Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups (3 page)

But even as orgasm overtook him, Clausean goodness came rushing back into him. His fingers twitched against the soaked and clotted panties, which bloomed into a large package wrapped in soft paper the color of lemon chiffon, topped with a large bow of a deeper yellow. Feeling low and mean, he set it down beneath the tree and fled to his sleigh, fumbling his buttons up as he went.

Outside, Lucifer's soulful eyes glinted with incriminating sparks; but Santa tossed the spent sack behind him, threw himself into the driver's seat, and with nary a word of explanation whipped the team skyward.

"Off with you!" he shouted in a voice thick with self-loathing.

On Christmas morning, John and Mary Draper awoke, to their delight, in the midst of a lovemaking most amazing. When at last they lazed down from the dizzying heights of orgasm, uncoupled, and donned robes and slippers, they found their home infused with the most delicious aroma imaginable. The kids noticed it too. They bubbled with life, more than could be accounted for by the excitement of Christmas Day alone. Even Bobby, usually the soul of fifth-grade cynicism, raced to and fro before the tree, heady with childish greed.

Little Anne Marie sniffed out its source: the pale yellow package sitting apart from the piled gifts. Its curiously quaint card read: "For John and Mary, to be opened in the privacy of your bedroom. May the coming year be new and happy in a multitude of ways. Much love, Santa." Despite the pleas of the children, Mary refused to open it but set it upon the cedar chest at the foot of her bed.

Her hands tingled as she touched it.

All through the exchange of gifts, the visits from friends and family, and the endless holiday feasting, she and John exchanged looks of suppressed excitement.

And after a day of revelry, with the kids tucked safely away for the night, they tore into the yellow enigma and brought forth sex toys galore. A profusion of them splashed across their comforter: dildos and cock-rings and ben-wa balls; frilly fuckwear for her, leather briefs with strategic zippers for him; flavored creams and gels of every variety; and condoms without number—ribbed and stippled, latex and lambskin, clear and opaque and every color of the rainbow.

Each denied the giving but delighted in the gift, as much for the sheer naughtiness these playthings suggested as for anything inherently exciting in them.

And their sex life, hitherto a dim porchlight over the dark doorway of their marriage, became thereafter a blazing hearth-fire, lending abundant light and heat to all of life's endeavors.

*****

The second time Santa saw the Tooth Fairy, he had nearly succeeded in putting her out of his mind. For a time, he dreaded seeing her again. He couldn't shake her image, her aroma, nor his overwhelming sense of guilt. If Saint Anthony had resisted temptation of all sorts, he agonized, then why couldn't jolly old Saint Nick?

Good God in Heaven, Claus, another part of him shot back. Anthony was an ascetic, an oddball, a loner, thin as a rail and half as exciting. You're as corpulent as they come, a lover of food and drink, fond of realizing spiritual good in material form. When you saved that Lycian merchant's three daughters from whoredom by tossing a bag of gold in at each of their windows, please recall how you yielded at once to the youngest's gratitude: you followed your money through her casement, taking joy in the sweet paroxysm of her loins.

Dear Jesus, I'd forgotten that. Yes, but that was before I met and married my beloved Anya, before I vowed to cleave to her alone. If she knew about tonight, it would hurt her heart. It would wither her soul.

So keep it from her. Heavens, man, you didn't even
touch
the temptress. So unfret that brow, put your worries behind you, let's see some
jolly
light those eyes. If she presses you again, you'll be ready to resist, to play at Saint Anthony, or even Jesus in the Wilderness, if you wish.

So it went, the turmoil in Santa's mind.

But by the time he reached the Midwest, all was once more bright and calm, nothing in his mind but sleighbells and candycanes.

Humming with joy and contentment, Santa reached into his burgeoning sack and pulled forth gift after gift for the Gilberts, long-time Iowa City residents in the blue and white Victorian at 925 North Dubuque Street: Sandra, a full professor in the School of Dentistry; Paul, head dispatcher for the Coralville transit system; and their daughters—Karen, Julie, and Jane—arrayed in age from nine to five. Theirs was a lovely tree, dusted white and decorated in motifs of gold and silver. Much love filled their house. True, Paul was boffing one of his bus drivers, an earthy young woman named Debbie Travers. But his heart, Santa knew, belonged to Sandra and the girls.

This time his nose found her first.

One moment he was on his knees adjusting the ribbon around the neck of a rocking horse and breathing in the apple-cider and cinnamon-stick air of the ticking house. The next, his nostrils were ravished by the sharp thrust of the Tooth Fairy's woman-scent, alluring and arousing and monstrous all in one.

He tossed his head back in panic. There she stood at the sliding doors to the front parlor. A luminous trail of fairy dust sparkled down the dark stairway. Apparently she had already paid her visit to Julie's room upstairs, taken up her tiny tooth, and left a cache of coins behind. Now she hovered, one hand on the dark wood of the sliding door, and spoke his name.

"Santa," she said, "you know why I'm here."

Fright seized the unwary elf. He stood up in a rush, upsetting the rocking horse. A string of silver bells on the tree
ting-ting
'd in protest. "All right," he said, his voice trembling. "This has gone far enough."

"Has it?" Her body choked his eyes. Silken panties as orange as hissing bonfires hugged her hips. She cupped and caressed her dark-tipped breasts.

He faltered. "Look, I'm trying to do my job here. You're distracting me. You're spoiling the mood, the purity of the . . . of the holiday spirit. Now be a good little fairy and . . ."

Santa's mouth moved but suddenly nothing would come out. He wanted to be firm with her, abrupt as a dictator, but it refused to happen.

The Tooth Fairy tilted her head just so and hung a smile upon her lips.

Santa staggered.
Oh Jesus, I'm going to fall.
The Persian carpet's elaborate weave funneled him toward the delectable devourer.

"For the sake of the children," he moaned, "please go away. You're so beautiful—good God the word doesn't do you justice—but I can't give you what you want." Had he called her beautiful? Yes, he thought. As beautiful as an earthquake swallowing whole cities.

In a blink she wafted over to him and pressed her body against his, her breasts pushing the sharp necklace of teeth into his red-suited chest, her pantied pelvis molding and encouraging his arousal.

"You can," she insisted, "and you will."

"I have a wife," Santa protested weakly. He was losing himself in the wilds of her scent.

"Forget her," she rasped. She swirled her tonguetip inside the dips and folds of his left ear. Santa's knees buckled, taking his last vestige of resolve with them. The steady voice of conscience, the troth he had plighted long ago, proved no match for this insistent female, whose moist lips now played upon his mouth. Her tongue licked greedily at Santa's teeth and gums, deftly probing his oral cavity.

It suddenly occurred to him that he was Santa Claus, God damn it, that three innocent children slept overhead, and that what he was now engaged in was an unforgivable violation of the sanctity of the Gilbert household. Santa seized upon the Tooth Fairy's shoulders and rudely thrust her away.

Drunken rage flared in her eyes, but she masked it and glided back against him. "So, we're playing hard to get, are we? Or maybe we're just getting hard. Is that what this is about?"

"No more, please."

"Shall we see just how hard we're getting?"

"Don't, please don't." But in the physical struggle she had begun, her playful combativeness made her body shift and arch in alluring ways and Santa felt the demon again, the not-Santa in him, surge up, robbing him of all resistance.

Now her fingers snaked down his paunch, past the shiny black belt to the bright red bulge in his trousers. His buttons must have undone themselves, for in no time, the ineffable thrill a man feels when a woman grips his loveshaft surged through him.

"No," he gasped.

Santa's hands felt numb and alien. His left splayed across her shoulderblade like a starfish on a beach.
This is not happening.
His right sculpted her neck, her hard-tipped breasts, her belly, then plunged beneath the orange silk and found the swell of her desire.
Please God, let this not be happening.

Thus they led one another, by hand and lip—though Santa kicked and screamed inside like a caged saint—to the brink of orgasm.

With a shudder, she gripped his inserted middle finger and bellowed out a world-splitting groan. That sound was enough to tilt the balance for him as well. Santa's low taut baritone came up under her full-throated gasps, and his seed arced out of him and spattered the topmost branches of the tree, dripping downward in dribs and drabs.

Oh Lord, I'm damned indeed
, he thought, but it didn't stop him from wanting suddenly to embrace the Tooth Fairy in all her monstrosity. His massive red arms encircled her to hold her tight. And closed on nothing. His sex hung suddenly free and unstroked and spurting, and his mouth, still a-tingle, gaped empty and unkissed.

Fighting back tears of humiliation, Santa gestured toward the tree and watched his semen turn to gleaming white candycanes on the branches it had befouled.

He fell to his knees. "Heavenly Father," he prayed, "give me strength. Help me withstand the temptress. Be with me in my hour of need. This I pray by all the saints in heaven and on earth. Amen." Then he gathered his things together, dematerialized through the front door, and dove into his sleigh.

Lucifer took one look at him and rolled his eyes at Prancer. But Santa's whipsmack split the air above his antlers, distressed shouts of "Up and away, damn you!" filled his ears, and before he knew it, his hoofs had left the snowy lawn and the sleigh was airborne.

The Gilberts' Christmas that year was the best any of them could recall. It wasn't so much the presents, nor the food, nor the folks who dropped by, though all of that was tinged as usual with the special clarity and goodness of Christmas Day. It seemed rather that the house itself, from attic to basement, from front porch to back, was infused with the deepest comfort and warmth.

But the girls' favorite moment was Karen's discovery of the off-white candycanes on the tree. They went wild over them, the young ones especially, licking the stiff glistening columns of white like Ponce de Leon indulging himself at the Fountain of Youth. They smuggled some of them to school to share with their closest girlfriends, and Julie pressed one upon her mother.

Sandra had never tasted anything like it. Despite a dominant strain of treacle, powerful barbs of nutrition jagged out here and there into her taste buds. There were hints of salt mingled with a sugar so pure its taste made her eyes glisten with tears of joy.

Paul Gilbert reaped his reward that night when Sandra slipped into bed beside him, peeled off his pajama bottoms with her teeth, and spent the next five hours lining her stomach with his outpourings of love. Sandra had always blanched at the very notion of oral sex, which was one reason her husband spent three lunch hours each week with Debbie Travers, a woman who loved to lick and be licked, though she refused to let him come in her mouth.

From that night, Paul swore off Debbie and stayed faithful to his wife ever after. Karen, Julie, and Jane, as well as their friends who had partaken of the special candycanes, grew to be skilled milkers of men, and even the plainest of them, once her talents became known, never lacked for dates.

*****

The third time the Tooth Fairy crossed his path, Santa thought he was ready for her. Anya's image he kept close to his heart, catechizing in mid-flight the richness of their lives together, all the blessings they had shared. He devised devastating rebuffs for the temptress should she reappear.

But his strongest defense, he believed, was his clearsighted assessment of the sex act itself. Devoid of love, did it amount to anything more than a poke and a squirt, the thrust of a fleshy banana into a squishy doughnut for the momentary excitation of both? Surely he could quell his sensual urges, acknowledge them yet not act on them, if the dreaded third visitation occurred.

The Townsend residence on K Street in Sacramento was a well-preserved, three-story Victorian, slate-gray with white trim. The house kept a stately watch over its occupants: Harold Townsend, a dealer in used cars, his wife Patricia, and their children Rachel and Billy. Santa had just read Rachel's note to him and taken a crisp bite out of an Oreo.

The sudden pressure of a hand coming to rest upon his shoulder nearly made him choke.

It was her, pantied in red this time, the same fire-engine red as his suit. The savage beauty of her body was as breathtaking as before, but no lust shone in her eyes, nothing of the huntress hung about her.

That caught Santa off guard.

"It's me again," she said.

He swallowed the cookie as best he could, pretending nonchalance. "So I see."

She brought her lips to his fingers and took the last bite of Oreo out of them as if it were a communion wafer. Then she lifted the glass of milk from the table and drank it down.

The not-Santa crept back into him, peering hungrily at the long sweep of her neck and its inviting resolution in the thrust and surge of her mammaries.

What's her game this time? And what is this thing inside me, this thing I call not-Santa?
Whatever it was, it felt disturbingly comfortable, like easing into a pair of forgotten slippers.

She set the glass down. "I haven't harvested the little girl's tooth yet," she said. "Let's take a peek, shall we?"

Santa sensed a trap. "I don't think that would be a good idea." But the Tooth Fairy insisted, poking his rotund belly and giving a maddening little laugh.