thenoondaydemon (3 page)

One black eyebrow rose over his curiously gold-green eye. He didn’t balk at her insult, only smirked.

“My angels sell for thousands.” She raised her glass at one, an Asian nude with purple wings. “He’s already promised to a man in Paris. And him.” She tipped her head at the angel with the afro, gold wings curled over his chocolate colored skin. “He’s been promised a place at the Whitney Museum in New York.”

Val seemed unimpressed. He drank his lemonade; he waited for her to say something more. It irked her. She wanted him to be awed with her talent, with
her.

Abra
studied his hips, imaging him naked and hammering against her ass. She liked to think she enjoyed sex as much as most independent art freaks, but something about this guy screamed at her eroticism. She wanted him, craved him. Every turn of his gaze, every hard muscle in his body begged for her attention.
Abra
felt an epiphany coming on, one she never thought to have.
I need him.

She took a step back, then another, until her ass bumped into the wood that rimmed the entry. Drinking the lemonade nervously, she tried to turn that desperate need off.
Ridiculous.
I don’t need anyone. I never have, and I never will.
A phantom touch crept along her inner thighs. She shivered.

Val gazed at her with a knowing stare. He sipped the last of his drink, the fingers on his left hand thrumming against his leg.

The ghostly touch sought the wetness of her womanhood, slipping, teasing, then in an unexpected rush, forcing their way inside.
Abra
looked down, unsure of what she expected to see. No one knelt before her. The skirt of her dress hugged her legs with soft cotton.

“Something wrong?”

She reached down and smoothed her skirt. The sensation vanished. She regretted questioning its presence. Those fingers felt damn good.
“N—no.”
She sipped at her lemonade. “How long will you be in town?”

Val strode across the distance that separated them. He stopped before her, bending to take in a ravenous breath.
Abra
leaned into his heat. Beyond his soapy fragrance, she could taste him, the sweet, salty musk of a man, just as it tasted in her dream. “I’ll be here as long as it takes,” he replied.

“Takes for what?”

“To get the job done.”

She nodded.

He ran his lips across her cheek, sliding them to her earlobe,
then
he
vanished
.

Abra’s
scream caught in her throat. Soon after, his glass hit the linoleum, shooting green shards and ice cubes in every direction.

The clock chimed once.

Afraid to move, she stood there for a long while. “I should have put shoes on.” That seemed logical, but her thoughts did not.
He disappeared. He was here one second and the next he was gone. Poof! What is this?
Some kind of black magic?
Gathering her courage, she knelt and collected the larger pieces of broken glass into a pile.
Abra
half jumped into the study, setting her glass on the floor. The corn broom and purple plastic dustpan stood near her table of pastels. She often used them to sweep up the dust from the chalks and those annoying beads of crayon-like bumps the oil pastels made. She snatched the broom up and swept the remainder into the jagged mess.

“Shoes,” she reminded herself. It wouldn’t do to step on one of those sharp edges.

Her sandals were in the study.
Abra
rushed into that room and stopped, staring down with a dizzy feeling.
He vanished. How can that be?
She changed her mind about cleaning. “There’s no one here but me. Who really cares?” The thought felt forced. She’d always minded before, always kept the house clean.

A few unpacked boxes were pushed to the side of the couch and one she recognized. The thought of crushing her dildo between her legs appealed to her. She glanced at the couch, frowned, and opted to sit down to reason out what had happened.

The beige cushions warmed up after what seemed only a few minutes.
Abra
stared at the grandfather clock by the bookshelf and did a double take. “It’s two?” She leaned to one side and let her head fall against the armrest. Curling her legs up, she kicked the magazines onto the floor in short bursts.

From the easels, four of her angels watched. They looked washed out, like bad watercolor renderings by a first time student of the craft. “Must be the light,” she muttered as she studied them.
Abra
felt tired, drained.

“Maybe I imagined him,” she told the angels from their easel perches. A triangle of glass on the floor caught the ray of sunlight beaming through the window in the studio and glittered at her.
No. He was real. I wasn’t holding that glass. I didn’t drop it.

She turned her gaze on her box of sex toys, the packing tape still sealing them off from use.
It’d be nice to have a real man.
More than six months had passed since that skinny Italian guy at the last show. “And he was too fast. Men are so impatient, only care about getting themselves off.” Determined, but feeling lazy, she hiked up her skirt and stared at the curls of hair that mounded over her pussy.

The clock chimed four times. Lacking enthusiasm, she spread her legs wide, closed her eyes, and threaded her fingers together behind the back of her head. Heat spread across her feet, reaching around her ankles. Invisible lips pressed against the soft flesh behind her left knee. She sighed at the caress. A wet, questing tongue tickled its way from there, along the tender skin of her inner thigh. With its hot tip, the tongue parted her labia.
Abra
fought the desire to squirm. The unseen intruder lapped at her moistness in excruciating, long draws. Her legs trembled each time. Teeth pinched her clit, tugging it for a startling instant. The unexpected shock of tender pain felt good, something she’d not experienced before.

“Harder,” she begged. “Do it harder.”

The incubus halted.

Her body shuddering for climax, she opened her eyes and looked down. “Why did you leave?” she cried out, frustrated.

No one answered. The clock chimed five times and she realized she’d missed breakfast and lunch. Her stomach grumbled, and her clit shouted for attention.

Abra
rolled off the couch, shot the seven painted angels an acid-filled stare and stepped around the pile of broken glass to the small kitchen. The basket of bananas on the counter appealed to her in a way they never had before. “Damn, I need a man.” As soon as the words slipped out, she shook her head, countering the statement.

She opened the fridge and gaped at its contents. “I don’t need anyone but me.”

“Yes. You like being alone, don’t you?”

It was Val’s voice in her thoughts, deep, alluring and simmering with sordid secrets, the promise of fulfillment, of companionship. “I don’t need you,” she whispered. “I need a turkey on rye with extra mayo.
Maybe a pickle too.”

The voice chuckled.

“Not that kind of pickle. I don’t need a man. I have fingers, a rubber dick and a lot of sick thoughts.” She took out the mayo, snatched the package of roast turkey breast and the cheddar.
Abra
toted it all to the table, set it there, and went for a butter knife. She didn’t bother with a plate. The bag of rye was almost gone. She returned to the table and sat in the chair Val had occupied the day before.

Searing heat spread through her. It felt as if she’d sat on his lap and her hungry channel swallowed up his hard, thick cock.
Abra
knew she was alone, as deserted as ever. The appealing thought of a man inside her, thrusting, driving his body deeper, it overwhelmed her reason for some time. She closed her eyes, leaned back and felt the pull of curled fingers urging her down.
Abra
moaned. She wriggled in the chair, forcing that bulky shaft to fill her.

The butter knife slipped from her grasp, clattering on the tabletop. Her eyes shot wide, the mysterious phallus retreating as unexpectedly as it had invaded her. She glanced around the kitchen, sweat cooling on her skin. Reaching up, she pinched her nipple, twisting it between her thumb and forefinger. Her pussy pleaded for more. She stopped pleasuring herself and shook her head.

Abra
unscrewed the cap from the mayo jar and retrieved the knife. She slathered the white cream over each slice of bread. Her mouth watered. She put two slices of turkey, bit her lip and dropped a third on. Then two slices of cheddar.
“Mm.
That’s what I need. Not some migrant man that vanishes like a magician’s bunny.” She bit into her sandwich, chewing thoughtfully. The mention of a bunny made her remember an old lover. He used to turn her on with the stupidest phrases.

“Let’s fuck like rabbits.”

Abra
giggled. It was Val’s voice swimming in her mind, tempting as hot chocolate on a cold night. She wanted him to touch her, to take her any way he could think of and make her beg for more. She ate half her sandwich, stared at the bananas too long and decided, when the clock—which needed recalibrating because time couldn’t possibly be moving that fast—clanged out seven times.

“Time to paint,” she said, and got up to do just that.

Chapter Three

The tribal angel’s dick was the first thing to go. She crossed it out in angry painted swoops with her index finger. She smeared the mix of silvery gray across his innocent features and felt the others watching, waiting like lambs in line for the slaughter.
Then came the old one, his gray hair blending in with the paint she
globbed
over his face.
Abra
moved on, saving the two she’d discussed with Val for last. They remained stoic as she buried them beneath the paint, their colors muted from whatever spell they’d fallen prey to.

It felt utterly mad to cover her creations. She stood there when finished, in the midst of them all, and studied the demon painting. Paint dribbled from her tingling fingers. It spattered onto the wood floor, tiny echoing droplets landing on her bare feet. Naked, as was her way, she wiped the remaining paint across her abdomen and strutted to the bathroom to look at
herself
in the mirror.

Someone else’s face stared at her from the looking glass, his black eyebrows slanting at odds with her light brown ones.
Abra
leaned closer until her nose touched the cold glass. Val’s ghostly image faded. “That’s right,” she told her image. “Run away. You know I don’t need you.”

Pacing to the study, she tore at the cardboard box, leaving swipes of melded color across its surface. Her fingers slipped on the packing tape, but determined, she picked it free and tore it off, revealing the many toys within. Grinning, she grasped the object of her desire and clutched it to her chest as she returned to the bathroom.

She traipsed to the tub, stepped over her clothes from the previous day and climbed inside, setting the prize aside. The water came on, slapping her skin with its icy touch. She held still, quivering in the cold as it eased into the blistering temperature she preferred.
Abra
washed her hands, her arms, worked the bar of soap over her upper chest and then crossed her breasts with slick, massaging strokes. She glanced down at her pubic hair, remembering that she’d forgotten to shave. “Not that it matters. It’s only me and…” She turned in a graceful half spin, picked up her purple dildo and gave it a squeeze. “My jell friend, complete with suction cup for hands free relief.” She laughed at herself, moistened the gargantuan toy in the shower jet,
then
fitted its cup to the fiberglass wall at just the right height.

Abra
faced the shower again, bent over and backed into the rubber cock’s rounded head. The phallus paused at her entrance. It had been too long and things were tightening up. In a desperate backward thrust, she forced it inside. Her ass hit the wall with a loud thump. The length that filled her stretched the walls of her channel to their limit. She moved back and forth in slow, calculated thrusts. She rammed it harder, the dance of sex and release,
a
torrid, needful game.

Working her nipple with her fingers, she reached down with her free hand and found the center of her clit. It ached from the prior shower party, flaring a painful warning that she ignored. Her ass slapped into the shower wall; her finger demanded her clit to play along. At the edge of a blissful precipice, she cried out her frustration. The cock came undone from its perch, entered at an awkward sideways angle and fell away, bouncing in the inch of water on the tub floor.

Abra
groaned.

Beyond the lull of the shower, she thought she heard someone laughing.

* * * *

“I don’t need a man. I’m fine on my own.” She stood at the bedroom window, naked save the towel wrapped around her head like a top-heavy turban. The grille of Val’s old pickup smiled at her with its rusty, white-painted grin. No shadow of a man waited in the cab. She knew; she’d gone to check. Buck naked and sexually aggravated, she’d marched straight out there in the cold, November wind and peered inside, hopeful.

Val, who or whatever he was, was not inside his pickup.
He wasn’t in the barn either, but a bale of hay had burst from its twine and lay in a seductive pile, a rumpled, white t-shirt nearby. She’d stood there a long time, remembering the taste of him in her dream. She hungered for that taste; that sample only made her mouth water for the full of his release.

“Go away and leave me alone,” she told him, wherever he might be hiding. “I need to be alone so I can paint.”

She slid the curtains closed, stumbled over the edge of the rug, and climbed beneath the wrinkled quilt, horny, unable to bring
herself
to orgasm, and fighting the need to submit to admitting she couldn’t handle being alone any longer.

“I have faith in myself,” she explained to the darkness. “Once I lose that, what’s the point?” She rolled on her side, hugged one of the pillows and drifted into a troubled sleep.

The dream began the same. He rested spread eagle against the fallen hay in her barn, his eyes closed, his jeans calling to be torn away.
Abra
crawled toward him like a stalking panther, hungry for her prey, that promising, erect tower of a dick with its bulging head. She wanted to taste him again, then crawl higher and guide his shaft between her legs. She’d let it tease her, crush angrily against her sore clit until she couldn’t take it any longer.

Her teeth closed over his zipper; she jerked her head down. She bit down on the waistband of his jeans and tugged the snap button free. Her fingers dipped into the sides of the denim and she forced the fabric away, past his hips. Blue and white boxers were no match for her need. She tugged down the front, too anxious to do more. The red head of his uncircumcised dick rested against his pubic hair, a prize waiting in that curly, black nest. She glanced up, smiled as he slumbered, and let her tongue reach for the head of his cock.
Abra
tasted the now familiar flavor of him. She suckled like a hungry calf, drawing him inside her mouth.

He moaned.

She looked up.

His eyes opened slowly, the pupils flickering with a faint red light. For an instant, Val seemed puzzled. His eyebrows arched; his tempting, full lips parted. A drawn out sigh fell across the silence.

Abra
swirled her tongue around the head of his dick. He watched as she lifted her face, the tip of his erection sliding free from her wet lips. She crawled across his body until his face came level with hers.

“What do you want?” he asked in his low voice. Those eyes flashed crimson, the depths of Hell reflected in their midst. When he smiled, his teeth appeared pointed, his tongue a split, snake-like version of something inhuman.

Abra
hesitated. She’d known, all along, from the moment he appeared walking down the hill. The warmth that affected her that day came from a point after death, the dwelling place of nightmares. She remained there, stifled in his body heat, entranced by the unique desire that burned in her body to have him for her own, her very own for all eternity. To have him, to be his, this peculiar desire seemed…
unnatural.

“You’re trying to trick me.” She narrowed her eyes, waiting for him to refute her words.

He shrugged, the rigid length of his cock challenging her as it moved beneath her navel. “I only offer you what you do not have. Without me, admit it, you felt safe, an autonomous woman with free reign over her life, content in your solitude, in your farm cell. All I ask you is if that’s what you really want. Is it?”

“It’s all I need.” She spoke with resolve, determined to fight him.

His eyebrows furrowed tight together, and the signs of his true form faded until he appeared completely human, irresistible and sexy. Val laid his head against the gold hay, the light of dawn glowing across his gold-brown face. Beneath his head, she noticed his t-shirt, rolled into a makeshift pillow. The locks of his shadow-colored hair framed his perplexed countenance. Scarlet fire glittered in his ever-changing eyes. “You show great faith and devotion in yourself.”

Abra
rolled off him to land in the hay. It itched along her naked skin, poking at her curves, and she realized in a distant way that she must have been sleep-walking, that this was not her bed. She closed her eyes and drifted further until, at the sound of a dog barking out in the fields, she opened her eyes and wiped sweat from her brow.

The air moved in stifling gusts. She didn’t need to check a clock. High noon bore its over-heated orb in the hazy blue sky beyond the open barn door. Standing, she brushed the straw from her backside then glanced around the vast barn her father once used to store the heavy machinery. Daylight spilled through the high rafters in slits of bright white. Dust motes spun and danced, mocking her.

Though she walked naked toward the open door, stepping on a discarded white shirt, she didn’t feel the chill that ought to be in the autumn air. The noonday demon waited for her, his hellish heat smoldering in the light. The dog went silent.
Abra
sauntered out into the open air. Val’s truck grinned at her. Waves of heat swam across her field of vision, blurring the edges of all she stared at. The screen door tapped against its frame. She climbed the steps to the porch, crossed the peeling wood in seven long strides and went inside.

Val sat at her kitchen table, his shirt missing and every tempting muscle made available for her perusal should she care to do so.
Abra
bypassed him, glancing back to see the last serving of lemonade trickle into his glass. He nodded at her, his eyes a shade of ice blue this day.
Abra
blinked and went on her way.

She sidestepped the pile of glass, thinking in a vague way, that she ought to clean it up. As she walked down the hall by the bathroom, she noticed the piles of soiled clothing on the fuzzy, purple rug. Cleaning didn’t interest her at the moment though. It seemed the chore would never interest her again. She needed to get to her study. She needed to understand.
Abra
needed to find the tatty King James Bible and read a passage, a few words that called to her from that worn out tome.

“Or maybe the angels are warning you.”

“Be silent, Demon. I know who you are.”

From the kitchen Val answered, laughter in his somber voice. “You know little, if anything at all.”

She threw lesser books aside—manuals, expired almanacs, composting guides and seed catalogs. There it stood, at the far end of the
third
shelf. For a blinding moment,
Abra
recognized the significance of the number. “Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” she whispered. Her fingers trembled as she reached for the bible. Grasping its spine, she pulled it free. Her grip failed, and the book tumbled to the wooden floor, landing open face.

She knelt to pick it up. Light from the window limned the pages, the very text she read aloud, “Psalms 91.6
Nor
for the pestilence that
walketh
in darkness; nor for the destruction that
wasteth
at noonday.”

Abra
dropped the bible on the coffee table. “I know who you are!”

She backed out of the study, through the hall and stopped in her studio. Seven silvery canvases circled the room, and the dark demon she’d painted looked as virile as ever. At the sight of his gray speckled phallus, an appendage more akin to that of a bull than a man,
Abra
felt the beginnings of arousal pressing in on her sense of rebellion. She shook her head, retreated to her bedroom, and sat on the edge of the mattress.

“Sleep.
I just want to sleep.” She stared through the doorway at the studio, at the paints and pastels, the canvases that used to call to her, urging her to create. Now they looked unimportant, something that, if she started to work on them, would become just one more mess to have to clean.

Work boots thumped in the kitchen. The demon came through the hall, his glass in hand. Val swigged it back, licked his lips and kept on with his ominous approach. He swept a hand through his straight hair, causing the locks to fall just so against his forehead. “I know what you want,” he told her. “To lay back against those pillows and let me have you, to surrender to me, to your inability to keep up with everything around you.” He paused in the doorway, turning his head slightly to the side. It made him all the more attractive.

Abra
felt his draw, the lure of surrender. She trembled, fighting the need to give in. Being alone seemed so impossible now, so full of work and tedium.

He knelt to untie and remove his boots. Val undid his pants. They fell away from his body. He wore a pair of crimson boxers, the color,
Abra
realized, matching that shifting, bloody light that centered in his eyes. A line of black hair ran from his navel down past the waistband of his undershorts, a trail to be followed. The slit in his boxers opened and she glimpsed the treasure within.

“Lie back,” he whispered.

Heat pulsed through the room.
Abra
let him grasp her shoulders. She blinked as he guided her down against the pillows. Fingers made of fire swept over her cheeks, tickling the length of her neck, and they delved lower, reaching for her ripe breasts, touching every place just right. “You want to do nothing, don’t you?”