The Amber Columns (The City of Dark Pleasures Book 2) (6 page)

O’Mara frowns up at me. “What did you want with a lady’s bracelet?”

Our noses touch, her brown eyes go out of focus.

“I wanted to give it to someone,” I say, my own eyes drifting shut. “I wanted to give it to you.” And then, so I don’t have to explain anymore, and because I really want to, I kiss her.

Chapter Six – O’Mara

Tully kisses so tentatively, unlike the first time he kissed me, when he was “priming me” for the most intense sexual experience of my life. This kiss is nothing like that, because I realize that first kiss was just business. This one only lasts a second, there is no tongue or groping, his hands curl around my arm and the back of my head. But gently—his touch is soft.

And yet, in the brief time it lasts, I feel the same kind of intimate connection I did with the imaginary version of him I encountered in my first dream. Kissing Tully is like kissing someone directly on their soul. There’s something beyond erotic about that; I could cry and orgasm at the same time. When he withdraws and stares down at me with his golden eyes I forget to breathe. My core aches, sending a shooting jolt of desire and need up my body. And of course, I want him desperately; want him to do things I know he can’t.

It’s as though he knows. He gives a little shake of his head as he looks at me, and those golden eyes glass over.

“Do you know much about us?” he asks. “About how we are?”

I just shake my head. Of Culls, he means. I’ve looked it up. I’ve read some things. But people don’t like to talk about it. There’s an attitude that eventually they will all die and we can forget about them – forget it ever happened.

“I take these hormones,” he says. “If I don’t take them then I’m like a child, a young boy. But it’s hard to get them balanced. They’re expensive and mostly I buy black market ones and they can be a bit unpredictable. So the levels are…messy.”

I find my voice at last. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I just want you to understand. I’m not a thief. It’s wrong to steal. Wrong and stupid, especially for non-citizens. But my…chemical state means that sometimes I act like a teenage boy. Impulsive.”

“So you had an impulse to steal a pretty bracelet? For me?”

He actually hangs his head.

“Why do you say this as though it’s a bad thing?”

“Isn’t it?”

“Tully, no one has ever had any kind of generous impulse towards me. At least not since my mother died.”

He leans down and kisses me again. This one is a little deeper than the last, and our hands untangle from the tentative places on arms and hips and wrap around each other. He slips his hands inside my jacket and links them behind my waist.

This time, when we part, it is him that is speechless, and breathless. I watch him for a moment before speaking again.

“If I joined a harem there would be no impulses. My contact with my husband would be scheduled like a haircut. Some husbands buy gifts for their wives but it’s all ordered and planned, each gift has to be equal to the next or there is conflict.”

“There must be men who want something different.” He nudges my cheek with his nose.

“
You
want something different, don’t you?”

“I’m not a man, O’Mara. I’m not even a citizen. I’m nothing.” But he kisses me. And this time there is no reluctance. His tongue invades my welcoming mouth and caresses mine as he tightens his grip on my waist, pressing our bodies together. And in that moment, wrapped around me, his tongue inside me, his breath mingling with mine, Tully isn’t nothing.

He’s everything. Everything I’ve ever wanted. More man than any woman has ever had.

“Are you okay?” he asks, pulling back. “You made a noise.”

“I’m more than okay.” So much more than okay that I’ve started to tremble.

It’s partly from cold. They say our island used to be “tropical”, whatever that means, but now the climate consists of sunny fresh days and cold verging on frigid nights. The farms only function with heat coils buried in the soil.

“It’s getting cold,” Tully says. “Let me see if I can fix your jacket.”

He lifts my arms out to my sides and opens the front of my jacket, pulling something from his pocket. As he tucks it into his mouth I see it’s a data stick. He clicks it on and it lights up, providing a little illumination as he unzips the innards of my jacket.

I try to keep still as he digs around in the lining.

“Ay!” he yelps suddenly, withdrawing his hand. “Well, your battery is still good,” He says out the side of his mouth. He digs in again, yanking out a thin cable with a connecter at the end. Oddly, he puts it in his mouth, then removes it, polishing it on his sweater. His hand brushes my breast as he slips the cable back into the lining of the jacket. Seconds later, it begins to heat up, infusing me with welcome warmth.

Tully grins down at me. “Better? It was a dirty connector. The fluff from the lining interferes with the charge.”

“You’re very handy,” I say. “What else can you do with your fingers?”

The expression on his face is worth the courage it took me to say that.

“Fuck,” he says, laughing. “You’re different from what I expected. Cheekier.”

“You bring it out in me.”

As I look up at him, I’m surprised by how much my body and brain are telling me to do things that just won’t work. Undo his belt, tugs his jeans down over his slim hips. And then what? I have a constant mantra repeating in my head.
He’s a Cull. He’s a Cull. He’s a Cull.
I want him that way, but I don’t want to want him that way. It only makes me sad.

“There’s a cloud,” Tully says, waving his hand over my eyes. “What brought
that
on?”

I cover it by looking at my wrist monitor. “It’s late. It will be dawn soon. I think I get kicked out, don’t I?”

Tully sighs, sliding his hand down my arm to take my hand. “Yeah. I’ll walk you back to the gate.”

As we walk I think about the dream I had in his machine, how I sucked his imaginary cock, how he fucked me. None of those things can really happen. And yet, feeling his hand in mine, as my body warms from the heat coils he fixed, I find it getting easier to let that dream Tully go and transfer all the feelings I had for him to this one—the real one. Love was always my fantasy, but I wonder if this love isn’t just as imagined as the love I felt in the dream.

As the lights of the Promenade appear though the thick trees lining the path, Tully lifts my hand and presses it to his lips. It’s so sweet and gentle it makes me laugh.

“What’s so funny?” he asks, slipping my hand in his into the warm pocket of my jacket.

“In the dream, for part of it anyway, you were different than this. You were…” I search for the word. I know there is one. “Dominant?”

Tully frowns, pulling me to a stop under a canopy of flickering fairy lights. I can see he’s amused by my confession. “Dominant how?”

I decide to just come out and say it. “You tied me up and spanked me.”

“I did
what
?!” There is revulsion in his voice. “You mean in one of the nightmares? Not the first dream.”

“You’ve never done that? Lots of women I know say they come here to be tied up and spanked.”

Tully falls silent and begins walking again, pulling me along with him. “I did all kinds of things when I first came here,” he says at last. “I mean I did whatever people asked of me. Whatever I
could
do.  Did you like it? In the dream, I mean. Did you like that part?”

I shrug. The truth is I’m not sure. “I thought it was funny. But then it was scary. But you stopped as soon as I thought it.”

He nods thoughtfully. “But in the nightmares I don’t stop?”

I try to make little of it. “They’re just dreams. Sometimes they’re not even scary. Sometimes they’re just strange.” I force a laugh. “Like in one, we were having sex on the roof of my dorm. Me perched on the edge. Can you imagine? A hundred and four stories high? It seems a little risky. I don’t—”

My eyes fill with tears suddenly. I try to dash them away unnoticed. But nothing escapes Tully. He has made a career of reading people and giving them what they need. He stops and wraps his arms around me.

“I just don’t know why I would dream such things,” I sob into his shoulder. “I’m not scared of you. Why would I be scared of you?”

He just shakes his head, pressing his lips into my hair, his hands making soothing circles on my back.

I gather myself somewhat, wiping my face. I speak into the warmth of his soft sweater. “I come every time.”

A second goes past. A second in which my whole body burns with embarrassment and desire.

“Pardon me?” Tully says at last.

“In the nightmares. Whether you…no matter what you do. No matter how violent or…non-consensual or depraved I always come. I wake up coming.”

He’s silent for a long time. Finally I look up at him to see his eyes are clenched shut, his face stony.

“Say something,” I entreat him.

More time goes past before he speaks. “A lot of Culls hate women. Blame women for everything.”

“That’s understandable.”

“I’m not one of them. I know who the real perpetrators are. All too well.”

I don’t know what he means by this and it doesn’t feel like the right time to ask for clarification.

“I love women,” he says. “I mean, I…always wanted to love a woman. To be loved by a woman.”

“I love you, Tully.”

“Oh. God,” he says, his voice breaking. It’s odd to hear him use this word. People refer to God so infrequently now. No one believes that nonsense anymore. Why would they, after everything that’s happened? Half the planet destroyed by catastrophic climate shifts, the other half plunged into a century of brutal war. And the little pockets of civilization left, falling prey to civil calamities like the Expiation. And the Culls. What sort of God would have that as his plan?

“You don’t really know me,” he says. “But I would never…I have never hurt a woman. When I stole that bracelet that was the first time I’ve ever…victimized a woman. Male citizens, men…I used to steal from them all the time when…” He sighs. “I used to do things with men.” He looks at me then, as though waiting for a reaction.

“So?”

“I did something with a man just the other night because I needed money.” He raises his eyebrows, waiting.

“Am I supposed to be disgusted that you have sex with men for survival? I’m not a total idiot, Tully. I’m a journalist. I know how our society works. Sex is our main form of currency outside the Pleasures too, you know. Women try to fuck their way into the most prestigious harem they can. And in the harems they fuck and suck each other for political gain, for alliances against the other wives. Like monkeys. It’s disgusting. But you have no choice. You’d choose something else if you did, wouldn’t you?”

Standing there, clinging to each other it’s as though we are the only two virtuous people left on earth. On our little corner of the earth anyway. I don’t know what people are like on the mainland. They buy our salacious news for exorbitant amounts of money, but the news we get of them is heavily filtered. Maybe their way of life is even more depraved than ours.

“One man and one woman,” Tully says. “That’s what you want?”

“For me, yes. I don’t care if other people prefer something different. The harems are wrong I think. They’re unhealthy. But women together or men together are fine, I guess for them. I know couples of women who are so happy. They love each other. That’s all I want. Love. Like it used to be.”

It’s my turn to look at him expectantly. But he takes so long to reply that I blush with shame again. It’s ridiculous to imagine he loves me. What have I been thinking?

“You need to have a soul to love. I don’t think I have a soul anymore.”

“Why did you steal the bracelet, then?”

He laughs nervously, like a child caught in a lie. “You need a man, O’Mara. I’m not a man.”

“Stop saying that! Tell me why you stole the bracelet. Why would you take such a stupid risk for me if you didn’t feel something?”

“I did feel something,” he says, and it registers with me that he’s trembling as much as I am, even though back here on the promenade is warmer than the path. “I do feel something. I’ve created this kind of idol of you in my mind. I don’t know why, apart from…you’re beautiful and sweet and the way you blush is adorable. And there are so few people left who will even criticize the status quo anymore. The way you talk…only Culls talk like that because we have nothing to lose. Everyone else is too scared to point out how obviously fucked up our society is.”

“Not me. I’d shout it from the mountain tops if we had any. I don’t know how anyone could not see that without love we’re nothing.”

I wait for the words, but they don’t come. Maybe that doesn’t matter.

From the main gate, we hear a bell ring and a distorted voice, announcing that citizens should prepare to vacate the Pleasures for the day. Tully looks at his wrist monitor.

“We have fifteen minutes.” He takes my hand. “Come, I want to show you something.”

He pulls me along the nearly empty promenade – the only other people around are in pairs like us. A man who looks like a servant and a citizen woman. A few of the couples seem to be the reverse. And there is a trickle of male/male couples strolling towards the exit from the Western Villas.

“Who are..?” I begin to ask. But then I realize what Tully wanted me to see.