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

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.

“It feels like flesh.” Chiara had marveled when she first ran her fingertips along the carved patterns inlaid within the sides. “Flesh that’s hard.” She couldn’t help but laugh at his smile when she said those words.

He took them both, gargoyle box and woman, into the bedroom.

“I’ll show you flesh that’s hard,” he said, curling powerful hands around her upper arms and drawing her slowly and deliberately toward his own body. Just before her breasts would have touched his chest, he dipped his head and touched first the right nipple, then the left, with the tongue Chiara always felt was itself a highly tumescent organ.

She knew what he was going to do. She still gasped, let her arms pivot together from the elbows, brought her hands down so her strong fingers could wrap around the inches of hard flesh she sometimes joked about as his tongue gone south. When she’d first told him that, he had cocked one eye and said, “Should I then imagine you referring to my tongue as my penis gone north?”

“Whatever,” Chiara said. “I was never very good with directions.”

They both laughed. Then their collective breath quickened.

It always did.

But after this one time, as both of them lay across the bed, skin sheened with salt and heat, limbs akimbo and plaited, passions still humming like a dynamo switched into standby mode, he said, “Just don’t let any of this ever go west.”

Chiara drew back her head slightly so she could look at his eyes and made a small sound of curiosity. Somehow his voice had sounded both resigned and wistful.

“Going west,” he said, “that mythic thing.”

“Oh,” said Chiara. “Right. Like dying.”

“Yes, a lot like dying.”

The box itself. It resembled an ancient and elaborate sarcophagus covered with erotic carvings in relief. It was not obvious, nothing like the crassly amusing coffee mugs covered with giraffes copulating, or alligators wound into complex arabesques of reptilian sexuality. When eyes beheld the gargoyle box, they followed, for a while, the sinuous lines as the human sense for patterning gradually turned shapes into limbs, the limbs into linked bodies.

But, as he pointed out to Chiara, the linked bodies never quite slipped into stereotypical form. Sexual images? Well … maybe. Sensual? Indisputably. Pornographic? Perhaps … with imaginative leaps.

“Use intuitive leaps,” he said one night, holding the box up against the diffused light from the Tiffany torchier.

“Evel Knievel leaps?” She teased him, nestling close behind, rubbing, stroking, trailing her fingertips down his chest.

“You don’t have to span a canyon,” he said, laughing. “Just that old chasm of disbelief.”

Chiara was silent for a few moments. “Don’t leave me,” she said.

He did not laugh at all. “Why are you saying that?”

She didn’t answer for a much longer time. Finally she picked careful words. “You used to tell me everything about doctor’s appointments. It was a pain.” Chiara hesitated. “Now you tell me almost nothing, or else when you do, I feel like I’m getting a completely laundered version. That’s far more excruciating.”

He set the gargoyle box on the bed table and shoved it to the edge of the lamplight. “I’m sorry,” he said, and she could hear the regret in his voice that said he was telling the absolutely literal truth. “I haven’t been altogether forthcoming.”

“Be that now.” She cupped his face with her fingers, leaned toward him intensely, gazed into his eyes. They were lighter than hers. In this diffused light, they looked almost green. The light always changed them; sometimes green, sometimes brown, other times hazel. She said he had the eyes of a chameleon. Or a shapeshifter.

“All right,” he said. He did something he rarely did before launching words at her. He took a deep, deep breath.

Later, she cried herself to sleep.

What perched on the gargoyle box was not the standard, garden-variety dog-faced boy with wings, as he sometimes described other gargoyle art. This gargoyle was feline, with a lithe, muscular body crouched atop the lid in an aggressively watchful attitude. The reptilian wings spread at precisely the appropriate angle to provide the perfect handle for grasping and lifting the lid.

Winged and fanged, the cat looked the part of the fearsome guardian.

“No vermin will come close,” her lover said. “No bugs need apply.” He laughed. “No mice, no rats, no takers to confront such a creature. She’s one fierce beastie. They’re all afraid.”

“I hope so.” Chiara shook her head and let her fingers wander over the obscure curves of the seductive stone. “This one—” She felt she could almost prick fingertips on the creature’s teeth. “She’s only interested in bigger game.”

He nodded seriously. “It’s tough to outmatch a gargoyle. That’s why they’ve got the guardian job.”

Chiara nodded slowly, with gravity. “Can she protect us both?”

“Up to a point, I expect.” He shook his head with sudden violence as though coming abruptly awake from a reverie. “Hey, what do I really know about gargoyle specs?”

“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.

Then came the morning when the telephone rang. She ignored it. Ten minutes later, when it rang again, Chiara didn’t answer. She covered her ears with the pillow as the answering machine picked up the message.

Two hours later, the lawyer showed up at the door.

He kept his well-manicured index finger pressed to the bell until she answered.

All the while, the stone box kept silent company with her.

When what now remained of her lover was returned to Chiara, it reminded her of Chinese takeout. At least that’s what the white shiny-stock cardboard box resembled.

She unfolded the lid and contemplated the contents. When she stirred with one tentative and delicate forefinger, she discovered the bits of bone.

Chiara withdrew her finger and stared at the dusty patina that filled in the whorls of her fingertip. The rose glow of the Tiffany lent everything a sensual radiance.

The time seemed appropriate, so she talked to him.

Chiara talked far into the evening.

Eventually — and not to her great surprise — he answered.

I guess we ought to discuss our relationship, he said.

She smiled. “I always thought it was forged in heaven.”

Even now?

“We fought sometimes,” she said. “We had misunderstandings. A few times we hurt each other. But we learned to talk it out. Each of us cared enough to work for what we wanted.”

I miss you, he said.

She didn’t have to say anything. It was in her sudden tears. “Can we stay together a little longer?” she said.

I think so, the equivalent of his voice said, sounding wistful. There’s a way.

“I’d like that,” she said. “Tell me.”

Then … he began to whisper, you know what you need to do.

Yes, she did, but she had to think about it a while longer, denying herself food, drink, sleep. But she was a quick study. She required only a brief parching stint in the wilderness of her own soul to reach a conclusion.

Yes, she knew what she had to do.

And more, she wanted to do it.

She bought smooth stones, alleged to be, if not outright magical, at least highly spiritual, from a Boulder, Colorado, woman named Chalice. The surface of the stones was veined with a blue mineral.

Chiara used the stones to grind the bone fragments from the takeout box into a fine powder. Then she sat at the kitchen table under a bright light, her largest facial mirror set out on the checked cloth. She used the spare sharp X-Acto blades from the tool drawer to divide the powder into a finer dust. Some dispersed into the air with the quick, birdlike motions she employed.

She thought the cloud particles looked shiny, almost glowing in the light from the overhead.

“So beautiful,” Chiara murmured. She knew who that really described.

Some of the dust settled on her lips. She flicked with the moist tip of her tongue. The ashy residue tasted — she wasn’t sure at first — a little of salt, with a hint of something much richer.

Chiara licked her lips again, eager now.

She abruptly saw herself as if from another’s eyes, toiling in dirty work clothes with the sharp blades, the mirror, the powdered remains. Chiara laughed at the image and offered a silent half-serious prayer that the police were not somehow watching.

This would be a tough one to explain.

She finished powdering the bone and mixed it back into the contents of the box. Then she put away the smooth stones. Chiara realized she was humming, and her lips curved around the companion lyrics:

“Fee, fie, foe, fum …”

Tonight she did not feel alone.

Not one bit.

The gargoyle box bided time patiently, watching over Chiara and the men she chose.

Rick or Roddy, Steve or Lance, whatever his name was, his body was younger than hers. She thought about that briefly, a little regretfully, and then put it out of her mind. Rick or Roddy had been a tennis pro. Steve or Lance worked out well and regularly. His muscles were toned, the definition as clearly delineated as a USGS topo map.

Good territory, she thought.

Chiara surveyed him from where she lay back on the Olmec print comforter. He was ready, clearly so. She watched and appreciated the rigid jut, the involuntary quiver of anticipation.

He smiled down at her and settled himself on the bed. He reached to part her legs and she was instantly rolling onto her side, and then to hands and knees.

“No,” she said. “Not for a minute yet. Remember? Indulge me.”

“Right,” said Rick or Roddy. Slowly, knowing she watched avidly, he raised one hand to his mouth, then licked the inside of his beefy fingers. He used that hand to reach for the gargoyle box on the bed table. He carefully lifted the lid and set it aside.

Fingers dipped lightly into the powder inside. He transferred that dusting first to the head, then the shaft of his penis.

“Enough?” His voice was hoarse as he started to pump with his hand the length of his shaft. “This is kind of strange.”

“But you like it,” Chiara said.

He looked doubtful at first, but then nodded. “Yeah, I like it.”

“Then it’s enough.” Chiara moved her head, eyes fixed on his, knowing she was all too ready now. Waiting any longer was totally out of the question. “Come here,” she said.

He didn’t have to part her legs now. She did that well and smoothly on her own, feeling the air on moist flesh as knees, thighs, vaginal lips divided at her own urging.

The man descended into her as she arched to meet him.

He moaned. “Oh, Christ, so goddamned deep …”

“You can go deeper,” she said. “I want that. I can take you deeper.” Fingers digging hard into the corded muscles in his rear, she pulled him into her.

“That powder,” he said. “It’s like goddamned Spanish fly. It’s not helping my self control.”

“Don’t worry, baby,” she said. “It doesn’t have to. I came as soon as you entered me. You’ll make me come again before we’re done.”

He said nothing, just uttered eloquent, inarticulate sounds as he slammed into her again and again.

“That’s it,” she said, “harder, baby.”

“Now!” he said. “Now, now, now, now!” Heat shot into her, sleeted through her. She thought she felt sexual exit wounds glowing with radiation like a nuclear test site.

After a while, she turned back into the shelter of his arms and said, “That was wonderful. I loved it.”

“Me too.” The man seemed to hesitate before speaking again. He toyed with her breasts, bringing the nipples erect as small stones. “Chiara, you think maybe we’ll ever get, well, really serious?”

“You want to?” she said.

He slowly nodded. “I gotta admit, I’ve never been with a woman like you.

“You’re very sweet.” In the half-light, she thought she could see him blush.

“I mean it,” he said.

She nodded sleepily and kissed him on the lips.

Really serious? she thought.

Chiara knew she would leave him in the morning, or the morning after. She would never see him again.

Night followed night, month after month, man after man, the Rickies, the Robbies, the Randies. The gargoyle box made them all momentary possibilities.

But the store of powdered desire was depleted. The night Chiara had dreaded eventually arrived.

She sat crosslegged on the bed in the room that had given her so much solace, the implements of that comfort spread out around her. Chiara gazed down into the emptiness that now mostly filled the open box.

She rested her palm lightly on the cool, sharp-veined stone wings of the creature on the lid.

The voice whose source she could never quite see whispered close to her ear: Love, I think it’s finally time.

She slowly nodded. “I was never unfaithful,” she said fiercely. “I’ve loved only you.”

I know. But we’re both on courses that no longer cross.

She wet her finger with her tongue and lowered it into the box, picking up the final vestige of powder.

I’ll miss you very much, he said.

She tried to smile. “I’ll miss you too.”

Silence stretched, bent, flexed in its supple way.

What will you do? he said.

Chiara dipped the tip of her tongue, caught the last bit of ash. “Have you no faith in me?”

I have every faith, he finally answered. But I’m still a little jealous.

I am too. She didn’t say that aloud.

What will you do?

When she spoke, her eyes were as wet as the rest of her had become. What will I do? she thought.

The taste was bitter and salt, sour and sweet on her tongue. It brought back everything. She had to swallow before she could speak.

“Well, darlin’,” she said. “I guess I’ll just have to fall in love again.”

The pain stung there, sharp and sudden as a blade; then it was gone.

And so was he.