The Wicked: A Love Story

One morning in college it had happened, a joy in herself that was beyond pride, and an exultation in being alive. Loreal had always seen those girls who walked so easily, seemed so very sure of themselves, and she had liked herself well enough, but she had never tossed her hair, or felt a bounce in her walk. Maybe it had to do with her very first magics. Maybe it had to do with going out at night and standing in the midst of the trees, her hands out, fingertips touching the air, feet rooted to the Mother Earth. Whatever it had been, she came out of the shower and stood in her room naked, and gloried in her body, her hips, her breasts, firm and high and round, her sex, the triangle of soft reddish dark hair, the cinnamon of her soft hair. She delighted in her dark eyes, her smiling face. She threw up her hands, laughed and turned in a circle, and right then she knew she was beautiful, and that knowledge could not be taken away from her.

But the exultation could fade. That much could pass. But this night. She had felt it again. This night she knew that she had put up a virgin wall between herself everything, and she had believe in that wall. Now, freed from it, she was delighted in herself again. She was the goddess, the great mistress, the maiden, the mother, the lover. The whore? No, such creatures were bought and used and she did not use and she was not used. She delighted.

In the great bed, to her left lay Laurie on his back, his mouth open in sleep as if he was any ordinary man, though he had tasted her blood and she had felt his bite and knew different. She examined the hollow of his unshaven jaw, the waves in his almost black hair, his sticky out ears, those strong features of the Irish Italian dockworker turned into charismatic high flying business man. His body, so tense so often lay relaxed before her, and her hand strayed across the hair radiating over his strong breast and making a dark line down to his stomach. She touched the pit of his belly and looked with protective love over his penis, soft, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, rising and hardening when she brushed her hand across the head, and she gazed with love on the cloud of black hair where it rested.

“And that was how you first met Kruinh,” Loreal said, turning around.

Dan was half asleep, and Loreal was not sure when he had been speaking and when his mind had entered hers. He looked so much softer than Laurie, his cheeks rounded and soft, the dim candlelight on his hair turning it almost bronze. Dan clutched the pillow and his warm side was pressed to hers. She followed the small of his back to the gentle double curve of the soft hills of his ass, saw the dim light on his long naked legs.

“And how you met Myre.”

Dan nodded.

Loreal lay down and she pressed her breasts against Dan’s side.

“It could not have been an accident. Not entirely. Your meeting Kruinh and Tanitha.”

“Kruinh thought it was meant.”

“But,” Loreal’s soft voice was interrupted by a yawn, “to be meant, someone had to mean it. Who, I wonder? Whom?”

Dan turned on his side and pulled Loreal close to him, twining his thighs with hers.

“But you did not share with me how you became what you are now. How you became a Drinker.”

Dan was thinking of this rare and strange intimacy, where he and both of the people he loved were all in the same bed, making love, sleeping and getting ready to make love again. As Loreal’s hand had strayed over Laurie, Dan’s spirit made that same journey, and if it weren’t for the lack of rest that had been in Lawrence Malone for so long, and how contented and at peace he seemed now, Dan would have waken him so they could all be together again.

But when Loreal asked him about being made, his mind went to those moments not long ago, after Laurie had slept, when he and Loreal had been together, and her nails had clutched his back, and he had felt like he was ripped in two while he spurted inside of her and his body jerked and twisted, secured in the shelter of her thighs. The moment of his making was too intimate, and too intimate to talk about in the midst of this intimacy.

“That, my Loreal, I’m afraid, is a story for another night.”