A Fine Cast of Characters - J. Dane Tyler [54]
I pressed her wrists into the mattress, but her strong legs locked around me. I yanked with all my strength, snapping her up from the bed, and snatched her hair in one fist. I ripped her head back, she scratched and pounded at my chest with her free hand, eyes wild and wide, teeth gritted. I pulled harder and her back arched. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Now!” she panted, “Now! Take me now!”
I seized her breast in my mouth, with teeth and lips and tongue, and she gasped, almost a scream. We joined again, with a new rhythm, a new force driving us. Anger, frustration, fury.
Afterward, she lay on my chest, her arm across me and mine draped over her. The raging fire before made the tenderness more intense.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“I don’t know what happened with me either. I’m sorry too.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
It was strange. The words felt natural, as if spoken daily for years, the way elderly couples say them in their fifth decade together. It was unrehearsed, and I don’t remember ever saying them before, but they flowed from me.
She stroked my chest and abdomen with in silence for a moment. “The kelp bed.”
I looked down at her head. “What?”
“The kelp bed. You asked where I spend my days. The kelp bed.”
“In the cove?”
She nodded.
“What are you doing there?”
“Just ... waiting.”
“Waiting?”
“For you.”
I said nothing. It was strange to me. Very strange. But if she wanted to spend her days swimming out to the kelp bed and make me her sexual plaything at night, she would get no argument from me.
Time rolled by like ocean swells under a trawler. We rose and fell with it, finding heights of joy and passion, and depths of anger and vehemence. She became more volatile night after night. Our fights became more frequent, more physical, more intense. They ended in increasingly passionate and physical sex. I drove into her from behind. She swore at me over her shoulder during her climax, and I slapped her buttocks red and tender during mine. We rolled over face to face. She hammered my chest with the side of her fist and left bruises, and I grabbed her arms and wrists until she cried out, pinned her like a trapped animal and tore locks from her scalp in my wrath. And the orgasms were stronger every time, and I don’t know how that was possible.
But when I awoke in the night I’d find her weeping instead of staring. Her eyes glowed an eerie, aquamarine-amber hue, and tears streamed from them, like an angel crying over the sorrows of the world. I would hold her, and almost became used to the clammy damp flesh until it warmed. I knew better than to speak. It would only spark another outrage. Instead, I held her and she sobbed harsh and racking into my shoulder. She was inconsolable. I didn’t try. I simply held on.
The moon shrank and she seemed so upset by it. I couldn’t understand.
That morning I tried not to wake her. The sun was coming, as she’d say, but it hadn’t arrived yet. I dressed in the bathroom and went to steal a kiss from her. As I stepped near the bed, a shallow splash startled me.
I waded into a puddle.
As deep as my shoe sole, it spread across the floorboards under the bed. A steady rivulet trailed from the sopping sheet dangling over the mattress. Her limp hand dripped into the puddle with a blip, blip, blip sound. Something lay over the pillow and in her hair, a wide, oily black-green band. She lay on her stomach on the sodden mattress, her breasts welled out beneath her weight, face turned away from me. Her flesh had that sickly gray-blue pallor, a stench wafted from her like rotting fish, dirty salt water, putrid, gagging, and something stuck out near her ear, like a feeler or tentacle and I didn’t see which, didn’t care which, didn’t want to know. I ran, ran down the stairs and crashed through the front door and vomited