14. Titania
Chapter fourteen
Titania
Eoghan
S he fell asleep in my arms. I let her, unwilling to break the contact that she had allowed.
What was it about this woman? What was it about her that drew me in like a moth to a flame?
She was a nymph, a siren. She could so easily conjure my ruin, and I went to her with no fear, no hesitation. I didn’t even care if she’d drown me with her song.
I slowly lowered her onto the couch, sneaking out from beneath her. I placed a pillow below her cheek, and let her sleep, as I went into the bedroom to retrieve an emerald colored blanket. It was thick and heavy, and when I placed it over her, covering her beautiful, dark skin, I had a vision of her in a dress of that same vibrant green, with an emerald ring on her finger.
My mother’s ring. An emerald of the deepest, darkest green, surrounded by diamonds, on a golden band.
Black is the color of my true love’s hair…
She had shown up with her hair loose from its usual bun, and just like I fantasized, it was long and wavy, down to her waist. It was coarse, but silky and full of life. Seeing the strands of it over her bare shoulders filled me with an unfamiliar longing.
I lifted the lid of the coffee table, to show the compartment underneath. I pulled out the sketch pad of heavy weighted paper, and pulled out a 2B medium charcoal pencil, and sat on the floor as I sketched her sleeping face.
Her curls had drifted over her cheek, wriggling free from where they had been tucked behind her ear. I wanted to tuck it back, to see the perfect roundedness of her warm, tanned cheek. But I didn’t. She was perfect without adjustment. Her plump lips, the way her curved body showed the beauty of her shape, even from beneath the blanket…
I suddenly had a vision of her in an enchanted wood. The kind with glowing fairies, and streams with diamond white rapids. She wasn’t just some fairy or nymph there. No, she’d be a queen. She was Titania in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream .
I chuckled, realizing that if she was Titania, the Queen of the Faeries, then I was Nick Bottom, the man with an ass for a head. Or at least… I wanted to be. I wanted her to wake and look at me with the magical podium of love in her eyes, and for her to fall in love with me as Titania did. Then again, I also wanted to be Oberon, her husband, jealous of a little changeling boy that she adopted. After all, they were wedded, and belonged to one another.
I would be her monster, if it meant that I could be the monster she loved.
I spent the night drawing her that way - as a slumbering fairy queen. I sketched until my fingers were stained black, and page after page of my imaginings littered the coffee table. Each one, a masterpiece, even as they fell short of the beauty that I watched in the golden sunset that crept in through the windows.
What would I do for a kiss?
I had offered her a gallery, for the chance to taste her sweet pussy. But for a kiss… what would I give?
A kiss meant more.
I had been in dozens of women, fucking them with a fervor like my cock could empty out the demons that lived in my mind. But I had seldom ever kissed them. Hell, I had rarely ever looked at them, really. Even if I sketched their naked forms in my studio at the Green Mansion. Even as they stripped for me, swaying in an erotic dance to titillate my visual senses. They were one of a hundred. One of a thousand.
Names, faces, voices all blurred together. But not her. Had she been a dilettante, then… maybe. So many people were just that. Philistines, and amateur, pretending to understand art while having nothing but the silence of an empty wind between their ears.
But Kira Kekoa was something else entirely.
Unraveling her would be like peeling back the paint of one masterpiece, to find another painted underneath. Like Rembrandt’s Old Man in Military Costume , which was revealed to have a portrait painted underneath the final work - a portrait of a woman. Except Kira was a masterpiece after masterpiece, layer upon layer, ad infinitum. A lifetime of study would never reveal all that went on beneath the surface.
Even as these thoughts swirled in my mind, there was a string of melody that kept coming into my ears. I was humming it, before long.
Black is the color of my true love’s hair…
But the words kept changing in my mind. My mother’s lullaby turning somber, into something more like a funeral march. The words shifted and different lyrics popped into my mind.
Her lips deceive, her eyes despair. Mask so serene, with graceful hands, and I love the ground whereon she stands.
Despite her confession about her father, there was more that she had yet to tell me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was lying, at least by omission, if not lying outright. It didn’t bother me, as such. Everyone had secrets, me included. But I knew that hers would blow up in my face.
I accepted it with surrender.
I relished the tragedy of it. All the world's great love stories are tragedies, aren’t they? I saw nothing different for her and me.
Fate. Tragedy. Love. All three words were one and the same.
When the rude, jarring light of day went from a pleasant glow to a harsh slant that crawled up the floor, to the couch, and up to her eyes, her lashes fluttered and she stirred.
She stretched, her beautiful body pulled taut, her breasts to the ceiling as she yawned. Her bleary, tired eyes looked around, resting on me as she smiled.
A smile so radiant, it rivaled the sun itself.
“Well, that’s a pleasant view to have in the morning,” I said, with a sigh, leaning against the coffee table and letting the sketch in my hand fall onto my lap.
“Did you sleep at all?” she asked, sitting up, pushing her hair from her face.
“No, my little muse. I was busy.” I indicated the papers on the table. Several had fallen onto the floor beside me. Black charcoal on a white, textured paper.
She leaned down to pick one up. It was an early sketch, where she was sleeping beneath a bower of branches, orchid blossoms hanging white and perfect, as if they were reaching to blanket her in their warmth. She was nude, of course, resting on her side, one leg curled over the other, as her hair formed the bed on which she rested.
“You’ve made me into a Celtic Goddess!” She almost looked offended by that fact.
“Greek, actually. As Shakespeare’s Titania.” I smiled, when she looked at me with shock in her dark eyes. Eyes as dark as my own. “You and I both know that Titania was modeled after Hera, the Queen of the Gods.”
“Titania wasn’t meant to look like me.” She let the paper fall from her fingertips.
“Why not?”
“Because… I don’t exactly have Greek features.”
“You are such a darling little muse,” I chuckled, as I placed my sketchpad on the floor, and crawled my way to her. “You are Isolde, Boudica, Juliet, Joan of Arc, the Virgin Mary, Penthesilea, Freyja, Catherina Sforza, and Aphrodite. You are Queen Liliuokalan, Catherine the Great, Eleanor of Acquitaine, and Ching Shih. From now, until the day I shut my eyes, they will all bear your likeness in my mind, and in my art.”
She looked at the drawings, and though she was a fairy queen in every single one, I knew that she would become every woman I named, and every great woman I hadn’t. Every legend, and story, every great beauty would bear her face.
“You’re insane,” she said, pulling her legs down from beneath the blanket, and laying her bare feet on the ground. “I look nothing like any of those women.”
“That is their loss. Not yours.”
It was hard to read her expression, when her dark eyes flashed towards me, her lips slightly parted as her chest rose and fell.
I was curious, though, to know what was crossing through that active mind of hers. What did she think? What did she feel? How did my worship affect her? Not that I would change my ways.
I was nothing, if not an honest man. Maybe I withheld the truth, but I did not lie. Not like she did.
She threw herself into my arms, her lips covering mine in a searing kiss.
I didn’t need to be told twice.
I wrapped my arms around her tiny waist, my hands resting on the full curves of her ass as I pulled her into me, my tongue delving between her teeth to invade and take. To steal what I could before she came to her senses and slapped me again.
If I had to take a slap everytime she kissed me, it was a price worth paying.
I stole her breath in my lungs, tasting the sweetness of her until I could drown in it. There was the lingering taste of absinthe on her lips. Green, and vibrant.
Still, then, it wasn’t enough. It was nowhere near enough, when her skin was flush with mine, her sweet core hot against the zipper of my trousers, as she straddled me, causing friction between the parts of us that were desperate to join.
She pried her lips from mine, but I couldn’t let her go. My hand was in her hair in a flash, fisting her rough curls, and twisting it into a rope around my palm. Around the wound I had made for an oath.
“I’m not done,” I groaned, as I delved into her mouth again.
I would cover her in my blood, if I could. Mark her as blood of my blood, as my wife, my family, my fucking soul. I longed for the handfast that would scar my palm, diagonal, from pinky to thumb, declaring me a taken man. A man who belonged to a woman.
We would be bound, a silk wrapping around us as our wounds joined together. We’d make vows of eternity. I’d vow that her pain would be my pain. Her needs would be my needs.
Her oaths would become mine.
She whimpered, but I wouldn’t let her go. I wouldn’t let her make space between us. She’d need to do more than slap me, if she wanted this to end.
Because it will never end.
Black is the color of my true love's hair , and I would burn the world to make sure that she was mine until my last breath.
She turned her head, pulling her lips from mine.
“I have to go to work,” she groaned, before she turned back to me, resuming our lip lock. Then she pulled away again. “I have to… oh!”
I jutted my hips up, letting my hard cock behind my zipper rub against the sweet apex between her lovely thighs. The place where heaven would be. That was where all my dreams would come true.
I wasn’t a fool. I knew I had to let her go. I knew she wouldn’t want to take the day off to spend time with her boss.
Beyond that, I had to go to the airport to pick up Dairo.
The world was rudely intruding into my brief taste of heaven.
I put my forehead against her throat, my nose resting in the space at her sternum. Her scent invaded my lungs. Musky, earthy, aroused and sweet. It reminded me of a garden in spring.
“When will I see you next?” I said through the lump in my throat. “Don’t make me beg, my darling muse. Don’t be so cruel as to leave me uncertain.”
I looped up at her hazy, unfocused eyes. She was as affected as I was.
“I have an exhibition tonight at Gallery Four. Maybe you can come after? Would that… would that be okay?”
Oh, how sweet that uncertainty was to my ears. Her hard no was turning into tentative yes.
She would love me one day, with the same fire and passion as I did her. I could see that as clear as day.