Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

She makes a noise like laughter, and she shudders all over, again and again, and he sees her, shuddering, laughing in ecstasy, her breasts and her hair, and he rushes her body up and down the length of him, and tingles and rills and impossible yawns of unbelievable pleasure tumble up his spine and across his blood and through his penis, until he detonates, in what must be the fireworks display of the century, but, alas, all invisible inside her.

In the early morning light, punctual as a clock, after her six or seven hours, Ryder wakes up and joins Rose and Wolf-Nana, and they shower together and eat a small but healthy—and nourishing—breakfast, and go back to bed, which is Ryder’s bed, all lambent with her scent and the size of Central Park. And here the two women praise all Wolf-Nana’s virtues, which are many, and play games all over him, until in the end, in a knot of limbs and hair and laughs and shudders and spasms and shrieks, they are coming together, and coming apart, and coming and coming and coming.

And perhaps, being so well-suited as they are, at the top of that cliff in the city wood, they will live happily ever after.

Ashes on Her Lips Edward Bryant

HERE IS WHAT HAPPENED so many times later on. Naked and sweaty, chest thick with curled dark hair, muscles taut and finely delineated, he whirled her across the bedroom. It was the season of heat, and this was an old, old dance. Nicky or Carl, Tad or Paulie, whatever his name was, the man was a late spring blossom of color and passion, testosterone and promise.

“Here,” Chiara said. “Right here.” She felt almost unable to speak. His superheated breath brushed aside the hair on the back of her neck.

“Not the bed?”

“Not yet,” she answered. “Soon. For now, right here.” She gripped the edge of the smooth cherrywood vanity with tight fingers, the tips already tempted to slide with sweat. She felt his arousal as hotly, tightly, vividly as she registered her own.

Then Chiara reminded herself to tell him what she truly wanted.

“Use the box,” she said, voice low, breath ragged. “Now. Like I told you.”

He reached past her right shoulder and opened the container. He clumsily extracted a substantial pinch of the iridescent gray powder inside and lifted it to her waiting mouth. Her lips and tongue took it smoothly off his hand.

Chiara turned sinuously, dropped to her knees facing him, and took a fair length of him into her mouth. She imagined she could feel him absorbing the heat of pliant lips, the insistent wrap of her tongue, the slickness and slightly abrasive texture as she anointed his hard penis with the mixture of saliva and grit.

On her feet again now, she turned back to the vanity, her eyes meeting his in the beveled mirror.

“Do it now,” she said. “No more waiting.”

Using strong fingers to spread her, he slid up high and taut inside.

“It feels—”

She ignored his words and flexed tight around him.

“You feel—”

She reached down with one burning hand and cupped his balls.

He finally found the word he apparently groped for. “—fine!” he said, slamming up against her. He hesitated for just an instant, resting, before sliding back into the aggressive, escalating rhythm she knew he would generate.

“Don’t stop,” she said. “Do it, baby. Just do it.”

He did—for as long as she wanted.

After a time they were both so slick with the heat, it was hard to stay inside her.

She found another way to squeeze, and that was enough to trigger the explosive pyre that consumed them both.

Later he said, as they all did, “When can I see you again?”

Chiara hated that question, because she already knew the answer.

Once upon a time, in a life far away, there was a woman and a man who loved each other, and there was the gargoyle box. It had been a gift to him from a mutual friend named Todd—the girl with a boy’s name, Chiara called her—the woman whose gifts had always seemed to arrive at a time appropriate to change the recipient’s life. “Or at the very least,” Chiara’s lover once said, “to give me a fucking clue.”

The gargoyle box had originally come from an obscure gift shop at Disney World, but neither held that circumstance against it. When Chiara had first spied the box on his desk, she had coveted it with all her being. But the present was his.

Later, when the bone disease had begun to crumble him away from the inside, he had hung on to the box, even though, in the potlatch phase of his decline, he gave away most of his clothes, the books, the music, the art, all the rest of what he termed the “really neat things” he had accumulated over a lifetime.

The gargoyle box crouched in its accustomed position on the external drive beside the computer monitor. The box itself was rectilinear, carved from some variety of smooth gray-greenish stone, a mineral bearing a most unusual patina.