Epilogue #5
The minute our lips break apart, I’m sliding out of her body.
I’m off the table and pulling her to the edge so that her legs dangle toward the floor.
I drop to my knees and press her thighs as far apart as the table will allow.
I’m too impatient to unfasten her harness, so I tear at one side to loosen it and then shove the cock high enough to get at her clit, which I do with a wild, sucking kiss.
She moans and stabs her hands into my hair, trying to arch her cunt harder against my face.
My orgasm is leaking right back out of her.
Her cute little feet hang in the air on either side of me, and when I look up at her face while I eat her, I see that her hair has half come undone, that she still has a pearly streak of cum near the corner of her mouth.
Despite how hard and how long I just came, my body gives a lazy stir of interest.
Forever , I remind myself. You have forever now.
Tristan, who I’m pretty sure died during his orgasm, has come back to life and is now moving closer to Isolde and kneeling behind her. He kisses her neck and caresses her shoulders and plays with her nipples.
“Bite her,” I say from her cunt. I work two fingers into her wet, wet channel and press up until her toes point on either side of my shoulders. “Bite her until she squeaks.”
He bites her.
His teeth dig into the tender place between her neck and her shoulder, and she lets out a high note of forlorn lust, and then with me sucking her clit, she ruptures and comes apart in a flooding rush of clenching release.
Her hands are tight in my hair, she’s moaning my name, Tristan’s name, God’s name.
Her lingerie is half-off, the still-wet cock is shoved against her thigh, and wax is flaking around us like flower-colored snow.
As Tristan said earlier: I wish I could be exactly here forever.
My wife comes longer than I think possible, and I make a note to put pegging in the regular rotation. God bless.
When she finally slumps back against Tristan, we all look at each other and the carnage of wax and lube and cum, and maybe carnage was all we were ever going to be, blood and burned-out buildings and silver wristwatches and chess queens, but we are fucked , I tell you, absolutely corrupt and depraved in the same ways, because we like it like that.
We look at this room we’ve destroyed, and we’d do it again. Everything from start to finish, we’d do it all again.
See, you thought it was just me, didn’t you? But you must have suspected my little knife wife had it in her. And as for Tristan, well. It’s very hard to love two hunters if you’re bothered by marrow and blood yourself. If you don’t secretly love being hunted.
The smiles spread across our faces at the same time, dark and gleeful. We can’t wait to tear each other up again.
But first the hotel. I want to spend the rest of the night pampering the two of them with long massages and even longer baths, and then I want to take them back home tomorrow, to our hidden idyll in the forest. To our dog, to our library.
To Isolde’s now genuine but mostly virtual job as a religious antiquities appraiser, to Tristan’s small herd of sheep and even smaller brood of hens and too-large garden.
To my reluctant work as a secret keeper, because people keep coming to me with their secrets for some unknown reason.
I don’t have a club to offer them anymore, but still they come, hoping for a favor or an introduction or a discreetly placed word with someone influential.
Once every few months or so, I leave Morois to do things that are best done in the dark, and I come back a favor or two richer or a little less in Embry’s debt, with fresh bruises and blood in my hair, and Tristan and Isolde look at me like they wish they could be virgins all over again for me.
It’s a good thing, my life.
We dress and do our best to contain the carnage of the room to the plastic sheet and then go downstairs to the lounge to arrange for a car to take us to the hotel.
Tristan is still unsteady on his feet, and a florid bite mark is visible above the boatneck collar of Isolde’s dress, but it’s the kind of club where such things are expected.
We’re waiting near the door when the doorman opens it for two men dashing in from the rain.
One is tall and pale, platinum-haired and blue-eyed, with a chilling, angelic beauty that makes me think more of Lucifer than one of the good archangels, and the other is lean and subtly tanned and green-eyed, with delicate features under a shock of black hair.
He’s young, college-age, so he’s younger than the evil angel, who looks to be in his midtwenties.
I pause, recognizing the second young man, and his eyes meet mine with a quizzical elegance that is so very Morgan Leffey that I nearly laugh. But if the expression is all his mother, then those dazzling green eyes and the firm mouth are all his father’s.
The pale man steps between us, a movement that I clock as more possessive than protective. He is taking Lyr Moore upstairs, and he has no intention of sharing, and he’ll mark his territory if needed.
“Do the two of you know each other?” he inquires. His voice is as American as mine, which is interesting here in the heart of London.
“No, we don’t, I’m afraid,” Lyr says politely. His voice is a melody, just a register above his father’s.
“I know you,” I say with the insufferable knowledge of the old. “Or I should say, I know your father.”
Lyr doesn’t flinch, but it’s a near thing.
“Don’t worry,” I say, dropping my voice into a confidential tone. “I won’t tell him I saw you at a place like this.”
“Thank you,” he breathes quickly. Still so young, so many glimpses of wounded sensitivity under his armor of poise and good manners.
It makes me slide my gaze to the pale man he’s with. I give him the full force of a Mark Trevena smile. Enticing and amoral.
“I’m Mark Trevena. And you are?”
He looks at me with cold blue eyes. “Ryan Bell,” he says. We shake hands, both of us too clever to try to outgrip the other, but it’s still a handshake of layered meanings.
This one is mine tonight.
I will literally kill you if you hurt him. And then his father and his stepfather and his stepmother and his actual mother and his biological mother and his grandmother will kill you a second time.
We let go and briefly smile, having understood each other.
I nod at Lyr, my hands in my pockets, and he blushes a little as Ryan Bell puts a hand at the small of his back and guides him away.
Isolde watches them leave and says, “Maybe it’ll be true love.”
“I think that blond one has a few more souls to eat before he settles down,” I say. “If he ever does.” I know my kind—the heartless and wicked—and it’s a rare specimen among us that finds an infatuation that can sustain—or indeed endure—our interest for long.
Somehow I found two such specimens, and for that, I will happily bury my heart at their feet every day for as long as it takes to grow a whole new life around us. A garden of devotion and the unspoiled truth of our deepest selves. A bower of communion and sex. A castle of mercy.
Like the dream I had of the king and the two graves but in reverse, with my own heart as the soil, as the garden walls, as the shelter of hazel and honeysuckle.
Our car pulls up, and I find Tristan’s and Isolde’s hands as we step outside the club. The rain has stilled for a moment, and the world glistens under a moon just barely revealed by the shredded silver batting of the clouds.
With my beloveds’ hands in mine, with the moon looking like truth itself glimmering in the dark, we make our way into the car and then to the hotel.
Tomorrow we will go home, to our woods and our graveyard and our burgeoning little farm, to our dog and our jobs and our unfinished chess game by the fire, to the small little secret deep in Isolde’s body that she thinks she’s keeping so well.
To our radiant love rare and fathomless.
But as for tonight, we look at each other with magic in our eyes, having seen darkness and lonesomeness and vengeance, having seen death and beauty and pain, and somehow surviving anyway. We sojourned in Lyonesse for far too long, and now we’ve come back to where we were meant to be all this time.
To where we’re real in the dark.
To forever, together.
The end.