5. Peter Stands At Yonder Gate, Waiting For A Soul Cake
PETER STANDS AT YONDER GATE, WAITING FOR A SOUL CAKE
“What everyone is hinting at,” he began, trying to be delicate for once in his life.
“It is no evil thing. At least… it ought not be. You certainly shall be doing nothing wrong. The physical act of… well, love, it is only slightly different from embracing your friends and family, one just… carries on further.”
Beatrix, whose family had never much gone in for embracing her except on special occasions, frowned at his obvious embarrassment and fumbling.
“And this is what has every man over the age of fourteen smirking and tittering as if they share some great secret? A long embrace?”
“All hells, girl, there is more to it than that,” Sahar said, choosing a spot at the edge of the woods where they could still see the party at the town center. “There is a certain… intimacy involved. Very vulnerable, very… exciting intimacy.”
“Then why is it spoken of as something that can ruin a woman?” Bea asked.
Sahar growled, making her jump.
“Because your people have taught women that pleasure is only sinful when they experience it. Why do you think you have always had to hide your favorite books and men did not?” he asked.
“Women need more time and attention if they’re to really enjoy the experience, and your people have this mad belief that this is asking too much.
Any misuse of this manner of intimacy, or even ineptitude, is almost entirely the fault of men. ”
Beatrix tried to take this in, but too many questions were clamoring for attention at once.
“Men… like the one I am to marry in two days?”
Sahar opened his mouth, then thought better and shut it with a clack of his teeth. He leaned back against a large willow, arms crossed, one foot against the trunk, as if ready to bolt at any moment.
Silence stretched for what felt like too long. He really ought to say goodnight and go back to his own world. He had already taken this too far. Let Beatrix remember their dance and go on to her new life where she would be safe and cared for, all the more so without him around to stuff it all up.
“There are things a man might do,” said Sahar, regretting each word as he said it. “To secure a woman’s pleasure. Perhaps you will both learn these things in time.”
Beatrix stared up at the skull mask which sat above a pensive frown, searching for any tell—any reason her heart was punching so hard she felt she might fall forward onto her face. Heat and cold flashed through her. Was it fear? Curiosity? Illness?
“What might a man do?”
“You ought not ask me such things,” Sahar huffed, pushing off from the tree with his boot.
“Jack!” Bea grabbed his sleeve. “How can you tell me only half of what I need to know? How can you say there is nothing evil in it and then behave as if it’s too shameful to discuss?”
Because such things are not for your ears, he thought, knowing he was a hypocrite and a fool all the while. Because I cannot bear to describe what you will be doing with some man that is not me. Because if I start down this path, I may never stop.
“You talk as if women deserve better than the censure of all the world and yet your behavior continually keeps me in the dark!” Bea tugged his arm so he would face her. “Why is curiosity praised in a man and scolded in a woman? Must you always hide from me, even my own fate?!”
He pushed her back against the tree the second the words left her mouth.
The moment his mind caught up to his body, he knew he’d made a dreadful mistake.
There she was, up against him, so tiny in spite of her luscious curves.
She looked up at him with eyes as fearful as they were determined.
His hips were too close to hers, her generous breasts against his rib cage.
His heart drummed with every shuddering breath.
His leather glove creaked as he dug his fingers into the tree bark above their heads.
“If he wishes to… to please you,” he said through clenched teeth. “He will touch you. In… intimate places.”
Bea’s breath stopped and her face burned again, so hot that she felt she must be glowing in the darkness of the woods.
“And he will need to be patient,” Sahar continued, unable to keep a hand from reaching up to brush back a few wild curls from her face. “And learn which places you like to be touched. Or kissed. Or penetrated.”
That last word barely got out of his mouth alive, the way he clenched his teeth around it. His hand lingered at the side of her face and Bea leaned into his touch before her eyes shot open.
“I beg your pardon?” she whispered.
Oh please do not make me say it again, he thought. Let me slink away into the darkness and be nothing more than a memory to you.
“Your b-body has places where you may enjoy… being filled,” he said, stroking his thumb down her soft cheek. “But that is—he must—your husband, that is, he must… use patience. Listen to you—to your… sounds. To learn what you like.”
Sahar looked away, shaking himself free of dangerous thoughts. “There, that is a fine start to your education.”
“Sounds? What sounds?” Bea grabbed his wrist as he tried to pull back. “I’m to make sounds when he… if he touches me?”
“Only if he does so the right way.”
Beatrix was beginning to grasp what sort of sounds he might be referring to. With his closeness, his soft voice in her ear, the way he touched her face just barely with his glove, she was struggling not to gasp and cry with every new sensation.
“Show me?”
“Damn it all, Beatrix, have you no sense of—”
“Propriety? None, sir, and don’t pretend you ever wanted me to. Now show me what you mean or I shall go back to the bonfire and find someone who will.”
It was an empty threat but it had the desired effect of transforming the burn within Sahar’s chest into a howling wildfire. With a panther-like growl he rammed his hips harder against her, pressing his forehead to the tree trunk as if it could ground him.
“Lift your skirts,” he ordered.
Beatrix nearly dropped to the forest floor with the sensations that swept over her at those words.
She felt as if she’d drained all the cider in town, she was so wobbly and light headed.
Now was the time to put a stop to this if she wanted…
But whatever was to come in her new life, in marriage, she would rather hear it first from him.
Keeping her eyes fixed upon that inscrutable skull mask, she gathered up the thick black muslin of her skirts and petticoat, raising them almost to her knees.
Sahar wanted to tease her for choosing this moment to be shy, but he didn’t trust himself to speak. Gently, he laid his hands over hers and raised them higher until he could easily reach beneath.
The gloves made it more difficult to tell where her corset ended and her soft underclothes began, but he knew better than to touch her with a naked hand. Already, he would be lost forever after tonight; he did not need to add the sensation of her skin against his fingers to his eternal torture.
“I ought to stop,” he whispered, watching her face as the tips of his fingers slipped beneath the waistband of her chemise.
“Stop and I will never bring you another soul cake,” said Bea, gripping his forearms tightly while glaring up into his face.
She saw a flash of that bright white smile under his mask, heard a breathless laugh, and then Bea felt his fingers dip lower, stroking along the seam between her thighs before parting it gently to press inside.
Something hot and slick made his gloved fingers slip against her, sending sharp arrows of heat up from where he touched her.
She gasped, slapping a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out.
“J-Jack!”
By all the dead stars, he could hear that again and again till he crumbled to dust. He didn’t even care that it was not his true name—it was real enough to her and he adored the sound of it.
What a beauty she was, flushed and panting at her first ever touch. He could feel her shaking through his glove and he wanted so desperately to keep feeling her, to make her come on his fingers, to bury his face between her breasts and kiss every inch of her.
“Well,” he said in a strangled voice, keeping his hand still but not yet willing to pull back. “There. That is… what I meant.”
“Is that the end of it?” Bea asked, struggling to put even a few words together.
Sahar shuddered, fighting back the ravenous beast within; its appetite grew as he felt her heartbeat pulse against his fingertips.
“No, Little Bea. There are miles to go yet,” he said, unable to stop from offering another stroke, just the barest curl of a fingertip, so he could feel her jump again. “But that is something… you ought to discover with your husband.”
“Do you want me to discover it with my husband?” Bea asked in a barely suppressed moan.
“No,” he said, as his own hand shook where he touched her.
“Do I ask you for too much?”
“No,” he said, this time bending low to press his lips to her forehead as he dipped his fingers slowly in and out of her slick heat. “Never. Never once.”
His purpose was giving too much to greedy souls, and he took pleasure in making them regret it.
Now he found himself desperate for her to ask more of him, to hold his talisman and call his name and wish for the moon so he could spend eternity giving it to her.
No, he did not want to send her off to another man who would more than likely never touch her like this.
He did not want to lose her forever. He did not want to stop hearing these delicious sounds.
Sahar slid his fingers up through her petals to find the precious pearl of nerves where he knew she would be most sensitive. As he circled it, she cried out sharply and threw her head back against the tree trunk with a loud whack.
“Ach, Bea.” Sahar stilled his fingers, reaching behind to cup the back of her head. “Are you hurt? Look at me.”
Bea was seeing stars, but hitting her head seemed to have very little to do with it.
“I’m not hurt.” She reached up to squeeze his shoulders—great heavens, he was gigantic. His shoulders felt like mountains. “Though I think it will hurt very much if you stop.”
“Sweet damnation,” he growled, searing her throat with hot kisses and the barest graze of sharp teeth as he resumed his attack between her thighs, circling her clit in earnest now that he was done pretending.
The slick sounds his gloves made were driving him half mad, and her gasps buried against his chest claimed the other half of his sanity.
He kept his other hand behind her head, shielding her from further injury, as he worked her in increasingly tight circles as her breathing quickened.
Bea was in a panic, clawing at his jacket and squirming under his touch as a great monster reared up within her, snapping and pounding closer with every stroke.
She felt ill—weakened. Was this dying? Why did it feel so powerful and so beautiful and so massive?
Why did it feel as if something much bigger than her body was creeping up from her hips, about to tear her apart?
“J-Jack—Jack, what’s—going to—happen?”
“It will be lovely,” he said, lips against her neck. “Breathe, keep breathing. I’m here.”
Those words broke the storm inside her. She looked up to assure herself that he was there—that it was him—but that skull mask stared back at her where the face of her mysterious friend ought to be.
Bea’s hand snatched for the mask and pulled it off before he could stop her.
There he was—not a painted face at all, but skin a deep purple like the evening sky, freckled with stars shimmering in the far off glow of the bonfire.
He had a long and wide nose, a shock of curled hair, and eyes that shone white like two little moons in the dark of the woods.
With that, she exploded. Her body clenched around his fingers so hard it felt she might be crushed. Wave after wave of pleasure slapped her in the face until her eyes watered. At last, she was exhausted, collapsing against his grip with shaking limbs.
She kept her eyes on his face, grappling with the shock of what he had made her feel and the realization that all this time, he hadn’t been a man at all.
Some part of her had always believed he was fooling with her, telling her stories to frighten her, but here was the evidence—beautiful and strange and somehow familiar.
Sahar was frozen. What had he done?
Never in his many hundreds of years had he felt such a pounding in his chest, such a delicious agony.
The appetite of a carnivorous thing only kept at bay for the sake of her—and there she was, pink faced and panting and wild haired because of him, because he had shown her what a human man surely would not.
He wanted to hold onto this feeling until the world crumbled, but it was shattered by the realization that she saw his face, and was clearly horrified.
Some creature had just touched her—a creature she couldn’t name, a creature that had been insinuating itself into her life since she was a child.
She must hate him.
Sahar stepped back, pulling his hands away.
“Forgive me,” he said, for the first time in his life, before he disappeared in a whisper of smoke and stars.