Story 9: A Man's Best Friend
For those exhausted and traumatised by last week's story, A Man's Best Friend should be a bit more peaceful. It's a proper fantasy romance, set in a land which somewhat resembles ancient China. Musician and ex-warrior Lin Xhai, exhausted and broken by war, has travelled for months to find the wife of his best friend, and let her know that she is a widow.
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“Rest with our ancestors, husband, and be at peace,” she whispered, setting the blue pot among the others. Xhai stood and moved away, giving her space to pray. He looked out across the darkening landscape and the blue gloaming. Early stars were emerging in the west. The evening was still, no breeze stirring the grass. He could feel his heartbeat, thudding in his chest.
When Tsulin had finished, he helped her replace the grave slab. Her face was pale in the shadows, but he had heard no weeping. They walked away a little.
“I didn’t know you’d had children,” he said softly.
She ran her hand across her head. “They were both born too early, and only half-made. One the second year, one the next, and then the soldiers came and took him away for the Emperor, so I never had a chance to give him another.” Her voice sounded hoarse. “I must have spoken to a widow-woman when I was small, my mother says, and been stricken barren. Now I have passed the widow’s curse on, to my children. To my husband, who is dead of it.”
The weight in his chest was jagged now. “No!” he protested. “You did not kill him; war took him. It is an insatiable thing. I have seen a thousand thousand men dead upon the battlefield—do you think your little curse did that?” He wanted to grab her and shake her. He wanted to seize her face and kiss it. “You did not curse him. Liwan spoke of you often, and always with love. He longed to return to you. You were a joy to him.”
Tsulin turned to him in the blue dusk. He could hear her breath, fast and shallow. She laid a hand on his breast and his heart crashed against it. She tangled the fingers of her other hand in the still-damp ends of his long hair. He clasped her around the waist, before he could think about it, and she pressed against him, panting. His blood was roaring in his veins, and he was filled with both delight and the terror of teetering upon the edge of doing her a terrible wrong. The scent of her hair filled his head, driving out thought. Her body was pliant under his hands and he couldn’t tell if he was pushing her away or pulling her to him.
Then she reached down and grabbed his cock through his trousers, and his whole world fell apart. He didn’t need to see clearly to clasp her face and lift it, covering her lips with his kiss. She moaned into his mouth, her open palm writhing across the hardness of his shaft, and he staggered, pushing her back across the grass. Both her hands were suddenly at the drawstring of his trousers, pulling frantically, as he kissed her and kissed her and the breathless dusk whirled around them.
It was only when she bared him that he really believed it. Only then that he knew what he was doing. He laid her down in the long grass and yanked open her jacket to reveal those luscious breasts, soft as peaches. The scent of her skin was intoxicating; the ripe swell of her flesh beneath his mouth and the stiff pucker of her nipples drove him out of his senses. He sucked upon her even as his hands tore at her trousers, jerking them down over narrow hips, pulling off one of her boots and hurling it away in his haste to open her legs.
He found her sex, moist and open and soft. There was no question of finesse. Her hands scrabbled at his cock and balls, pulling him to her, squeezing his shaft like it was a spear and she was ready to kill someone with it. So he stabbed her to the core and felt her gasp and heave beneath him. Her heat was all around him, wet and slippery and exquisite; her legs embraced his hips. For a moment he froze, not daring to move. He felt her arch her spine, and heard her growl as she bit at his jaw.
“Yes!” she gasped.
It was like a fight to the death. Her body heaved beneath his. She was slighter and softer and so much weaker than him, but she refused to go limp. He was thrusting with all his weight, but still she fought him, her body growing more and more rigid as he drove in and out. And he didn’t want to hurt her, didn’t want to defile her, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t tear himself away from the hunger of her mouth, and the fingernails that bit into his clenching buttocks, and the wet hot incredible need of her sex, the need of her body, the need of her lost days and her stolen love.
Until she start to shake, clamped rigid and locked around him, and she jerked and cried out like something dying, and then for a moment he paused because he thought that somehow he was hurting her, and then he knew he was going to die too; he could feel his death pouring through him like a red tide from his balls all the way up his spine. It was coming, coming, coming—he jerked out of her, desperate to spill on the green grass, but he’d lost control of this long ago and he erupted all over her belly and thighs.
Oh, he thought, as he fell through a star-filled void. I had forgotten what it’s like. How good.
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