Not like Ariel at all.
But in that moment, I could move again—I could feel—and my hands went instinctively to her sides. Shadowy, yes, but her skin was real and sweet against my hot sweat. Fire started in my blood, racing to my center. I rolled my hips under her, unthinking.
The first sound she’d ever made in almost two decades: a growl deep in her throat. Her tongue found mine and she arched her back again, the heat between her legs increasing, pushing at me, ravenous. She closed off the kiss yet stayed near enough that I could still feel the wetness of her lips on mine and said, “Is this what you wanted?”
Her voice echoed in my head, hollow and insubstantial. Goosebumps broke out all over me in spite of the summer heat.
Ariel breathed beside us, silent and sleeping.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered.
She slid her hand beneath my shirt, franticly. Her fingers searched the round underside of my right breast, then found my nipple. She pinched, and I rolled my hips again, biting back a groan. The soft t-shirt raked against my skin, against the newly hardened tip of my left breast, as I writhed. The sensations were fever-sharp, sending shots of heat and light downward, making me swell.
“You’re mine. You’ve always been mine. You’ll always be mine.” She crushed into my mouth again, squeezing with her thighs and fingers until my blood boiled. “But you’re all grown up now. So I’ll give you what you need, May.”
“But you are her—”
She moved lower, raked her tongue over my nipple, heedless of the shirt and still tweaking the other. Then she closed her lips around it, sucking, using her tongue until my shirt was as wet as my underwear, and I couldn’t stop myself from sighing out loud.
Ariel rolled over to face the wall.
The Other sat up slightly, pushed my shirt up so she could rest one palm flat on my belly. I rolled beneath her, begging, the heat in me overwhelming. “You are her.”
But I was trying to convince myself, not the Other.
She put her free hand between us, inside my underwear, and rubbed at me—not gently, but hard, demanding. I spread my legs, wanting her closer, harder, watching her shadowy elegant body writhe on top of me—the small round breasts that made my mouth water, the roll of her smooth hips, the tightening of her stomach.
The way she swallowed, the moonlight pouring through the window. The way she made me hers.
It happened at least every other night. The Other came, she told me I was hers, she fucked me so completely that it was all I could do not to scream and wake up Ariel. Fucked me so completely that when I looked at Ariel in the light, I felt almost nothing. Affection, but almost motherly, devoid of wanting.
It was a dream, though, all a dream, like my parents used to tell me. There was nothing at the foot of my bed, and shadows aren’t real. I’d done nothing wrong; I couldn’t help what my mind made up in the dark.
But Ariel knew, somehow. It was barely a month before she drifted away, and I didn’t try to keep her. The magic was gone, the thing that made us real together had been shattered. And there was nothing to tie me to the world out there—nothing like the thing that tied me to the bed at night, the thing that made me come alive.
And so it wasn’t her, it was me. It was always me, or maybe the Other, but she can’t help what she is, either. And it wasn’t the doctors here—wasn’t their fault I wouldn’t eat their food or take their medicine, my complete indifference to their white-painted walls and their beige carpet and lulling therapy. It’s not their fault my body is folding under the strain, or that all I can think of is darkness, sleep, her arms, her hands, her thighs, her cunt. If I wanted to give up Ariel for it, the only person I ever recognized, what makes them think I don’t want to give up myself?
She tells me it’s not giving up. That I’ll always have what I want from her. That death is just the beginning, when you belong to someone, to something like her.
I’ve loved her forever—since I was five-years-old. Of course I believe.
THE LIBIDONOMICON
Gregory L. Norris
Rain lashed the house. The thick, clotted drops clung to the outside of the misted-over attic windows, reminding Barry of sweat. Adding to the image was the attic’s smell, a heady blend of old books, musty air, and the occasional ripple of a man’s cologne, drifting up from one of the boxes or trunks entombed within the eaves untold decades earlier in the New Englander’s mysterious past. The muggy weather mixed it all together into a carnal, narcotic scent.
Barry had discovered the collection of grimoires inside a steamer trunk that had also boxed in a peculiar smell. Unlike the usual aroma of old paperbacks, library books, and yard sale finds, these exuded an odor of perspiration and sin. One in particular, a leather-bound volume with a mottled gray-pink hide, felt oily to the touch.
Five of the books were traditional hardcovers, at least in outward appearance, though written in languages he didn’t recognize. One, its indigo cover decorated in a spiral pattern of gold leaf, looked German. Barry had taken two years of German language in high school. Though some of the writing sparked familiarity, he couldn’t translate a full sentence despite retaining a decent amount of words and phrases. Another was filled with sexual pictographs and hieroglyphs.
The leather bound book, wrapped in a square of exquisite silk, held its secrets from Barry’s prying gaze. Age and isolation had conjured a waxy, pale pink resin from within, gluing the pages together. To force them apart would likely damage the book beyond repair. Barry sensed it was valuable; the most-valuable of the thirteen books in the trunk. It had to be. Simply touching its pallid, gray-pink cover sent equal parts excitement and revulsion through his blood, the latter leaving his stomach feeling like it had taken a punch while the former made his cock swell.
For the second time that rainy afternoon since entering the attic, Barry fumbled his loose-fit jogging shorts aside. His balls spilled out, hanging full and heavy between his spread legs. Bracing an eave with his spine, he worked his cock free. At twenty-eight, he hadn’t suffered such demanding erections in a decade. Since finding the books, he felt eighteen again and knew that with just a little extra effort, all he needed to do to get his cock sucked was to lean down, extend his tongue, and both of his heads would meet, an act both selfish and sacred.
Barry cast a furtive glance toward the book filled with hieroglyphs, opened to a page that showed a trio of rudimentary human figures, all male if the swollen genitals jutting between their legs were an indication. The three formed more of a triangle than a circle, the traditional geometry for an oral chain. Mouths were aimed at dicks. At the center of the human triangle, a giant inhuman eyeball sat open, observing. Barry wasn’t sure why this particular image made his flesh sweat and his cock leak. Memories of his one and only threesome to date, held in the woods behind his uncle’s house so very long ago, rose fresh in his thoughts.
Barry sighed. The warm breath teased the sensitive flesh of his cock, now so close he could take it between his lips. And he did. Mouth met tip. While one half of his body moved lower, the other wiggled higher. The head of his cock and an inch or so of steely shaft pulsed over Barry’s tongue. Only in his mind, it wasn’t his but one of the dicks from the woods. He’d gone down on himself regularly since finding the terrible, wonderful books.
Barry sucked and tasted his pre-cum, salty and bitter at the edges. Smelling the musty sweat of his pubic thatch and balls lit his skin on fire. The sweat… the attic was doused in perspiration and haunted by the ghosts of past sex. The kind of sex that had few, if any, boundaries. Sex that had teeth.
For a startling instant, the vision became strikingly real: him, David, and Jamie, naked on that tatty old army blanket someone had left in the woods, all of them high on the hot summer stink of their male bodies. There’d been many configurations on that long ago afternoon, though none spent in the wicked triangular pose that promised such intense pleasure. Between suckles on his cock, Jamie spoke in a garbled foreign language.
The itch in Barry’s cock doubled and then, without warning, his balls tightened, unloading the first blast of come across his tongue. Barry swallowed, struggling to keep up. One large shot slipped free of his lips and fell between the rafters, fresh ejaculation added to all the now-stale loads deposited there in decades past.
