Little Disquietude (19 page)

She scooted down the bed and pushed Sophia's
legs farther apart. They fell open easily, revealing slick folds.
Leah stared dumbly and pressed a kiss to the lowest part of
Sophia's stomach.

"You shave everything," Leah said.

"For the play," Sophia mumbled, opening her
eyes just enough to gaze through the slits at Leah.

"Did I miss something?"

"To make me feel more vulnerable. More bald
and connected to my own infertility. My own womanhood and how it
defines me."

"Amazing."

Sophia worked her fingers into Leah's
hair.

"You don't want to talk about acting?"

"I'm not acting," Sophia said, half-angry,
half-breathless.

Leah lowered her head to kiss what beckoned
her, what echoed and pulsed in her own body and led her to
Sophia's. Sophia held her there. Pressed her closer. Leah licked.
Sophia cried out. She licked again, and the resulting cry was more
incoherent. The third one, more guttural.

"Here?"

"Higher."

Leah rubbed her lips against Sophia's
clitoris and felt Sophia's answering shudder around her, her thighs
tightening. Leah settled in to kiss and tease and lap.

Sophia no longer vocalized, just shivered,
lifting herself to Leah's mouth. Leah tasted Sophia, all that
Sophia was offering, unabashed, licking until Sophia strained under
her. Leah stopped moving and simply held her tongue against
Sophia.

Sophia cried out and pulled harder. Leah
licked, bringing her to a second, slower trembling, and then kissed
her thighs and stomach through the aftershocks. Sophia twisted
away, but didn't let go of her hair. Leah grasped her wrist. She
rubbed until Sophia released her with a long sigh.

"It's been a long time," Sophia said.

Leah waited to see if Sophia would say more,
or would grab her hair again, but Sophia merely smiled up at the
ceiling. Leah continued to plant kisses on her abdomen, still
deeply aroused, sensitized to every touch between them.

"I knew you were a tease," Sophia said,
pulling on Leah until Leah crawled up beside her and kissed
her.

"I protest."

"I'm sure."

"What about you?" Leah asked, wriggling
closer, stroking Sophia's side, becoming more aggressive in her
kisses.

Sophia's answer was muffled by her lips until
Sophia put her hand on Leah's breast, turning slightly from the
kiss, "I'm no tease."

Leah smiled and kissed Sophia's cheek. Sophia
squeezed her breast. Leah closed her eyes. She couldn't breathe.
Her ability to continue had been predicated on Sophia not touching
her, not like that. When Sophia's thumb brushed her nipple, Leah
let out a voiceless squeak.

Sophia pulled back to look at her. Her hand
moved lower, scratching at Leah's belly. Leah bit her lip. She
wanted to seize Sophia's hand and press it against herself, but
Sophia was happy, smiling, her fingers shifting mischievously. Leah
decided to see what Sophia might do. And she didn't have the
strength to move, anyway.

Leah wet her lips, and asked, "Mercy?"

"Mercy?"

Leah covered Sophia's hand on her
stomach.

Sophia moved her hand lower. "Leah Fisher
doesn't have to ask anyone for mercy. Least of all, me."

Leah grinned and tossed her head, her hair
spilling across the pillow, and rubbed Sophia's hand. Their hands
moved together with Leah's uneven, excited breathing.

"Especially the night before her show opens,"
Sophia said.

"I like to concentrate my success in 48 hour
segments, and then have a really bad rest of the year."

Sophia cocked an eyebrow and slid her hand
down between Leah's legs. She pressed her whole hand against Leah.
Leah swallowed hard and braced herself on the bed. Sophia's middle
finger worked between Leah's lower lips. Leah cried out.

"I can already tell you're going to be loud,"
Sophia said as she stroked Leah.

Leah nodded a response and bit her lip. She'd
be as loud as Sophia wanted. She panted shallowly. Sophia curled
her fingers, dipping the tips just into Leah while increasing the
pressure against her. Leah gasped and let out a hoarse cry. Sophia
knelt on the bed, keeping her hand against Leah. Leah tried to keep
her eyes open. Sophia was playful and radiant. Her breasts swayed
just out of reach. Sweat made her skin gleam. Leah wanted her
again. She wanted--

Sophia pushed a finger inside Leah.

Leah bucked and groaned. Sophia, watched her
intently. "More?"

"More," Leah said.

Leah gritted her teeth as she felt Sophia
inside her, stretching her, exciting her with just her hand, her
practiced fingers, her eager posture. Leah surrendered, wasn't even
jealous that Sophia so obviously knew what she was doing. Just
grateful that Sophia's fingers pressed in an interesting place and
took her higher.

"Mercy?" Sophia asked.

"More."

Leah contorted in ecstasy. She must look
foolish, red and sweaty and so needy, but Sophia smiled, meeting
her eyes, looking intense yet pleased as she stroked. Leah's toes
curled. She tried to let go. Sophia leaned down to kiss Leah's
forehead, and then her cheek, and then whispered in her ear, "Maybe
if you closed your eyes."

Leah closed her eyes, which helped free her
from the physicality of it all, the visual of how Sophia looked
reflecting back on how she must look. Now the universe was made
only of Sophia's hand and Sophia's breath on her face. Sophia
kissed her lips and then drew back. Leah lifted her chin for
another kiss, but didn't find Sophia. Sophia's hand shifted,
settling outside her to stroke her swollen folds. Leah could
imagine Sophia above her, back arched, hair sweaty and tousled
around her face, still grinning.

Then Leah screamed as Sophia's fingers
quickly entered her again. There must have been a third, she felt
fuller than before. There was more friction. More.

Her cries became constant until she reached
the cusp. She was so close and yet she still wanted to see what
Sophia would do. Her stomach quivered. Her breasts felt hot.

Sophia said, "You're so beautiful."

Leah let out a rough gasp. She grabbed for
Sophia. Sophia settled on top of her, her fingers taking her, hard
and slick and slender. Leah clung to her, thrusting her hips in
cadence, close. Her eyes stayed closed.

"I think you're the most beautiful thing I've
ever seen," Sophia said, in a low and seductive voice.

"I'm almost there."

Sophia covered her mouth in a kiss, robbing
her of breath, touching her relentlessly. Leah struggled and then
her ears roared and her mind went blank. She came, her senses
focused at the point of Sophia's hand, exploding outward. She
screamed and Sophia released her from the kiss. Leah bucked as the
orgasm rocked her. She fell back against the bed, shaking her head
to protest Sophia's continuing touches, now torture to her
sensitive, swollen folds, and breathing deep, gulping breaths.

"Okay," Leah said. "Okay."

Sophia settled down at her side and let her
hand rest between Leah's breasts. Leah waited until the room
stopped spinning before turning her head.

Sophia grinned.

Leah licked her lips. "I have no idea what to
say."

Sophia's grin got wider.

Leah closed her eyes. "What time is it?"

Sophia kissed her shoulder, and then shifted
to raise herself up far enough to see the clock. "One thirty," she
said.

Leah rolled onto her side, and considered.
Sophia wrinkled her nose.

"My show is opening," Leah said.

"Tomorrow, I hear," Sophia said.

"That means I don't have to be at work until
six in the evening," Leah said.

Sophia raised her eyebrows.

Leah nodded.

Sophia kissed her, and then murmured, "That's
wonderful. There are things I haven't done."

"Let's do them," Leah said. She ran her
finger down Sophia's stomach. Sophia sucked her breath in,
tightening her abdomen. Leah asked, "Showing off?"

"You're tickling me."

Leah slid her hand over Sophia's ribs. Sophia
squeaked. Leah trailed her fingers down Sophia's hip. Sophia
whined.

"There too?"

"Everywhere," Sophia said.

Leah relented, and cupped Sophia's cheek, and
leaned in to brush noses with her. "This time, we're starting from
the real beginning."

"What's that?"

"Making out like schoolgirls," Leah said.

Sophia stuck out her tongue, and then
stretched it toward Leah. Leah met it with her own, and then sealed
their mouths in a hungry kiss. When they parted, Sophia said, "I'm
glad we're already naked."

"Me too. It was a good idea."

"Do you have any more good ideas?"

"Tons." Leah rolled onto Sophia and murmured,
"Good idea number two..."

Leah studied her expression in the dressing
room mirror. She looked younger and fresher than she usually saw
herself. Her cheeks were rosy with rouge. Her outfit, from the late
1880s, itched and made her feel like something out of an Edith
Wharton movie. She wriggled experimentally. Virginia wriggled back
at her. Leah was gone, at least physically. She smiled. Virginia
smiled back.

The mental part, she still had to work
on.

Adam ducked into the dressing room. "You look
beautiful," he said, and it was Sophia's voice that echoed in her
mind. She shivered. He asked, "Do you need any last minute
preparation?"

She shook her head. "I'm psyching myself up
for the crying."

"Dare I ask?"

"I was watching
Cold Case
on TNT back
at home and they had this one about a homeless woman and her
daughter."

Adam looked pale.

"And the homeless woman won the lottery--a
really small amount on a scratcher, like $25, and she used it to
buy her daughter a birthday cake. It was all she could do right.
B-plot." Leah's voice faltered as a lump rose in her throat. She
inhaled sharply through her nose. "Anyway, her cake got destroyed.
It was awful."

Adam frowned at her.

"What?" Leah asked through her choked
throat.

"I need to stop asking actors questions."

"It was really sad!" she yelled as he left
her dressing room.

She went back to looking at herself in the
mirror. Under the scratchy clothes and the silkier underclothes and
the layers of makeup to change her into someone else, were the bite
marks and bruises and scratches and hickeys Sophia left on her.
Under that, the soreness and the aches and the still-simmering
arousal between her legs. And under that, her heartbeat, pounding,
making her feel alive and desperate.

"Underneath, underneath," she murmured, and
Virginia looked sadly back at her, blinking away the tears in her
luminous blue eyes.

"Can you sing?" she asked Virginia.

"Like a songbird," Virginia said. "Like a
warbler. Like a crow. Like a hawk."

Like a raven.

* * *

Virginia was eight years old when Poe fell in
love with her, but Adam hadn't cast a child, wanting to gloss over
that in favor of the other tragic figures in Poe's life as the
specter of West Point loomed in his future. The widow, the invalid,
his brother dying of consumption. Already Poe had seen too much
death, too much upheaval, but the musical opened with the first
sonnet of "The Bells" sung sweetly by Virginia, with hope and
newness and youth between them.

"From the jingling and the tinkling of the
bells."

Ward was shaped by experience; charming,
belligerent, more intelligent than his betters, witty and doomed.
He blended easily with Poe, carrying the essence of a different
place and time, and yet echoing the late 20th century commentators,
too clever to be politically savvy, all quoting Poe themselves.
Leah admitted that he had been well-cast.

Even her hatred of him seemed timely.

And Leah thought, with pleasure and clarity,
that the critics would love the meta.

She cried, her back turned to Ward, her face
presented to the stage, a full house, but she couldn't see any of
them with the spotlight blinding her eyes, making them water. She
thought of the birthday cake and a sob escaped her lips. She
covered her mouth and ran from the stage.

Ward chased her, seduced her, sang prayers
that made her ache with their beauty, fought with everyone else, in
clumsy, choreographed duels.

She sat at the piano and bit into the capsule
wedged between her back teeth. Fake blood poured from her mouth as
she sang. Her voice trembled with the conductor's gestures.

Ward sat beside her, dabbed the blood from
the corner of her mouth, and studied her as a detective might a
crime scene. With interest and yet detachment.

He began to drink.

She took Adam's artistic license and died,
two years too early.

Ward descended into madness.

Hear the loud alarum bells –

Brazen bells!

What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency
tells!

In the startled ear of night

How they scream out their affright!

Too much horrified to speak,

They can only shriek, shriek,

Out of tune,

In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the
fire,

In a mad expostulation with the deaf and
frantic fire,

Leaping higher, higher, higher,

With a desperate desire.

She came back as a ghost, thought of
Macbeth
, and nearly laughed on stage. She sang alone, her
face powdered white, her clothes wispy and pale suggestions. She
wondered if Sophia was in the audience. She knew her mother was.
She thought of them as she sang, and Adam, and Grace, and everyone
she'd loved seeing her dead on stage, and singing, carrying or
breaking the musical all by herself, all at once, all alone. She
kept or lost their attention for three minutes and twelve
seconds.