Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

“You got any lubricant?”

“Bedside table.”

He took the condom and the gel from the drawer, unrolled the condom down his penis.

“I hate condoms,” he told her, as he put it on. “They make me itch. And I’ve got a clean bill of health. I showed you the certificate.”

“I don’t care.”

“I just thought I’d mention it. That’s all.”

He rubbed the lubricant into and around her anus, then he slid the head of his penis inside her.

She groaned. He paused. “Is—is that okay?”

“Yes.”

He rocked back and forth, pushing deeper. She grunted, rhythmically, as he did so. After a couple of minutes she said “Enough.”

He pulled out. She rolled onto her back, and pulled the soiled condom off his penis, dropped it onto the carpet.

“You can come now,” she told him.

“I’m not ready. And we could go for hours, yet.”

“I don’t care. Come on my stomach.” She smiled at him. “Make yourself come. Now.”

He shook his head, but his hand was already fumbling at his penis, jerking it forward and back, until he spurted in a glistening trail all over her stomach and breasts.

She reached a hand down and rubbed the milky semen lazily across her skin.

“I think you should go now,” she said.

“But you didn’t come. Don’t you want me to make you come?”

“I got what I wanted.”

He shook his head, confusedly. His penis was flaccid and shrunken. “I should have known,” he said, confused. “I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

“Get dressed,” she told him. “Go away.”

He pulled on his clothes, efficiently, beginning with his socks. Then he leaned over, to kiss her.

She moved her head away from his lips. “No,” she said.

“Can I see you again?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

He was shaking. “What about the money?” he asked.

“I paid you already,” she said. “I paid you when you came in. Don’t you remember?”

He nodded, nervously, as if he could not remember but dared not admit it. Then he patted his pockets until he found the envelope with the cash in it, and he nodded once more. “I feel so empty,” he said, plaintively

She scarcely noticed when he left.

She lay on the bed with a hand on her stomach, his spermatic fluid drying cold on her skin, and she tasted him in her mind.

She tasted each woman he had slept with. She tasted what he did with her friend, smiling inside at Natalie’s tiny perversities. She tasted the day he lost his first job. She tasted the morning he had awakened, still drunk, in his car, in the middle of a cornfield, and, terrified, had sworn off the bottle for ever. She knew his real name. She remembered the name that had once been tattooed on his arm, and knew why it could be there no longer. She tasted the color of his eyes from the inside, and shivered at the nightmare he had in which he was forced to carry spiny fish in his mouth, and from which he woke, choking, night after night. She savored his hungers in food and fiction, and discovered a dark sky when he was a small boy, and he had stared up at the stars and wondered at their vastness and immensity, that even he had forgotten.

Even in the prettiest, most unpromising material, she had discovered, you could find real treasures. And he had had a little of the talent himself, although he had never understood it, or used it for anything more than sex. She wondered, as she swam in his memories and dreams, if he would miss them, if he would ever notice that they were gone. And then, shuddering, ecstatic, she came, in bright flashes, which warmed her, and took her out of herself and into the nowhere-at-all perfection of the little death.

There was a crash from the alley below. Someone had stumbled into a garbage can.

She sat up, and wiped the stickiness from her skin. And then, without showering, she began to dress herself once more, deliberately, beginning with her white cotton panties, and ending with her elaborate silver earrings.

The Sweet of Bitter Bark and Burning Clove Doris Egan

AS ALWAYS, ANTICIPATION WAS half the fun. Bailey touched his forehead to the window of the sixteen-seat commuter plane and looked down at the white, pink, and apple-green houses of San Cristobel, set around a blue lagoon speckled with boats. He smiled. He hadn’t expected anything to come of his latest e-mail; he’d sent it off on Thursday more in a spirit of keeping to the rules of the game than in any real hope of an answer. Galera Cay was a tropical island, after all; not Lilith’s style.

“Galera Cay, arrive San Cristobel February 2. Not sure how long. Bailey.” And three hours later, thanks to the glory of the Internet, he read: “I’m in San Cristobel doing some work. Come stay with me. Lilith.” An address followed.

Doing some work? Lilith was an investment banker; her work took her to New York, London, and the Far East—what was she doing on a Caribbean island? But then, the place was notorious for money laundering, and he supposed that not all the clients of Rockville Perkins were spotless in the eyes of the IRS.