Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers: Magical Tales of Love and Seduction

Heat Melissa Lee Shaw

HER BREATH

WAS WHAT he noticed first,

steaming as she laughed

into a warm summer evening.

A trick of the light? A cigarette?

But no — arms wrapped around two companions, she laughed again.

Clouds lifted from her mouth into the lamplight.

Those surrounding her laughed too,

like statues — their mouths did not smoke.

He thought of her hot mouth pressed to his lips, throat …

And other places he blushed to name.

He hungered for such heat.

I have felt your eyes on me,

the letter read.

by the pier, where I gather with my friends

to watch the ships sail into the sunset.

We go there often — but lately

I have felt your eyes on me.

What is it you admire best?

Tell me tonight. Eight o’clock.

It named a mansion cordoned from the world by a spiked iron gate.

The letter bore no signature.

I will not go, of course, he thought at seven-fifteen,

taking random streets through the city.

It is madness. How do I know

the letter came from her?

But he knew. And eight o’clock found him pulling up

outside the gates, which opened for him

slowly, soundlessly.

He drove through, down a lane lined with weeping willows and white stone statues. Marble.

Men, all of them, slim and tall, youthful,

naked.

Their bodies bent in all manner of attitudes — crouching, kneeling, standing.

Two characteristics they all shared — expressions of a singular passion and grief,

and erections, gleaming in the electric light. Twenty he passed, then thirty.

And finally, the mansion.

He parked. His nerves made the crunch of gravel beneath his feet

uncommonly loud.

He thought a servant would meet him at the door—

but it, like the gate, opened for him

silently.

He peered inside.

“Come in!” sang out her voice — throaty, amused.

“I’ll be down in a moment. Come in and explore.

No matter where you go, I shall find you.”

He entered, and the door clicked shut behind him.

Nervous, he tried it.

It opened to his touch.

“None enter,” came her voice with a laugh,

“who do not wish to be here.

Leave if you like—

but I will not send for you again.”

A marble hallway, white pillars limned with angular tiles of dark blue and yellow,

a fountain in the middle of a mosaic floor. More stone men stood ankle-deep in the shimmering water.

Naked, yearning — phalluses straining, shining as if polished.

His own body swelled toward a similar excitement.

He imagined her soft hands polishing the statues with green velvet cloths

lingering on their cocks,

rubbing them to a high sheen.

“Do you like them?” came her voice. Her breath warmed his ear.

He jumped — his feet, his skin, his blood.

“I like to look at them,” she said. “I imagine them alive.”

He turned to regard her

and his breath stopped

like a clock set to rest at the moment of someone’s death.

Her eyes, so crystalline a blue they sparked,

her lips wet and red and curved in a teasing, daring smile,

her hair tumbling wild down her back, bright as burning coals.

Her perfume, rose and honeysuckle and sweet musk

seared his nostrils and burned his blood.

He stirred, though he stood still. He stirred.

A sarong of sea-blue silk clung to her body,

tied carelessly in a knot behind her neck.

A belt of gold links hung from her hips.

Around her throat nestled a thin gold chain

adorned with sapphires and diamonds.

Sapphires hung also from her ears.

“Are you hungry?” she said.

Her eyes traveled down the length of him,

lingering.

He could not speak. His mouth opened,

tongue and teeth and lips moved,

but his lungs froze.

“Come,” she said, laughing. She took his hand (so hot, her fingers)

and whirled him, dizzied, through halls and rooms.

Her scent teased at his nose.

She brought him to a dining hall,

chandelier winking overhead,

the long table spread with roast pheasant, rack of lamb,

simmering soups, heaps of rolls,

and an entire pig, skin browned to a ruddy glow.

“Eat,” she said, giving him a playful push. “Anything you like.”

He found his voice. “Anything?” He stared at her,

his hand tingling where she’d held it.

Delighted, she laughed, teeth sharp and white and even. “Anything

that doesn’t eat you first!”

Her hands curved around his neck,

Her breasts pressed against his chest.

She took his lip between her teeth, tugged—

gently, then like a wolf worrying a bone.

Before he could draw away, she released him, set

her lips to his throat.

“You are flushed,” she murmured. Her lips and breath warmed his ear.

He seized her, pulled her against him,

his body chilled, craving her heat.

“Where?” he asked, or tried to. It escaped his lips

as a sigh, a moan.

She licked his neck, then suckled hard against his throat.

His breath left him — he could not even gasp.

When she released him, his skin chilled in the absence of her touch.

She took one end of the golden belt around her hips,

placed it in his hands.

“Follow,” she whispered. Her throat pulsed fast, light and shadow.

She led him by the golden chain to a room of midnight blues—

walls, carpet, ceiling. A wooden table held a dark blue bowl.

A bed with a gauzy blue canopy sat against the wall.

She pressed him down onto cool, smooth sheets.

“Here,” she said, turning slowly.

The belt he held unwound from her body, fell to the carpet.

The sarong bellied like a sail in a breeze.

“Here will be our first place.

And our last.”

He hardly heard her.

She moved toward him. A tanned thigh peeked

between the sarong’s silken folds.

She stood before him, pulled his hands up around her neck.

He drew them down smooth, uninterrupted silk.

She arched against his touch, breasts lifting.

He reached inside the folds of her sarong,

stroked her curved belly, lifted the underside of a taut breast.

His thumb brushed a soft nipple, tightening beneath his touch.

“How sweet,” she murmured, “how delicious and cool.”

She untied the knot behind her neck.

The sarong whispered down, curving like a snake,

to her hips,

where it stopped.

A shimmy, and it flowed to the ground, revealing a nest of embers, of live coals.

He held his hand an inch in front of that auburn cleft.

Waves of heat licked his palm.

“Not yet,” she said, pushing him back onto the bed with her body.

She wound her sarong around his hands, looped it around a bedpost.

“First, you must watch.”

She drew back the gauzy canopy to reveal

a marble man, ice-white,

captured in a moment of yearning, straining — mouth parted,

hands outstretched,

phallus so swollen it glistened in the blue light.

She moved to the bedside table, bent over. Her buttocks curved against her back.

She picked up the dark blue bowl.

“Watch,” she said, voice airy as butterfly wings—

“watch, and if you like what you see — why, then, perhaps …”

Her fingers clipped into the bowl, came up glistening.

With deft strokes, she painted the statue with scented oil:

its hands,

its smooth chest,

its thighs—

its cock.

He strained, his groin afire, but the silk held his hands fast.

His hips, of their own accord,

writhed, grinding against confining cloth.

She stroked the statue’s cheek, kissed it tenderly,

suckled its stone nipples, gazed into its vacant, yearning eyes.

Kneeling before it, she put her tongue to its navel, then down the length

of the shaft below.

He groaned and struggled. His body burned. He cursed,

but she was lost to him, sliding the marble prick

in and out of her mouth.

He could not bear to watch. He could not look away.

She raised up, slid her skin along the statue’s oiled chest,

lifted on tiptoe, her buttocks centered over the stiffened stone,

and sank down with a sigh.

She gripped the marble arms, wrapped her legs

around its back,

and began a rhythmic dance that revealed

and concealed

by turns

the gleaming stone cock.

He could not breathe. His head thundered. His eyes swam.

He wrestled the smooth silk binding him, but

could not find release.

“Please,” he growled, whispered, wailed—“please.”

Her arms locked around the statue’s neck,

she pressed her red lips to its white ones.

Did she murmur? Did it answer?

She moved faster, faster, until—

she stopped.

Poised on the brink, her skin twitching,

she disengaged from the statue

and returned to the bed.

Scented oil streaked her skin,

and beads of oil glistened

in the auburn nest beneath her belly.

“And?” she said with a smile. “Did you want to be that statue?”

Her hands lifted to her breasts, traced circles around her nipples.

“Yes,” he hissed between locked teeth. His vision blurred red.

She unbuckled his belt, slid his trousers down his legs,

lifted the elastic of his briefs over his wagging prick.

“Are you sure?” she asked, sliding her hot hands beneath his shirt.

“Yes.” His breath bucked at her touch.

She tore his shirt from his body,

ripped the sleeves from his arms.

“Very sure? Careful — this one’s three,

and that’s the one that counts.”

Though he heard the warning, his maddened

mind could think no other thought.

“Yes. My God, yes.”

She laughed, long and free.

Releasing his hands from the confining silk,

she slid onto the bed, onto her back.

She held a hand to him.

“Well, then,” she said, flushed and smiling. “Come to me.”

He wanted to drive inside her, to pin her to the bed,

but his body, raised to such a fever pitch, would not last long.

He wanted to prolong his pleasure, so

he kissed her, rubbed against her oiled skin.

The air chilled him.

He drank of her mouth, her throat, her breasts, her belly.

He tasted the oily beads in the nest that opened to his tongue, tasted

the oil and tang of the folds within, the hard nubbin

that crowned them.

Her legs locked hot around him, her voice reduced

to animal gasps, primal cries.

His skin grew cold,

his fingers tingled,

his toes numbed.

Craving heat, he slid up her body, her skin like lava,

like sunlight.

He suckled at her warm breath, but grew

colder still,

and his cock, coldest of all.

Blindly, he drove toward heat—

and found it.

Roaring flame engulfed his phallus, fire

fanned at his hips. He drove and thrust

toward that blaze.

Her body grew hotter still, searing his skin,

burning his hands.

Her scalding breath tickled his neck,

sent chills through his legs.

Desperate for warmth and for release, he grunted and thrust

till his muscles burned

with cold. Frostbite.

“The cold,” he heard his own voice say. “I need …”

“Shall I warm you, then?” she asked, a hot smile

curving her lips.

She bucked once,

and he tumbled to his back, with her astride him.

“Please,” he said, unsure if it was heat or release he begged for.

His feet grew cold as lead

beneath her pumping thighs.

His fingers chilled to ice.

And yet it built within him, the explosion.

She set hands hot as pokers on his chest.

He groaned, yearning toward ecstasy.

“Please …”

His legs grew cold from the bone out.

Her caress on his cheeks was a furnace blast.

She glowed red. Her hair was flame.

His arms grew numb,

but climax tickled at his shivering blood.

“Please!”

She stroked his thighs with fingers like candle-flames.

He shuddered on the brink, the fireburst just before him—

and froze. Solid.

Stiff.

Her hips stilled. She laid a burning kiss upon his lips,

then lifted herself up and off.

He howled silently inside his prison, balanced ceaselessly

on the brink.

She raised him to his feet, patiently

arranged his limbs — arms outstretched, face

caught in a rictus of yearning, desperate passion.

She faced him toward the door.

Time fled. Her laughter filled the halls, trailed

through the room of midnight blue.

She entered, clad in a blue sarong,

and trailing a tall, slim young man

by her golden belt.

Soon, he lay, flesh and warm blood, tied to the bedpost with silk.

She picked up the blue bowl

and came to him, her marble statue.

She anointed him with scented oil.

He could not move, or strain — but her eyes on his

said she understood his hunger.

Ah, such delicious torture, to pierce her again,

when she lowered herself atop his gleaming shaft.

She clung to his legs with hers. Such heat,

to warm his frozen soul.

The hot breath of her murmur as she kissed him quickened his lips—

“Would you leave, if you could?” she asked.

And his reply, in the moment before the stone took his mouth again—

“No. I would stay.”

For after all this time,

when the explosion he yearned for came at last—

as surely it someday must—

it would set the world

ablaze.