Succubus in the City (35 page)

“Oh Lily,” he whispered. “Oh my God, Lily.”

He tore off the sweater and threw it on a chair. I looked at him in awe. Scholar, yes, but he had spent a good bit of time in the gym, too. Or hefting around those tablets; they were heavy. Marten had a lovely body, but Nathan had the smooth, defined look of an athlete. It may be a cliché, but there is something about six-pack abs and defined pecs and deltoids that are just delicious.

There is also something about a man’s nipples, very small on a chest full of muscle, when they’re clearly hard and tight. Aroused. Most men don’t realize how sensitive their nipples are. I ran my finger very lightly over Nathan’s and he moaned and half closed his eyes. I leaned over to lick them, but he pulled my head up. “Oh, no,” he breathed heavily. “No fair.”

I didn’t understand what he meant, and then he peeled off my leather shrug and my tank top and tossed both of them on the chair with his sweater. He left my bra, though, and traced the outline with his lips.

“Mmmm, lingerie,” he muttered the words into the skin of my breasts. “Pretty.”

I wanted to get out of that bra as quickly as possible. I wanted to feel his hands, his lips, on my breasts. I wanted him to tease at my nipples as I had done his.

But he didn’t unlatch my bra, didn’t even pause, but continued kissing down my stomach and tracing my skin with his tongue. Then he played with my navel, darting his tongue in and out as his hands reached my thighs.

How I wished I’d worn a skirt, so I could rip off my panties and he could explore me the way I wanted him to. But I was wearing those very fashionable crop pants made out of fabric that was way too heavy to feel the way he touched me. He sat back for a moment and unzipped my high boots, and pulled them gently off my feet. Then he took my left foot and began to massage the bottom of my foot and my calf. I nearly melted, one little goblet of succubus left in the massive explosion of wonder.

I’d had men rub my feet before, fetishists who found this act humiliating and sexually stimulating at the same time. Marten had rubbed my feet as a form of seduction. Not Nathan. He was rubbing my feet because he wanted me to relax. He applied himself carefully, paying attention to the soft responsive places on the bottom of my foot that I’d never known I had.

And just when I felt so relaxed that I was no longer certain of skeletal support, he lay my left foot on a toss pillow and then applied himself to the right.

I could have gone to Heaven then and there.

Instead, I grabbed his shoulders and pulled him back down on top of me. This time he did remove my bra (with a minimum of fumbling—it always amazes me how grown men who supposedly have some experience with sex cannot manage to unhook a bra) and held my breasts in his hands. His hands were large but my breasts overfilled them, spilling out against my chest.

He touched my nipples gently this time, feeling the response, though they were already erect. Bending over me, he kissed each nipple lightly, and then took the right one in his mouth and began to suck softly, flicking his tongue. While I moaned and begged for more, he took his time, as if he knew he was uncovering some new Babylonian treasure.

“We could be more comfortable,” he whispered in my ear.

I nodded enthusiastically and started to get up, but he pushed me back into the sofa. “Wait.” And then he got up and lifted me off the couch into his arms.

Yes, he certainly
had
been in the gym. He carried me out of the living room and up the stairs onto the mezzanine bedroom. Right at that moment all I noticed was how long it took and how badly I wanted all of our clothes off.

He lay me gently on the bed, kicked off his own shoes and tumbled next to me before he turned and buried his face back in my breasts. I was breathless, excited, ready. Almost too ready. I started to fumble with his belt and he immediately bent and relieved himself of his trousers, underwear and socks with a single practiced movement.

And he was utterly beautiful and obviously quite enthusiastic about me. Obviously.

I reached out to caress him but he shook his head. “Shhh, you first,” he said. And he pulled the elastic from his hair and let his long black hair tumble free over his shoulders. Thick and straight and well past his shoulder blades, it made an ink-dark shadow against his pale skin. I breathed in sharply, wanting nothing more than to run my fingers through that hair. He leaned over me and let his loose hair tickle my ribs, my breasts, and my belly. His hands went to my waistband and oh so very slowly he unbuttoned and unzipped, and slipped the capris off, leaving my panties.

No, no, no. I wanted them gone, I wanted everything right then. I wanted him inside me desperately. But he bent down again and ran his hands up my thighs and traced the outline of my panties as he had done with my bra. I was quivering, a mass of sensation without thought. When he ran his hand lightly over my still-clothed mound I thought I would expire from the need that had built inside me. And he matched that need, I could see quite plainly that he wanted as much as I did. But still he waited, teasing, drawing the seconds out cruelly and deliciously.

He slipped one finger under the thin lace of my panties and I shuddered and practically came right then as the tip of his finger grazed the outer edge of my labia, already slickly lubricated with my own desire.

“Mmmm,” he said, smiling. I wriggled and tried to ditch the panties, but he wasn’t having it. He wagged his finger at me and with a decidedly devilish expression went back to toying with me, panties in place.

Even with all my squirming he managed to keep me just on the edge and avoided the one final release I desperately desired. The pressure and warmth built inside me, built and built until I was beyond thought. Frustration drove my hips as the orgasm I so deeply needed was held just barely out of reach. “Please please please,” I begged him.

He still did not remove the offending La Perlas, but merely moved them aside and flicked his tongue expertly over my mons. And I exploded with the most overwhelming tidal orgasm I could remember in three thousand years as a succubus. Wave after wave rode me and my legs spasmed with the aftershocks.

“Satisfied?” A whisper in my ear.

I shook my head. “Want the rest,” I managed to sputter, though I’m not sure my words were entirely intelligible. So I reached up and stroked his cock and he shuddered. “Want.”

My mental processes were orbiting Mars.

He leaned over to the bedside table and put on a condom while I removed the dripping remnants of my eighty-dollar five inches of lace.

And then he entered me, so slowly that it was almost painful. I wanted him, wanted his strength and energy, but he was showing far more strength in holding back. Then, finally, there was satisfaction, that utterly delicious replete feeling with all the stimulation in all the right places.

Nathan was not the largest man I’d ever had, but he was plenty large enough. And I was already so sensitive and stimulated that it was all I could do to wait before falling over again into a second orgasm and then a third.

And then I really wanted him to come. I needed his response, needed to know that I could bring him as much pleasure as he had given me. My skill, my desirability, my beauty were on the line as I increased the pace. “I want you to come, I need you to come,” I chanted over and over.

Suddenly he changed his own rhythm, speeding up so that he was practically pounding me the way I wanted. I needed him raw and powerful, for my own power was on me and I was channeling it, increasing his desire and need in a way that would magnify his experience.

He shuddered and bucked, out of control. Then he threw his head back and his mouth opened with a soundless cry as I finally brought him over the pinnacle into release.

I had the power in me and with me and I held him and coiled it around him. It was a power that could mean death but I held it firmly disciplined. And that power, which I could release to deliver a soul to my Master or withhold wrapped around us both and surged with another level of sexuality.

Death and sex are one. No one knows that better than a succubus. And so, for the first time in three thousand years, I did not simply withhold the death but transmuted it. So he came and then he relaxed and was hit again and came again even more powerfully than before.

And the second time he screamed aloud, and he screamed my name.

We lay in bed too limp to move, both of us covered with a sheen of sweat though it was February and the streets were covered in slush and the thermostat was turned down to 68. A shower would be nice. Sometime later. I could not move, could not speak, could not bother to roll away from the dampness beneath me.

I heard Nathan breathing beside me, but I could hardly turn my face enough to look at him, and I’m not sure how long the two of us lay as if we were dead.

After some time I was able to move again, just a little. Nathan rolled over and sat up. I turned enough so that I could see him remove the condom. Then he rolled over and managed to burrow into the covers, and threw an arm over me.

I removed the arm. “I’d like to rinse off first,” I said.

He grunted and I moved out of the bed. I just was too sticky and gross to sleep. A few minutes of water and soap would make me feel much better.

The bathroom, like the rest of the apartment, was perfectly beautiful. Definitely there had been a designer involved. The bathroom was floored in flagstone with a deep two-person Jacuzzi set into a deck that was influenced by Japanese aesthetic. The shower was separate, floored and tiled in flagstone, with lemongrass soap, shaving gear, and two plants on a knee-high ledge. When I got out of the shower I found a cabinet with clean fluffy white towels. I wrapped one around my body and, clean and fresh, I felt suddenly very wide awake.

The entire mezzanine level was bedroom and personal space. Nathan appeared deeply asleep. I looked out the massive windows overlooking the city and saw the faintest lightening in the sky.

Restless, I started to explore. A large modern desk, glass on steel, dominated the far wall. Amazing how good it looked with the Deco antiques. I wandered over and saw the bookcase beside it and a credenza in the shadow. Idly, both bored and curious, I nosed around the items on the desk. I thumbed through his calendar and saw little of note—work meetings and one that read
Mom,
8 pm. Cute.

A fine notebook lay neatly in the corner. One of those elegant journals with handmade paper sold in elite stationery shops, it was bound in hand-stitched blue leather.

I opened it with no thought of what I might find. Men do not keep diaries, not that I’d ever noticed. So I thought it might be a picture album or book notes or something. But what I saw startled me beyond belief.

It was a handwritten series of triangles, some with short tails and some with long. Sometimes the smallest were enclosed in a fence of long-tailed triangles.

It was Akkadian. Handwritten. In a hand that was neat and legible and carefully schooled but looked nothing like any Babylonian scribe had produced. I sat in the desk chair and started to read.

I started near the back, not that I wasn’t curious about everything he had to say but I wanted most of all to see if there was any reference to me. And there, on the third to last page, I read an entry that, roughly translated, began, “I met a beautiful girl. A girl who thinks. A girl who is like all the stars. I hope I see her again.”

I heard a voice behind me. “What do you think?”

He had moved so quietly that I hadn’t heard him get up, hadn’t smelled him or felt his warmth as he moved behind me.

“You write in Akkadian,” I said weakly, not knowing what to say. I’d been caught reading his private diary, when men don’t write diaries. I looked up at his face, fearing the fury that I was certain would be there.

There was only humor and satisfaction in his expression. “Yes, I do write in Akkadian,” he said, quite pleased with himself. “I started keeping a diary as an exercise to write the language regularly. It was something we started doing in second year and I’ve always liked it.”

“But,” I protested very shakily. “Aren’t you worried about anyone reading it? About how I was just looking at it?”

And then Nathan laughed out loud. “That’s exactly the beauty of it, Lily. You were looking at it. And I don’t care. Because there are only thirty people in the world, maybe, who can read this. And I know most of them in this country. It’s the best security device I know, kind of like the code talkers in World War Two. Look all you want. I’ve got all my detective notes in here, too.”

I put the book down and he grinned at me, took my hand and pulled me up. “You are welcome to look at my notes and my journal anytime you like. You’re welcome to look at it all night, but I’m tired now and I was asleep and I knew you weren’t there. Aren’t you tired, Lily? You can look at the book tomorrow, but why don’t you come to bed now?”

So I went to bed, so relieved that I wanted to laugh and jump and shout for joy. I went to bed curled up against Nathan and I thought I would be too happy to sleep, so I was surprised to find that when I looked at the clock I had already missed the first meeting of the morning.

chapter
TWENTY-EIGHT

Sybil and I met for dinner at Ono in the Meatpacking District. Just a year or so ago this area was still rough, full of actual meat warehouses and leather bars. Now the good shops have started to move in and the clubs are trendy and full of people strutting their best designer duds.

Ono is one of the most beautiful restaurants in the city, modern and spare with a curtain of crystals hung over the bar. Their Asian fusion cuisine is innovative and exciting. When I first lived in New York I missed the fine sauces and interplay of flavors that I’d grown used to in Italy and France. Then Americans ate steak and salad and potatoes. I used to go to the premier French restaurant in midtown at least once a week to give my palate a perk. The only other foods that were interesting and reminded me of better times were the traditional Italian trattorias in the West Village and Little Italy, and the Chinese on Mott Street.