Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

“You convinced me.” She let her lips mold to the curve of a high cheekbone.

Time passed, seconds ticked off loudly by the tail-switching black Felix wall clock.

“What point?” Chiara said.

“What point what?” He blinked and drew a little away from her. He had been staring raptly into the cat gargoyle’s hard eyes.

“The point when she won’t protect us anymore.”

“Can’t protect us,” he said. “It’ll come as a surprise. We’ll know the time.”

Chiara leaned close and tight into one sheltering shoulder. Her hair, abundant and silky when she untied it, tickled his nose. Close up, he focused on the vein of startling silver that only emphasized the sheer ebony remainder.

Unbidden, his hands rose, strong fingers caressing and barely discernibly tightening around her throat, generating a band of intense heat around her.

She shuddered—but not with fear.

“I’m not the expert,” he demurred. “I’ve just read a little about this.”

“Then who is?”

He hesitated. “It’s going to sound pretentious, but experience is the master.”

“We’ve taken care of each other for a while now,” she said. “Bad times, lots of good times, times when I didn’t know what to think of you.”

“You too,” he said. “Tears and laughter, all of it.” He reached out to touch her hair. “We never abandoned each other.”

“We never will.” She realized it sounded more like a question than an affirmation. “Will we?”

“Never,” he said. “I’ll never willingly leave you.”

Chiara said nothing more for a while, using action as a substitute. His words made her wetter than the late humid August. Nothing would stop her. Not tonight. She took him then, there in the office.

It was her time to practice mastery, sitting astride him and controlling everything: depth, angle, frequency.

Chiara raised herself just enough, almost too far, so she nearly lost him. His tip brushed those hot slick lips like a lover’s lazy touch across her mouth. Illness, she reflected, had little diminished his reaction to her body.

He moaned.

“Shhh,” she said.

But she herself screamed when he bucked his hips up as she descended firmly around him.

The gargoyle watched them like a feral sentinel, a wild creature only marginally more benign than its human masters.

The cat gargoyle became their constant nocturnal companion. Chiara had the odd feeling the creature was almost sufficient to constitute the third party in an exotic ménage à trois. Her lover laughed at that.

One night he said, “So. What should I keep in the box?”

Her gaze flickered like the firelight. She spoke boldly. “In the pussy box?”

He laughed with delight. “The gargoyle box.”

“That’s what I was thinking of.”

“Liar,” he said.

Chiara nodded. “Prick,” she answered, grinning.

“Exactly.” He considered things for a moment. “It’s too big for paper clips.”

“And it’s too wet. They’d rust.”

“Elevate your mind.”

“I’ll elevate something,” she said.

“The gargoyle box—” he gamely persisted.

“It’s big,” she agreed. “It’d hold a quart at least.”

“What comes in quarts in a home office?” he said, sounding puzzled.

“Not what,” Chiara said. “Who.”

“There are times,” he said, “when I think the name Chiara surely derives in a truly loose sense from the word incorrigible.”

“And you love that.”

They stopped discussing the gargoyle box. Their mutual attention sidled into a whole new climatic zone.

“I know who I love.”

They both did.

“I haven’t been with you nearly enough,” Chiara said.

“Nor I with you.” The words glowed like coals.

They flickered.

“Just for a while longer…” Her words sounded forlorn, and that was the last time they did so.

They made love with the passion and heat of cats mating. But it was not a quick thing. Their voices were without human words, crying out, rising and falling like feline screams until exhausted silence fell.

The echoes persisted stubbornly.

She slipped away when he left.

That’s far too circumspect. More precisely, she ran when he died.

When she came back, she discovered he’d left a note, weighted beneath one corner of the gargoyle box.

“It’s not the idea of dying I mind,” he had said on more than one occasion. “I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Neither did she.

Chiara returned to the house and hesitated outside, watching all the lights in the first floor blazing. The upper story was dark. A paramedic gave her a note that had been left for her on the bed table.

It read: “I stole the line about dying and being there from Woody Allen. Give credit where credit’s due. But I hope you’ll give me credit too, sweetie. I love you.”

It was unsigned. It did not require his name.

“I love you too, darlin’.” Chiara cried for a long, long time.

And for a far longer time, it seemed to her, she lived by herself in the empty house with the gargoyle box. She moved it to the table by the bed. She went to sleep staring at the cat creature.

Nights fell around her, silent and cold.

There was no funeral and no burial. She permitted neither.