Mistress of Night and Dawn (12 page)

Today was their final day of freedom before Siv began working for her keep and they would both start their new lives in San Francisco properly, as bona fide residents rather than visitors.

Aurelia looked down at her finger. There was no longer any mark there where she had pierced herself with the sharp pin of her brooch and there was, of course, no outward sign of the comfort that he had given her when she had briefly cried out in pain, or the press of his lips on her injured skin.

The mark inside her, however, was still present. Indelible. One she would cherish for ever.

The wonderful stranger.

His touch.

His caresses.

The way he had made love to her. How her untrained body had so effortlessly blended with his. And the emptiness that she had felt that morning when she awoke so acutely aware of his absence before she had even remembered he had ever been there at all.

Aurelia heard the slamming of the front door, and checked her bedside clock. It was still only seven in the morning. She sighed, remembering with an undertow of irritation that Siv had to go into the city to pick up the obligatory application forms for the upcoming circus school audition and to get her original documents photocopied. She followed the sound of her friend’s steps as she ran down the road to catch the municipal bus.

She stretched, her limbs lazily unfurling from the broken angles of sleep under the crisp bed covers, her toes grazing the end of the quilt, and exhaled loudly in the knowledge she was now alone in the house. This was the first occasion since their arrival that she and Siv had been apart. And as much as she enjoyed spending time with her friend, Aurelia now welcomed the opportunity to laze about with no particular task in mind and spend some time on her own.

Not that there weren’t things to do. She had promised to send a long email to her godparents in Leigh-on-Sea to let them know all was well, but somehow she couldn’t summon the energy even to pull her iPad from her luggage, where it still rested alongside most of the clothes she had not yet bothered to hang up in her bedroom closet. There was washing to do, and shopping at the local mall as the provisions they had hastily stocked up on at the corner convenience store on their first day were running low, but nothing that couldn’t wait.

Aurelia closed her eyes and allowed her stiff muscles to relax. One part of her mind was prompting her just to remain in bed and do nothing while the other, more responsible half, was studiously making to-do lists.

Anyway, this was no civilised time to get up. Much too early, she concluded.

She kept her eyes shut, although the light streaming through the curtains created a white background to the screen formed by her eyelids and a constant distraction.

The scattered sounds of birds welcoming the morning outside reached her at irregular intervals, somehow evoking long half-forgotten memories she couldn’t quite identify, like a form of Morse code that only her DNA could interpret. Finally, she couldn’t resist and peered slowly at the corner of sky visible through the window. A greyish blue, uncertain colour.

And knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep now.

She swore under her breath and pushed the quilt to the side. Against her will, she was now wide awake and feeling a hollow pang in her stomach. Slipping sideways out of the bed, she walked barefoot to the kitchen. The old promotional rock ’n’ roll T-shirt advertising an Arcade Fire European tour that she had been wearing in bed, along with a pair of cotton knickers, barely reached her midriff and Aurelia shivered. It was chilly and the stains of blue in the sky beyond the windows conveyed a false impression of warmth. Siv had left a jar of peanut butter on the table and she grabbed hold of it and rushed back to the comfort of her bed. Then realised she hadn’t taken a spoon. Dammit, her fingers would have to do. She dived between the covers holding the glass container aloft.

Ten minutes later, licking her fingers clean, Aurelia dropped the now half-empty jar on the bedside table and screwed its plastic lid on. Again she considered getting up and beginning her chores or arranging some kind of touristic activity, but it was just too early in the day and the multitude of available possibilities offered her too many choices.

Instead, she turned over and buried her face into the warm softness of the pillow and welcomed darkness in the comfort of the material. Her arms were still uncovered and she pulled up the blanket and was now left with a decision to either lay her limbs over the top or tuck them under the cover alongside her body where the heat was now captured. She opted for the latter.

Her fingers were flattened against her inner thighs as she adjusted her position for a maximum of comfort.

A nail grazed the skin of her thigh in passing and Aurelia shuddered, her memory flooding with images and feelings as if a box of secrets had just been opened.

The stranger’s touch.

The way his fingers had moved across her skin, sometimes soft and sometimes firm.

How he had made her his on that mad evening that was still imprinted on her mind like an incomprehensible hieroglyph.

A whirlpool of emotions stirred inside her and she retreated into her private world, blanking the room, the faint noises reaching her through the window, transporting herself away on wings of deliberate magic from the Oakland suburb to a dark vaulted space in Bristol, seeking with increasing hunger to recreate every single movement that had passed between them, the smells, the touches, the contact, the static.

She licked her lips. And again she tasted pomegranate.

As if the delicate and fleeting echoes of the fruit had been conjured out of nowhere by the force of her will, her yearning.

Her heart jumped and she moved a finger nearer to her sex.

Her eyes still closed shut, she tried to imagine her fingers were his and he was again exploring her, travelling like an intrepid pioneer of unknown lands across the pale plains of her flesh, approaching the fire, the volcano, that defined her sexual heart. How had it felt to him?

The finger inched its way towards her opening, the heat radiating towards it, reaching it by infinitesimal increments, every hesitation a further degree upwards, an extra step towards the subterranean blaze that kept her alive, feeding the internal engine that regulated her senses.

She arched her back, deliberately slowed her movement. Patient, delaying the inevitable.

But there was so little ground over which her finger could drag itself without coming to a total stop and, all too soon, as Aurelia attempted to prolong the expectation, explore the apprehension, expand time to new proportions, the finger made contact with her lips.

She was wet, her body responding of its own volition to the complex feelings rushing around in circles in her mind.

The moistness of the labia she brushed against was velvety soft and, for a brief moment, Aurelia pretended she was blind and imagined a whole world she would only ever perceive through the nerve endings on the tip of her fingers, a new universe in which one only survived by the power of touch.

The probing finger dipped inside her – as his once had – weighing her, mapping her, now immersed fully in her raging heat, wrapped in the fiery blanket of her lust. When the stranger had similarly been inside her, Aurelia couldn’t help wondering what it had felt to him to be gripped by such transcendent heat and wished she could once be a man, if only for a day, just to know.

The temptation to introduce another finger was all-encompassing, but it was not the way she preferred to fulfil her pleasure. She retreated and turned over onto her back. Parting her legs wide, her right arm now leveraged into position, her forefinger found the hardened nub of her clit and began a rough symphony of concentric caresses while her free fingers dipped smoothly between her damp lips, their slight movements in studied, clever harmony.

She took a deep breath, all the time watching behind her eyelids a confused movie in which memories of that night in Bristol blended with elements of dreams and nightmares and nothing and no one was quite clear enough to recognise, plunging in and out of focus. Fuck, if only it hadn’t been so dark, then she might have remembered more about it all, the details of his face, the colour of his eyes, every line and crevice and blemish on his skin, and not just his voice, his smell, and the mechanics of the sex they had shared, however wonderful it had been.

The tectonic plates of her lust began to move, silently, inside her, subtle shifts in her equilibrium, as her cravings and her emptiness met on an upward path that zigzagged between her heart and brain and Aurelia now abandoned herself fully to the rise of the powerful sensations that had now taken hold of her whole body and mind.

She was melting into the bed, drowning on a sea of acceptance, primed for the terrible explosion that would blow her whole being apart, sunder her into a million pieces for the briefest of moments, a state of blissful nothingness during which life collided with death before the scattered clusters of her soul came back together again and she could breathe anew.

Yes, just another microscopic movement and she would be there. Reaching utter blankness and joy, Aurelia held her breath, every single sense following the progress of the mighty tide as it washed through her body and reached its culmination.

Yes.

Her back arched as if she had been stabbed, and then she fell back, her long auburn hair settling like a shroud against the pillow, like a crown of sun around her flushed, ecstatic face.

Yes.

She breathed again, feeling the lightness spread along her limbs, her mind clear, her body relax.

Aurelia sighed.

She had never felt an orgasm so strongly before.

Could it be because she had now been made love to by a man, that man, the stranger? Had it elevated the power of her orgasm to another level? Or was it just the craving for him that now filled her night and day and the way it blended uneasily with the memories that night?

Once again, her mind was all over the place.

‘I think too much,’ she concluded. Why couldn’t she just enjoy the moment?

As she lay sprawled out on the bed for what seemed like ages, Aurelia basked in the inner glow the orgasm had triggered, both welcoming and fighting the sensations, left breathless by the sheer strength of the sexual seizure and struggling with the deep well of the yearning for the nameless man who had unwittingly caused it, or at any rate, multiplied the intensity of the moment to a factor of infinity.

She tried unsuccessfully to censor her thoughts and return to reality.

Through the window, against the roof of the sky, she could see that blue was winning the battle against grey and the room was now beginning to feel warmer.

She needed a shower. Or she would fall asleep again and waste most of the day lingering in the comfort of the bed.

She stretched her legs and slipped a foot out from the quilt. Her toes tingled. The ends of her fingers too. Her body was suffused with lightness as she stepped towards the bathroom, her bare feet shuffling across the cottage’s wooden floor.

Splashing cold water against her face as she leaned over the cracked porcelain of the sink in the exiguous bathroom, Aurelia felt her mind revive although all her nerve endings still buzzed with uncommon energy. She turned on the shower tap, testing the gushing cascade that poured from the showerhead until it was the right temperature and would neither freeze her nor scald her and turned, pulling her T-shirt above her head and letting it fall to the tiled floor and stepping out of her knickers. As she did so and was about to step under the water, she caught a brief glimpse of her pale, elongated body in the tall mirror covering the inside of the bathroom door.

She noticed with the faintest of smiles that her dark-pink nipples were still hard and how her orgasmic flush continued to linger, spreading its pastel colours across the top of her chest.

She moved to dive under the shower’s flow and then did a double take. Something had caught her eye. She moved back an inch and looked at her body and its sinuous, pale length reflected in the bathroom mirror. A touch of colour. She looked down. Squinted as the steam from the shower was rising in the small space and the glass was beginning to mist up.

A bruise? A stain?

An indistinct shape just half a finger’s length away from her opening.

Aurelia instinctively passed her fingers over the area, as if expecting mild pain. She didn’t recall having recently hurt herself there or having bumped into a sharp corner of furniture or anything. There was no sensation.

She reached for the shower controls and interrupted the water and, with the back of her hand, wiped the surface of the mirror clean to get a better view of the small image that now stood out on her skin in such an intimate place, her puzzlement tempered with rising fear.

A fine red shape.

The mirror came into focus.

The image of a small heart.

Her breath halted.

Her body was now barely an inch from the mirror and as she looked down at her pelvic area, there was no longer any doubt. It was a minuscule heart, shrouded by thin tendrils of fire in the same sharp shade of red.

Her real heart was beating out of control in her chest.

A tattoo?

Impossible.

She looked again, her gaze fully captured by the small heart etched into her skin.

She passed a couple of fingers over it, as if half-hoping its texture might prove different from the rest of her uncovered flesh, to prove it was artificial, temporary, a mistake. But it felt no different, fully a part of her.

A fake? A joke somehow organised by Siv, while she was sleeping? But Siv wouldn’t do something like that in such an intimate place, surely?

She soaped her fingers and aggressively rubbed against the newly formed heart. It didn’t budge.

Aurelia stood there, naked, no longer aware of her surroundings, her mind in a daze.

All she could think of was the stranger and the way she had fallen asleep against him after they had made love. Passed out? Surely she hadn’t. And she would certainly have roused again. Tattoos were painful and the equipment must be noisy. She could not have slept through such a thing. Could she?