Familiar Spirit

“No, Sarah, I have no wish to destroy you. I have other plans for you, if you’ll only be sensible. You can’t destroy me. You must realize that even if you smash that bit of stone I will live on. I have more than one home for my soul, even now.”

“But the statue is your only hope of immortality,” Sarah said. “If I smash it, you’ll die.”

“Eventually, as everything on earth dies . . . not immediately. I’ll find you again, Sarah, whatever you do. I’ll come to you in another body.”

“Then I’ll kill that body, too,” Sarah said bitterly. “I’ll kill them all.”

“Why, Sarah? Why this hatred? Why won’t you let me please you? Have you forgotten so soon how you loved me?”

The hands seemed to be everywhere, caressing her, parting her legs, urgently stroking and kneading her flesh. Sarah cried out and slapped at herself, trying to brush away the intangible fingers. The small statue fell from her open hands. She heard it strike the floor.

The teasing hands were unimportant compared to that piece of jade. Sarah dropped to her hands and knees, gasping as the probing hands touched her even more intimately, and scrabbled around on the floor. She found it, but as she grasped the smooth stone she felt it turn in her hands to warm flesh. The touch of it sent a rush of sheer desire through her. In the darkness it did not seem so horrible. In the darkness, she could believe she grasped a part of her lover.

How could she smash it, even if she could find the hammer? How could she destroy this . . . thing . . . which throbbed in her hands, promising joy?

She shivered, responding to his caresses like a cat. In this total, suffocating darkness the only thing that tied her to life, the only proof that she existed, was her body’s response to the hands that petted and tickled and teased, soothed and aroused by turns.

She rocked back and forth in response. Coherent thought had fled. In such darkness, only the body was real, only touch mattered. Hands fumbled at her jeans, and unzipped them. Sarah gasped as fingers touched wetness. Were they her own fingers? In the darkness, it did not matter.

Her clothes chafed and stifled her, and she longed to be naked, to be enveloped by the soothing darkness, to let the fingers touch her everywhere.

Someone unbuttoned her blouse. Sarah tugged down her jeans, stumbling back until she fell onto the couch, feeling herself pushed back onto it by the welcome weight of a man’s nakedness.

Somewhere, beyond the thick, slow, greedy thoughts of flesh and touch which preoccupied Sarah, somewhere deep within her mind, a small voice was screaming, warning her.

But the sound of the voice did not penetrate, as the hands did, making her gasp. She could not hear her own voice above Jade’s wicked whisperings in her ear. She had no more will to fight. In the battle between body and mind, mind had too often had its sterile victories. Now, let body win. She would be satisfied, for once. She wanted to forget everything, and simply be. This was a dream, not life. The darkness absolved her.

Hands stroked her, made her liquid. Pleasure was infinitely prolonged.

“Kiss me, Sarah.”

Moving slowly, feeling as if she was floating in black water, Sarah brought Jade’s penis to her lips. It was warm and smooth and alive, the only thing she knew of Jade and the only thing she wanted to know. Was this the thing she had feared? It inspired affection in her now, and desire. She pressed her lips to it, and her tongue found and licked away the one salty, bitter drop at the tip. She slipped the warm, throbbing flesh into her mouth and held it there, her tongue learning and savoring the contours as her body arched and twisted in response to the hands that played her.

She parted her legs for him. She thrust with her hips and strained to meet something that wasn’t there. Why wouldn’t he take her, why wouldn’t he end it? She was no longer afraid he meant to destroy her—she no longer cared. Her single-minded concentration on achieving her body’s pleasure was so intense that she didn’t care if she died attaining it. Let the fire consume her utterly—so long as it consumed her.

“Now,” she muttered through dry, parched lips. “Damn you, now.”

Why did he torture her? Why did he delay and leave her empty?

The darkness had lifted, but Sarah didn’t want to see. She kept her eyes tightly closed, concentrating only on what she could feel, on the tides that rocked her body. Her ears were filled with the sound of her own ragged breathing as she twisted and sweated and begged for release.

If you want me, you know what to do.

Had he spoken, or had she imagined those words? It didn’t matter—she knew. She held Jade in her hand, cradled between her breasts. Jade. A man. A small, carved stone. A penis. She could feel it throbbing. She had seen it smile. She had heard him speak.