Evan looked up from shoveling a mouthful of curried rice into his mouth and gave his wife a quizzical look. They"d been having a quiet dinner at Ocean Thaid, their favorite restaurant, and Sarah had been quiet up to now. She"d been picking at her pad prik instead of attacking it.
"I know you can"t take a lot of time off right now, but maybe if we took a short vacation, even just a long weekend..."
His first thought was not for Sarah, or about the difficulty of asking Darren for time off right now, when he was on the boss"s s.h.i.t list and it was their busiest port time of the year. No, Evan"s first thought was that if they went away, he wouldn"t be able to spend his nights with Ligeia. a.s.s, he mentally kicked himself.
"We might be able to figure something out," he said aloud. "Did you have someplace in mind?"
Sarah shrugged. "Not really. I"m just feeling so...I don"t know the word...trapped? Like, we"re running the same maze over and over every day, and there is no exit."
"Very Sartre of you."
"You"ve been hanging out with Bill too much."
He grinned and took another bite as he thought a moment. "We could take a long weekend in San Francisco if you just want to get away," he finally suggested. "Or maybe spend a couple days in Napa?"
Her face brightened. "Napa would be good. I want to get away from water."
Evan felt his own smile diminish.
"We don"t have to," Sarah said, recognizing that something about the idea didn"t set well with him. "But I thought you"d like to get away from the ocean a bit too. It"s like we"re on a bad cycle and can"t stop."
Evan nodded. "You"re right. I"ll talk to Darren about it tomorrow. Maybe we can even go this weekend."
Sarah suddenly started eating her noodles with visible relish. "Thanks," she said. Her eyes sparkled in the warm low light. "I really need this."
Their conversation turned to other things, but for the first time in weeks, it seemed they were actually having conversation, and Evan realized how much he"d been neglecting her. He really did need to get her out of Delilah, away from the constant reminders of Josh. Guilt at the reason he was reticent to go caught in his throat like a golf ball, but he fought it away.
Across the table, Sarah was still talking, and he forced himself away from thoughts of Ligeia stretched out naked in front of him on the beach to pay attention. It was a difficult thing to stop thinking of her, and last night she had not appeared when he"d gone to the beach. He"d stayed there for over an hour, the panic slowly growing that he might never see her again before he returned home, disconsolate, to spend a restless night next to his snoring wife.
"...they said it was the first wreck on those rocks in more than eight years," Sarah said. She stopped, looking at him expectantly.
Evan shook his head in agreement, wondering what the question was he"d missed. "Yeah, it"s been a long time since they had a point accident. Ships these days have plenty of technology to make sure they don"t rip up their hulls on reefs."
"So what did these guys do wrong?"
"Asleep at the wheel," he said. In his mind he saw Ligeia standing naked on the top of the point, b.r.e.a.s.t.s jutting out in the dark like beacons of l.u.s.t. A human lighthouse of doom.
"I"d guess they were just distracted," he concluded. "They just weren"t paying attention to where they were going."
After dinner, Sarah took Evan"s hand and led him away from the car. The night was warm, a humid night breeze ruffled the short sleeve of her shirt as she walked. Evan felt a return of his love for her, and longed to hold her, just hold her there under the stars. As it turned out, that was her intent too. She led him off Center Street to the small park in the middle of town. A bronze statue of a fishing boat and Delilah"s first founding captain dominated the small square, and Sarah pulled Evan under the canopy of a tree and put her arms around his neck.
"I"ve missed you," she whispered.
He frowned. "I"ve been here."
"Not really," she said. "This last week or two...it"s like you"ve been somewhere else half the time. And honestly...we both have been gone for a long time."
He couldn"t disagree with that, and didn"t have to, as Sarah kissed him. She pressed against him suggestively, and then with a wink offered, "Take me home?"
The answering machine light was blinking red when they walked back into the kitchen. Evan started across the dark floor to answer it, but Sarah grabbed his hand.
"It"ll wait," she whispered, turning him to face her. Then she pulled her shirt over her head and smiled. "I won"t."
Evan laughed and doffed his own shirt before pulling her tight to him. Then with a deft, long-practiced hand he released her bra. "Pushy s.e.x kitten tonight, huh?"
"Are you complaining?"
"Not on your life." He bent to kiss her gently and her tongue slipped into his mouth with a more urgent demand. She burned hot tonight in his hands and worked clumsily at his belt buckle as she moaned softly into his mouth.
Evan walked backward to their bedroom as Sarah ran her hands over him. She hadn"t been this visibly turned on in months...maybe years, he thought.
In minutes they were both naked on cool sheets, and the familiar scent of her arousal filled Evan"s head with l.u.s.t and warmth. It was so good to be close like this with her; Sarah had been the center of his existence for longer than he could remember, and they had grown distant over these past months. As he slipped inside her, it was like coming home after an extended, tiring trip. After his recent nights on the beach, her flesh felt different, as if he had to rediscover the feeling of his wife. For all her energy, Sarah ground against him with a slower, less-fevered need than Ligeia.
"Oh G.o.d, Evan," Sarah cried out beneath him, and he ached to release with her. He tried to focus on the O of her mouth and his own impending release, but as it hit and the waves of pleasure sent him away for that split second of euphoria, he saw himself riding not his wife, but the dark, hungry body of Ligeia. As Sarah"s mouth opened in a final scream of pa.s.sion, Evan saw Ligeia, her eyes full of black mystery, her lips lush and demanding and her teeth...white and wide and...sharp. His o.r.g.a.s.m ended with a cool chill as he struggled to refocus on Sarah, who was here, instead of Ligeia, who was not.
He rolled off his real wife, blinking away the image of his feral "water wife" and forced a smile as he leaned to kiss Sarah. "Good?" he murmured.
She nodded, a dreamy smile already covering her face.
He started to slip out of bed, but she put a hand on his shoulder and whispered, "Stay with me?"
Evan took her in his arms and kissed her again, letting her snuggle into him, and rest her head on his shoulder. In moments, Sarah was fast asleep, but Evan couldn"t let go. He lay wide-awake in the dark, his mind filled with images of Ligeia. Images of l.u.s.t...and hunger.
Chapter Twenty.
The mornings came hard after a night of good s.e.x. Evan still felt completely drained as he finally turned off the alarm after three hits to the snooze b.u.t.ton. Sarah was already in the shower, and so he padded into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. As he poured in the grounds, he noticed the red light on the answering machine still blinking. The message Sarah had stopped him from listening to last night (not that he"d minded the interruption)-he"d never come back in to play it.
He poured the water into the back of the coffeemaker, hit start and then clicked the message b.u.t.ton on the answering machine. Bill"s voice drawled from the tiny speaker.
"Hey, people, where are ya at? Screening calls, huh?"
Evan smiled. Bill"s paranoid a.s.sumption if someone didn"t take his call was never that they weren"t actually busy doing something else, but that they must be avoiding him.
"Listen, Evan-I just thought you"d get a kick out of this. After the wreck by the point the other day, the city council decided at its meeting tonight that they"re going to have a beacon erected out there on the rocks. Talk about knee-jerk reactions! We don"t have an accident out there for years and then there is one and...pow, there goes the view! Anyway...just thought you"d be interested. Pretty soon when you take your night walks you"re going to get hit in the face with a nice red radio tower beacon instead of starlight. They call that progress. Anyway...see you tomorrow, I guess."
The line went dead and Evan stood still, thinking about the implications of the beacon. If there was construction going on out at the point over the next few weeks, would Ligeia still come around? A chill ran up his spine at the idea of losing her now. If he were a girl who liked to walk the beach naked, singing...well...he wondered if there were a bunch of guys lounging around by the point all day, would that keep her away at night?
Evan heard the shower shut off in the other room and shrugged away the thought. Nothing had started yet, and he hoped to be able to see her tonight after missing her the past two. For now...he had to get through another day.
The port was humming with activity as he pulled up to the lot. Bill was running up and down the dock shouting at various dockhands, while scribbling stuff down on a pad of notepaper. A large ship-the Ting-Ho-had come in at dawn, and there was plenty to do; this wasn"t a local freighter, but an international. And when a ship like that came into Delilah-someone outside their normal runs of local commerce-things kicked into high gear. Service with a smile-they wanted this trade back. Delilah had a small trade route happening with fishermen and rumrunners. Had since Prohibition. But they still hoped for bigger fish to fry as a port town. The fishing trade was diminishing, and the liquor boats could dock anywhere. All that drew anybody to Delilah was habit and a love of old-town architecture. The place did look good at sunset with all those turn-of-the-century Victorians dotting the long hill of Main.
But looking good didn"t contribute to the tax base.
Evan hurried up the steps to the office and kicked on his computer. He was on time for once, but with the boat in dock he still felt late.
"Darren said to grab a #2790 form and have a talk with the ship"s portage officer," Maggie said. She breezed through the empty staff office on her way to the kitchen, and was already retracing her steps with two mugs of coffee in hand before Evan had found the requisite paperwork. Someone was getting the A+ treatment!
"Chop chop," she laughed. "Cargo"s a-wasting!"
Cargo, in this case, turned out to be nothing worth writing home about. While the freighter hailed from Taiwan, it carried a wealth of widgets that were of no interest to anyone but manufacturers. No cool electronics filled this hold, no. Instead it was crammed with stacks and stacks of tiny plastic fittings and wires and computer chips, all boxed and crated and jammed as tightly as would fit from wall to wall and floor to ceiling in the hold.
You always liked it when a foreign ship came to port, because more often than not, you could score some kind of cool gadget or gimmicky bit of merch. But while this one carried lots of tech, it didn"t haul anything worth carrying away. This boat didn"t carry any DVD players or knockoff iPods. It had digital fun, yes, but only if you had a manufacturing division that needed the absolute basic raw materials to build something worthwhile out of.
Evan spent the morning walking the cargo hold and spot-checking inventory as the crew unloaded the hold, row by row. The short Oriental crew chief, whose name was Ying How or something similar, two syllables that hit the ear like a one-two punch-Evan couldn"t have repeated it exactly-told him all about their reasons for coming to Delilah.
"Everything is on way to businesses in northern California," the man said, gesturing at the crates. "Home boss say it cheaper to come here to the little town and send on trucks than to go to San Francisco and use trains."
Just the kind of story that Darren liked to hear; Evan grinned to himself. "We hope you"ll stay here a day or two and enjoy yourself," he heard himself saying.
Ying How shook his head. "We are back to water fast. Must pick up return parts. In-out, In-out, you know?"
The man raised one thick black eyebrow, and Evan nodded. He did understand, but despite that, when the man said, "in-out, in-out," there was only one thing he could think of. And it had nothing to do with freight.
By three P.M., the Ting-Ho had docked, unloaded, un-docked and sailed.
By six P.M., Evan had returned home, kissed his wife, checked the mail and changed clothes.
By seven P.M., he was itching to return to the beach. Sarah beamed at him all through dinner-some lemon chicken concoction she"d gotten the recipe for from her friend Yovana. He complimented it and absently polished off his plate.
But throughout the whole conversation (he couldn"t have told you what they talked about) his only thought was on whether Ligeia would be at the beach tonight.
When he slipped on his sandals at 8:30 and announced he was taking a walk, Sarah pouted. "You won"t be too long, will you?" she asked. Her eyes told him that she didn"t want him to leave at all. Last night had really impacted her, he guessed.
"Not too long," he promised, feeling like a heel. In his heart, he hoped that he would be seeing Ligeia...and if he did, he knew that he wouldn"t be home until long after Sarah had gone to bed.
He kissed her, and her arms held him tight, tighter than normal. She really wanted him to be with her tonight, he could tell.
"I love you," he said, giving her a quick peck on the lips. "I"ll be back."
The beach was loud tonight, Evan thought as he walked quickly down the line of tide debris. Storm coming, he supposed. The breakers were capping white as far out as he could see, and the rush of the sea felt like a tangible roar in the air.
Evan skipped a stone absently, but it sank before it completed three skips. The water was too hungry tonight.
When he reached the point, Evan took a breath and held it absently. He was convinced that she wouldn"t appear. The water was wild; he"d been gone for a couple nights (not that she came to see him, but still)...he was sure that he would go away crushed.
Evan reached the curve of the beach that dipped inward and then led back out to the finger of the point and stopped. He could walk down the long rock face, but he hadn"t the past couple times. And now...he just wanted to wait a while. Absently, he began to hum, knowing in his head that the past times he"d started singing, she"d answered.
It didn"t take very long.
The air suddenly vibrated with warmth, and Evan felt his lower back quiver. His chest ached, instantly, at the sound of her voice. He knew it was her before five notes had sounded. The gentle trill shimmered in the air like an aural fog, and Evan felt instantly euphoric. She was here! He couldn"t tell where; her voice seemed to slip out of the sky from everywhere at once. Beautiful, wanting and slow.
And then her hands were on him, ma.s.saging his shoulders and slipping down his ribs to hug him from behind. He sighed, and turned to meet her.
"You"ve been gone," she said. "I missed you."
"I was here a couple nights ago, but you didn"t come," he said.
"I was here last night," she whispered in his ear. Her tongue strayed quickly from words to exploration.
"I"m here now," he said, and her tongue found his, and they stopped talking. Like before, she was already nude, her body dripping with the moisture of the ocean. Evan pulled her to him and felt her dampness through his shirt. He cupped her a.s.s and ground himself against her pelvis, without any feeling of propriety. They both knew why they were here and he wasn"t going to waste their time with games.
But this night, instead of stripping him instantly, Ligeia pushed his chest away from hers. "Come with me tonight," she said.
"Where?"
"Come with me to my home. Stay with me. Swim with me."
Evan shook his head. "I know you got me in the water before but...I really don"t like it. Honestly!"
She ran a finger from his left nipple to the center of his crotch. "I could make you love it," she promised.
A fleeting thought of Sarah crossed his mind, and Evan shook his head. "I can"t go tonight. I don"t have much time," he said. "Where do you live anyway?"
A thin smile creased her face. With one hand she gestured out to the water just beyond Gull"s Point. "There," she said. "And everywhere."
Evan felt a pang of unease in his gut as she pointed to the water. Did she really mean to say that she lived in the ocean? Bill would have told him to run, run fast! Or was she just being coy, teasing him with vagaries and hints?
She pressed up against him and with a darting tongue wet his lips, and then his earlobe. "I"ve been waiting for you for a long time," she whispered.
Then she was undoing his shorts and pulling off his shirt, and Evan didn"t think about where she slept when he wasn"t there. He only wanted to "sleep" with her now. They lay down and the sand was cool on Evan"s skin, but Ligeia burned against him, her hands slipping up and down and around his body, exploring him with fluttering touches and urgent grabs. He nuzzled her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and teased with his tongue before swallowing one; her nipple was thick and hard in his mouth and she cried out as he bit down, gently, slipping a hand between her thigh from behind and then riding it up into her warm cleft. Then she wouldn"t wait anymore and she straddled him, the moonlight reflecting off the sweat on her skin as if she were covered in diamond dust. She was glorious in the night, and Evan came with barely any provocation. But she didn"t let him go, only continued to ride him, slowly, easily, as if they had all night. Evan could feel himself losing it, his moment long past. She began to sing. As always, her melody hinted at the lost and exotic, perhaps in part because the words were indistinct. Did she sing of love, or a foreign childhood? He couldn"t be sure. The beauty washed over him easily, and he surrendered to it fully, closing his eyes and disappearing in the colors and sensation it brought to him. Evan had always been in love with music. It had been his truest, dearest love since he was a child. When he tried pot as a teen, he had to do it while wearing headphones and listening to Rush or Kansas or Styx...some kind of ambitious progressive rock that worked inside him with the drug to produce...a grand euphoria that only the smoke and the music combined could create. If he drew in a hit without the music, he felt instantly nauseated.
Ligeia"s song reminded him of those long-gone days of smoking with headphones on, black lights raising strange and wonderful colors from the rock posters pasted across his bedroom walls. He had not felt this good in twenty years. Yet, this was better than then. This was stronger, natural...
Two hands helped him up from the sand, and Evan smiled dumbly as Ligeia continued to sing, her lips moving across his chest, barely touching, and then coming up to hum strong in his ear. He could feel his erection somehow returning, and she pulled him to follow her as she stepped backward toward the water. "My turn," she said, her eyes glinting with want.
"Oh no," he said, fear suddenly rising in his gut like a sudden fire. "Not again, I-"
"You shouldn"t refuse a woman who wants you," Ligeia said, tilting her head down to look at him with eyes that brooked no argument. "You should thank her, and listen to her song; her music tells you what you need."
With that she opened her mouth and let out a brazen moan of pa.s.sion that sent shivers down Evan"s spine. So raw, so feral, so...
Ligeia"s cry turned into a brooding, throbbing snippet of melody. Her eyes never broke contact with his as she stepped close, rubbing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against his chest, moving her lips within centimeters of his, all the while working a magic of melody that turned his bones to jelly. When she pulled again he didn"t protest, but followed her into the dark water once again. Ligeia wrapped herself around him in the water, pulling him close and impaling herself on him, taking him inside her with a single thrust. Her song rose and fell with their rhythm, until at last she gasped with her impending o.r.g.a.s.m and stopped singing to lock her lips on his. As Evan"s eyes opened wide, her face filled his vision, and then they were beneath the water, moving as one in a free fall of s.e.xual frenzy that kept thoughts of water far from Evan"s mind. All he could think about were the amazing bursts of pleasure shooting from his groin through his spine. s.e.x had never been like this for him, ever. And now he was giving himself to a woman whom he barely knew. A woman who insisted on taking him in the ocean. A woman who his best friend claimed was some kind of water witch, a Siren.
He broke her kiss to laugh at that stray thought and instantly regretted it. Evan"s mouth filled with cold brine and he tried to spit it out but only succeeded in drawing more ocean in through his nose. His eyes widened with the panic that had kept him from stepping more than a foot into the waves for most of his life, and his hands broke from their hold on Ligeia"s firm a.s.s to flail like a maniac in the water. He only succeeded in pushing himself away from her, his only life preserver, and in seconds he had plummeted from the peak of euphoria to the depths of panic. Evan opened his mouth to scream, where n.o.body would ever hear. Evan was going to drown, just as he"d always known he would.
Ligeia slipped up from beneath his writhing form, darting between his thighs to crawl up his chest in the water. She locked her arms around his waist, and pressed her lips to his. Evan pushed her away, struggling without reason to be free so that he could...what? Suck in more water? Panic didn"t leave room for logic. He tried to shake free of her embrace, but Ligeia didn"t let go. Her eyes bore into his beneath the black water, and somehow in the black of night beneath the ocean he could see the sparkle there, the life spark just centimeters away. Her tongue darted into his mouth and the closer that she clove to him, the more the fear dissipated. It slipped away like ice propped near a flame. In seconds, Evan stopped fighting her, and held her tighter. He clung to her like a life preserver, and in return, she moved her legs around his waist again. Her tongue wrestled playfully with his own and he couldn"t-wouldn"t-believe it, but somehow from the depths of panic, after being inside her twice already in a half hour, he slipped in again. Ligeia"s face grinned with victory, and this time she held him tighter and moved against him slower and made the moment stretch into what seemed like an hour.
When at last she pushed back from his mouth to gasp a soundless "O" in the waves, Evan had already moved beyond the boundaries of the place he called sanity. He started to take in water through his nose again and coughed, pulling horrible seawater into his lungs, but then she was back, pressing her lips to his hungrily, thankfully, and in seconds with strong thrusts of her feet they surfaced and bobbed above the waves. The lights of Delilah were distant fuzzy orbs on a faraway horizon and Evan wondered idly how far into the depths they had gone. Exhausted, he didn"t wonder how they would get back. He trusted Ligeia implicitly in the water. She had made him do things there he never thought possible. She had given him the best moments of his entire life in the place he hated with all of his being.
"Come home with me now," she whispered.
Evan"s eyes widened, and suddenly that blissful euphoria slipped away. His spine broke the water, which trickled down his vertebrae and suddenly felt like ice.