The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [106]
Visions burned behind her closed eyelids. Visions of her teeth closing and snapping neatly and effortlessly through his column of flesh, the donkey at last catching the carrot of future time, biting him off and swallowing him and retaining him forever. Visions of her mouth clamped to his emasculated form, greedily and endlessly sucking, sucking blood and liquefied bone through the hole where his cock had been, sucking him inside out until every atom of his being had vanished down her throat to fill her bottomless vacuum.
I am the succubus, thief of souls—
She brought him skillfully to climax, gulped down his soul as it spurted into her mouth. His orgasms were never shattering when she took him in this fashion. They were pure and perfect but unlike his waking climaxes, they involved no part of his mind and little of his body, just its specifically sexual apparatus. He had never awakened at such moments and he did not do so now. He moaned in his sleep as he came and the sound vibrated magically in her ears. But the moan was quickly over and he returned to a sleep as deep as he had been in previously.
She uncurled and lay once more on her back, eyes closed now, mind more nearly at peace. She gave herself up to the taste of his seed, of his soul, the taste of him in her mouth and in her throat. At certain times—this was one of them—she even fancied she could taste him in her belly. His cells, his soul, deep within her.
She did this every night. Took him in sleep and j the soul from him. He had never caught her at it and she had never told him of it afterward. It was, she felt, a perfect unspoken bargain. Every night he stole her sleep and every night she retaliated with the theft of his manhood, his essence. His essential soul.
Now she began to feel herself relaxing, felt her body and brain finding the way to let go. It would not be a complete letting go, of course. That much she knew. Bui it would be a descent into a realm where dreams soon thoroughly overcame reality than in her waking hours. She lay still, eyes closed, hands folded on her stomach, and let herself float on the tide.
FIFTEEN
When the phone rang, Olive answered it. She said, “Just a moment,” and motioned to Linda.
It was Hugh. She listened to him for a few moments. Then she said, “No, don’t be silly. It’s perfectly all right. I understand. No, it’s more important. I think you should stick with it… . Are you sure? Well, all right, but feel free to change your mind.”
She cradled the phone. “There goes dinner,” she said.
“The book takes precedence?”
She nodded. “But he’s definitely going to break by nine o’clock and he’ll pick me up then. In the meantime it’s going well, and he wants to stay with it.”
“What if it’s still going well at nine o’clock?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell him. To stay with it as long as he wants, but he insisted he’ll be done by nine one way or the other. And he will, because he told me to wait outside my building for him and he wouldn’t stand me up. Not after postponing it once already.”
“Unless he just gets so absorbed—”
“No, he’ll be there.”
Olive regarded her quizzically. “You don’t seem furious.”
“Why should I be furious?”
“I don’t guess you should, but not all women have your sort of cool and logical mind. You don’t mind playing second fiddle to a book?”
“No. At least I don’t think I do.”
“Hmmmm.”
“What does that mean, Mrs. McIntyre, ma’am?”
“Just ‘hmmmm.’”
“I heard the word well enough. I was curious about the punctuation. Is that ‘hmmmm’ with a question mark or ‘hmmmm’ with an exclamation point?”
“With a period. No. With three dots.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I have the feeling you’re waiting for me to pry, Linda, but I’m not entirely certain.”
“Neither am I.”
“Where was he planning to take you to dinner?