even so,” crowed the miller.

In horror she stared at her father, in mute appeal she shook her head, but the king had already beckoned forward the guards.

“Well then. We shall see what she can do, this weaver of dreams,” he said softly. He turned to her once more as the guards seized her arms, and his words echoed in her head like thunder before rain.

“If you succeed, clever girl, I shall marry you and make you my queen. Your father shall want for nothing so long as he lives. Fail, and both of you shall die.”

 

Tears served nothing. She would not shed them. For a long time she watched the light cross the dungeon floor. Then she slept a while. If she would never see the waterwheel, the river, and the silent depths of the summer forest, she might at least dream them one last time.

Thus she saw him, for the first time, in the twilight land between slumber and consciousness. And he called her name.

“Wake, Elisse, and tell me why you seek my woods in such distress.”

She sat up and wiped her eyes before settling her spectacles on her nose. In the twilight gloom of the straw-packed dungeon, he knelt beside her, but she couldn’t see his face.

“Your woods? But I do not know you.”

“Yet often I have seen you. Sitting beside the waterwheel alone or picking flowers to braid your hair.”

She raised a hand to touch him and shivered at his cool skin, smooth like stone or the glossy underside of a leaf.

“Why are you here now when I wait upon my death?”

“Death?” he said, though his voice held no emotion, only curiosity at her plight.

“The king will kill me if I do not spin his straw into gold.”

At that he laughed, and she looked in terror at the iron-barred door, but no guard came to rattle it. He lifted a handful of the straw and blew the pieces from his palm.

“Is gold all he desires? Gold is a simple thing. Ugly and bright and the cause of many sorrows. But if it is what he craves, he may have it.”

Elisse scarce dared to breathe. It
must
be a dream, a desperate fantasy to lull her mind’s fear, yet she felt the heat of his body and smelled the scent of his skin, warm as summer-baked earth, light as a springtime morn.

“It will save my life,” she said at last, and his eyes shone in the half-light like a cat’s as he turned to her.

“But I require something in turn, Elisse.”

“Anything,” she said.

A moment later she thought it had been a very foolish thing to say. Such a promise to one of his ilk she might well regret, but there was only his price or else the executioner’s rope.

“What can I give you?” she asked, between lips as dry as straw as he pulled her to her feet. The rapid thud of her heart told her it had already guessed the answer, even if she herself remained ignorant.

“This,” he replied, and he touched her lower lip, then the hollow of her neck, and then her breast where his fingers lingered until her flesh responded to the weight and heat of his touch. She hadn’t known arousal before. If ever the thought came to her in an unguarded moment, if a breeze washed over her skin while she bathed, she transmuted the craving into pale colors in her mind. Held them away until she could pour them onto cloth or stitch them in fine, dyed thread.

He
gave her no such escape. His hand on her breast, he bent and covered her lips with his. She tried to breathe and found only his warm breath and his tongue, and when she thought her
legs might fail her from the shock and the lack of air, his hand gripped hard between her thighs, and she broke the kiss with a cry. Now indeed she must fall, but his hand and his arm gave her no room to sink into a maidenly faint.