Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (15 page)

"No, wait," said Santa, sitting up. "That's lovely, as always, sweetheart, what you're doing. But we've got to come to an agreement about this. Please stop for a moment and talk to me."

With a look of impatience, the Tooth Fairy shifted on his thighs. "What about?" She rubbed the head of his arousal along the soft line of her jawbone.

"About not seeing each other again." Row upon row of toys and books and stuffed animals climbed the wall next to Wendy's bed. Nearby lay Wendy herself, thralled in normal time and looking beautiful as only six-and-a-half can.

"Don't talk nonsense," she said.

"My resolve hasn't been worth much lately," he said, "but things have to change." He tried to sound forceful, but all he felt was ineffectual. The strength of Santa's resistance seemed to ebb and flow in counterpoint to the tides of not-Santa's passion, and just now his tidepools were rapidly filling.

"Tell you what," she replied, leaning her cheek and temple along his erection and running her index finger around its tip, "I want you to remember what it's like to spend Christmas Eve without me. So you go about your giftgiving tonight, and me about my toothtaking. I'll wait for you to summon me. I'm betting your fidgety little hand will be shoved into Thea's mouth before the week is out."

Santa frowned. "You're not giving me the kind of cooperation I need."

"That's my best offer, big boy. Now shut up and give me that amazing snow-white head of yours." With that, she mouthed him again as deep as she could go, spun about like a noisemaker on his fat fleshy spindle, and smothered his face in fuzzy wet womanflesh.

*****

During round five, emptiness began to tinge Anya's raging desires. She had as yet no name for the feeling. She knew only that it threatened her vengeance and that only copulation frequent and feverish would keep it at bay. The bleeding Santa she beheld in her mind's eye was weeping, yet he also grinned at her antics, grinned as if he had ordered them.

Gripping stray wisps of black hair that swirled about a bald spot, she wrenched up and peered into the bleary eyes of Wolfram, the workshop's master miniaturist with a cock to match. "Not bad, pindick. Now get off me and go. On your way out, send in the next two."

His jowls fell and the ovals of his eyes lengthened like soggy Cheerios. "Did you say two, milady?"

Anya lit into him then, snatching an andiron from the fireplace and whipping Wolfram's baboon buttocks out the door with its long hard length. Flinging it into the snow in spangles of sunlight, she reached out and tight-fisted two elfin erections. "You and you," she said, her eyes locking on the carnal gaze of Gregor's brothers. "Get in here and put these things to their proper use."

They complied.

*****

Doubt bedeviled Santa.

For years he had lost himself in fairy flesh, first by way of seduction, then by design. It was elemental giving, this licking and stroking, this probing and enclosing. It stripped away his Santahood, yes. But it brought out a deeper urge to give, an urge beyond ego and tradition. And it brought out an urge to take as well, a grasping grope at exposed flesh and the joyous oblivion it offered.

But now that Anya knew all, now that he had spent a hellish month watching misery dwell in her, the reminders that he was Santa Claus would not be stilled. They nagged at him no matter how unbearably rhythmic his lover's hips rose and fell about him.

Santa he remained through it all.

The intruder—Santa's dark twin—had been eyeing him sullenly during this struggle, upset with his host's less-than-wholehearted attention to the pleasures of the bed. At the first hint of impending orgasm, he engaged him.

(Okay, friend, the time for introspection is past. We're entering the homestretch here and I want your full attention on maximizing my pleasure.)

What you want no longer concerns me. This, I swear, will be the last time I sleep with the Tooth Fairy.

Her fingernails tensed like claws at his back.

(Swear and be damned. You and I understand the value of a saint's vow. We've heard enough of them. We've seen them broken like twigs. Pay attention, damn it. She's starting to peak and so are we.)

He took in the tumble of her hair, the switch and sway of her head as it tossed to the rhythm of their sex.

Anya is my salvation, my anchor, my love. To her and her alone I hereby pledge my fidelity.

(What a wuss you are!)

Then there are the children. Sweet Wendy here, sleeping so soundly, shames me with her innocence.

The blood throbbed in his head. His heart pounded to the surge of his lover beneath him.

(Where's the shame? Humping is good. More humping is better. It's where kids
come
from, in case you've—)

They deserve better from Santa Claus.

(So Be the best
. Cease all this chatter and delve into the delicacy that lies before us—Tooth Fairy tenderloin en brochette.)

The upward thrust of her hips came faster now, less controlled.

To the boys and girls of the world, I vow no longer to dishonor them thus. And to my elves—

(Oh come now, you're going much too—)

—to my elves, faithful to me in all things, I owe this promise as well—to pull myself out of the foul mire of lust and regain my God-given purpose.

Below, she gripped tight along the length of him. He began to tingle all over, inside and out.

I'm rid of the Tooth Fairy. And I'm rid of you.

(Of me!?)

That's right. I'm putting you down, whoever you are. I don't need you anymore.

Santa gave a sharp inward thrust that made the Tooth Fairy cry out.

(Now wait just one—)

No need to wait! You're out of my life!

A second thrust and a third. They pushed her over the edge, ramping and rioting into sweet oblivion.

But Santa's dark twin was less easily defeated. The battle raged fierce and furious right up to the moment of climax. And when it came time to scale the great orgastic peak, they bickered and fought like brothers all the way up the sheer face of the mountain. For every piton his dark twin's sinning prick drove into a rocky cleft, Santa snatched a dozen more from him and hurled them clattering down the mountainside.

At last, the saint gathered his resolve, put firm hands upon the intruder's shoulders, and shoved him screaming down the steep slope. Bleating a cry of triumph, Santa Claus reached one hand, then the other, over the topmost crag and pulled his huge bulk up onto the gasping heights of elemental orgasm.

*****

In the frenzied feeding of Anya's revenge, two lovers became three, three became four, and four grew in kind. She dimly recalled Heinrich huddled about her, two of him taking turns at her mouth, two moving against her nipples, one each shoved into bunghole and cunt. But that memory lost its precision in the swirl of so many like it.

Long afterward, when she tried to focus on her bouts of passion, the recollection that shone most clearly was of every last elf packing the tiny hut to the rafters, though by any rational measure that could not have been. Yet there they were in memory—a host of Cupids grown old and bearded, leers of lust or bewilderment in their eyes; and loveshafts everywhere, thick and thin, lengthy and stubby, circumcised and un-. And somehow their slit pricktips all reached her as she lay there on the bed. Every pore was an orifice open to them, and their seed spilled forth rich and viscous, turning the mad swell of her vengeful flesh everywhere deeper, redder, wetter, until—while the Santa Claus that looked on and suffered in her mind's eye grew hardly distinguishable from the flayed carcass of some butchered porker—Anya grabbed all about her for love, bucking and ramping toward absolute forgetfulness.

*****

Thousands of miles distant from one another, Santa and Anya came. Their climaxes were not joyous by any means, not the sort one is wont to replay to heighten the solitary delights of masturbation. Powerful as these orgasms were, they brought with them a terrible ambivalence and the first tentative turnings toward reconciliation.

Santa, pumping and gasping beneath his paramour, looked up and saw pure harpy, pure siren, pure succubus. If this creature, into whose womb tunnel the long arc of his arousal now curved, had anything more to her than insatiable desire, he failed to see it, now nor in the twenty years of their adultery. In the instant his flesh lunged into what it craved, the scales fell from his eyes and he knew that, unlike so many times before, he had the strength to keep them from growing back. For as much pleasure as he shared with this faery daemon, so much pain he now realized would his dear wife endure.

And that was intolerable.

As for Anya, there came a time when the lust she surrounded herself with transmogrified into some bizarre and meaningless flesh-machine and her ire against Santa turned to dust and blew away. Beneath mounds of humping elves, Anya found a certain stillness, in the midst of which stood her husband, whole and pristine and loving as always. There were roses in his cheeks and a twinkle in his eye. Smoke curled in white wisps from the bowl of his pipe, wreathing about his face like the fingers of a loving wife.

*****

When she had come to herself, Anya rose from the bed and hurried two score bare-assed elves out the door like mice before a broom. The last of them—Helmut the clockmaker, whose mind, before this intriguing night, had been preoccupied with springs and flywheels—she collared.

"Send Fritz," she said, and Helmut nodded.

Fritz found her sitting on the side of the bed, staring into the flames. Uncertain of her mood, he wondered if he should tuck his engorged elfhood back inside his trousers.

"Mrs. Claus?" he ventured.

"Fritz," she said, glancing peripherally at him, "please help me into my dress."

"Yes, ma'am." He turned away, working with both hands to maneuver his stiff member beneath the fold of green cloth that fell from belt buckle to crotch. Given his tumescence, he abandoned the buttoning itself as a lost cause. It was all he could do to retrieve the torn peasant dress Mrs. Claus had tossed over the sleeping doll so long ago, carry it like a dead woman draped across his arms, and hold it out to her.

When she was dressed, he ushered her to the door and watched her take her silent way through a gaping sea of faces. In bewildered silence, the other elves followed Fritz out of the woods, past the skating pond, and across the commons to the porch. Those, like Fritz, who busied their giddy minds with renewed hopes of carnal easement, lingered there in the snow, watching the object of their obsession move from room to room, closing curtains. They heard her turn the shower on. Still they stood there in the snow, the lustful pure, in silent devotion. And when at last the distant hiss of the shower cut abruptly off, they took the occasion—all except Fritz—to disperse like whipped dogs to their kennel of calm, where elfdom damped down the satyr in them and all was right again with the world.

Sexlessness reclaimed them.

But it did not reclaim Fritz.

He stood there in the etched light of magic time, his clasped hands pressed against his erection, waiting for Anya to uncurtain her windows, to re-emerge on the porch, to give him some sign that his priapic adoration of her was not misplaced, that it had its parallel in the urgings of her own lovely sex.

*****

On the long walk home, Anya felt nothing.

In the shower, nothing.

Beneath the comforter staring up at the ceiling, still nothing. The close of her eyelids and her swift drop into sleep came as casually and as unlooked for as a shift in the wind.

In dream, her naked body sprawled across the snowy commons. Her right thigh rested upon the roof of the cottage, her left upon the workshop. Both buildings were weather-beaten, broken-windowed, abandoned and badly in need of repair. So too the elves' quarters along whose ragged front eaves she ran an idle finger.

The winter cloudcover broke. The Lord God's hands parted the firmament. His face showered beatitudes upon her. Then, touching His foot to the earth, He crouched between her legs like the lowliest of His creation. His vestments were of rough bronze and leather. His beard, always feather-white before, had turned a mischievous brown shot with bolts of silver. His eyes rioted with typhoons. With the easy contrariety of dreams, Anya knew that this was how God the Father had come to them at the beginning of Santa's realm, even as He manifested Himself in robe and crown, fingers bejeweled and beard beribboned, with hosts of angels singing His praises.

Along the folds of her flesh, His tongue traced a path of healing. He flicked and swirled blessing upon blessing there until her soul felt so full of passion she wondered the wood didn't blaze up about them nor the snow sizzle into steam.

At first when He moved to cover her, she protested, craving more mouth. But where His divine flesh touched hers, He was all tongue. His private hair was a writhe of tongues, teasing, urgent, intelligent. And His unending organ of generation eased past the swollen petals of her womanhood and gloried inside. Ever deeper His divinity probed, absorbing heartache and radiating epiphany.

And when He kissed Anya's eyelids, she knew for one blinding instant what she had once been. The heady scent of mountain groves in moonlight came to her. Her chaotic queenship over the fir nymphs. Pitys, her name. After elusive chase she had turned to fir, felt Pan peel off a low branch and wear it as a chaplet, watched him kneel in supplication at the base of her trunk, suffered blinding white splashes of devotion against her bark, and at long last metamorphosed back and let him prick her to his heart's content. Thus to Pan and his satyr offspring did Pitys's fir nymphs thenceforth behave, eternally open to poking, giving back better than they got and falling upon each other when the males were spent.

God's love made Anya young again, locked that youth into place. The barbs and burrs of old age softened and fell away. And when His climax came, it was oblivion as sweet as it gets, all-embracing, with a pleasure bearable only because her flesh had become divine.