Chapter 58

I’m inside her then, feeling the aftershocks of her climax. She clenches her muscles tight around me and I shiver. “Yes,” I say, “yes, like that, darling.” I’m driving in deep, deeper, lifting her leg onto my shoulder. Hard and fast now, as I’ve been needing, harder and faster, and she’s moaning with each thrust. I wrap my hands in her hair, violating that softness, seeking firmer purchase, a tighter hold, pulling hard: Mine

My balls are drawing up, tightening, I’m nearly there. Sweat burns my eyes and I wipe at my face impatiently. My fingers bump into something hard against my temple, but I’m too close to—

Fzzzzzzzzzzzt. Static.

“Ow, shit!” Cassie pulled the player from her head with a few more choice curses.

Next to her, Rich was still going, breathing hard, but a few seconds later, he opened his eyes. “Damn, that was—What’s wrong, babe?”

Cassie held up the chip. “Looks like you knocked your recorder loose right at the end, there. It dropped to static.”

Rich winced. “I’m sorry, hon.”

“And I—well, you—were just about to come.”

“Oh, geez. Headstatic andyou didn’t get to the climax?”

“Nope.”

Rich wrapped an arm around Cassie and pulled her onto his lap. “You know what that means,” he said with a mock-rueful sigh. “We’ll just have to record again.”The Woman with the Blue Tattoo by Elizabeth L. Brooks

The first time Silas dreamed of the woman with the blue tattoo, he was only a child of five. His family had just moved, and the new house was full of creaks and groans and shadows and things that moved inthe shadows. Silas was frightened, but Mama had reminded him that he was a big boy now, and that she and Daddy were very close by. He had finally, reluctantly, laid his head on the pillow, unable to articulate the sense of emptiness and loneliness that was far worse than the unfamiliarity of the new house.

But then he’d dreamed of the woman with the blue tattoo. She seemed an old friend, though he could not recall her name, and he’d been profoundly relieved to find someone he knew, something to cling to.

She visited sparingly through his childhood. The next dream that he could remember was when he was eight, and then another when he was ten. Again at eleven, but then not again until he was nearly fourteen.

At fifteen, his voice cracked and then plummeted like the first drop of a roller coaster, signaling the beginning of the exhilarating and terrifying ride that was puberty. The woman with the blue tattoo came to him twice that year. The second time, Silas was dreaming of fondling Jessica Langton’s breasts and when he looked up, the woman with the blue tattoo was nearby, watching him with an amused smile. He startled awake; the sheets were soaked with sweat and tangled around his unwieldy limbs, doing little to cover a painfully hard erection.

(Three months later, Amy Potter let him fondle herbreasts behind the bleachers at a basketball game, and he suddenly knew what the woman with the blue tattoo had been so amused by—his inexperienced imagination had been entirely unequal to the task of such a lush sensation.)

After that, the woman with the blue tattoo visited his dreams much more often. Silas never learned her name. Her appearance was fluid as well—she was tall or she was short; she had long, black hair or short, curly brown hair; her skin was pale or dark or in-between; she was thin and athletic or lushly heavy. The tattoo was just as changeable, both in shape and location: it was a bluebird on her wrist; it was a Celtic knot at the base of her neck; it was a dragon that spiraled up her leg; it was a tribal design on her hip.

But Silas always knew her, always recognized her. And though the dreams themselves were rarely erotic in content, he always woke with his cock throbbing and his balls already bunching up, only a few jerky strokes from coming.

He was twenty-three the first time he saw her in real life. He was climbing onto a busy subway train, headed downtown for his first big job interview. He pushed through the indifferent morning crowds smelling of coffee and powdered sugar and toothpaste. The doors closed and the train lurched and he turned to grab at a pole and just in that instant—for less than a heartbeat—he smelled honeysuckle and wild roses and the sultry air of the deep South.

He looked up and there she was, standing on the platform outside, and she might have been anyone, any woman he’d passed on the street or in the station that morning, but there was a tendril of blue ink snaking up the side of her neck from somewhere inside her blouse and her eyes were fixed, focused through the scratched and filmy glass of the train window, unerringly—on him

He leapt off the train at the next station and, too impatient to wait for the returning train ran back, ten blocks at top speed, but of course she was gone. He prowled the platform, sniffing the air and touching the turnstiles and even the ground, desperate for that gentle whiff of warm air, until a security guard came out to ask him to please move along, sir, you’re making folks a bit nervous.