And just in time. My orgasm hits me hard, and my cum spurts out in long pearly ropes across her chin, her cheeks, her waiting mouth. She jolts when it hits her, and it’s a jolt of pleasure. I feel it as surely as I feel the fire’s heat lapping at my skin.
“Eat,” I sign.
And she does, swallowing my seed down and then licking it away from her mouth with long, clean swipes of her tongue. Then she drops her head back, breathing hard.
“Thank you,” she whispers, her eyes fixed on the ceiling.
But I grip her jaw and force her to look at me.
“I’ve been dead for six months,” I say, keeping the movements slow and measured so I can feel her understanding as it happens. “And you told me not to stop.”
Something that feels like fear but isn’t actually flares hot and bright in her, and she makes that soft whimpering sound again.
Then I slide down to bury my face between her legs, to lap at her drenched, swollen cunt until she’s screaming my name.
36
THEO
Ilose track of time, fucking Chloe there in the heat and light of the fire.
Eventually, we wind up cocooned together in one of the blankets. Chloe is limp and sleepy in my arms, tucked up in a ball against my chest. I’m inside her, of course, her pussy warm and wet around my cock, and our position lets me kiss and bite at the slope of her shoulder. “Don’t stop,” she murmurs, thrusting listlessly back against me. Her words are slurred. “Don’t you fucking stop.”
I brush her cheek with my fingers, then reach down through the warmth of the blanket to toy with her clit. It’s hot and swollen and probably aching, although I haven’t been counting how many times she’s come. Or how many times I’ve come, for that matter. Inside her. On her. I feel like I could keep going.
Chloe, though, is clearly winding down. I press my hand on her hip to still her lazy, sleepy thrusts. She gives a soft, needy little whine that just makes me pull her in closer before I go back to brushing her clit. One more orgasm, and I think she’ll fall asleep. She’s already halfway there; her heartbeat is slowing down, same as her breath.
I nuzzle her neck, roll her hard clit around between my thumb and forefinger. Her body pulses. I press a little harder, and?—
Chloe cries out, jerks against me, and then slumps with a sigh. Her pussy contracts around my cock, fluttering like a butterfly.
Although I don’t particularly want to, I slide out of her, rolling her onto her back among the thick layers of blankets. She blinks up at me, her gaze blurry and unfocused in the firelight.
“Don’t stop,” she breathes. “Keep fucking me until I’m dead.”
Her words send heat jolting toward my cock, but I shake my head no and brush her tangled hair out of her face.
“I wanted—” she mumbles. “I was so—you left us?—”
“I’m here now,” I sign, although her words make my heart feel tight and strange. I wish I could make her understand the killing moon. That it’s like the tide, something that washes in every few decades and drags me out to sea.
I tried, but in the end, even I couldn’t fight it. But at least I came back to her.
“Sleep,” I say, and her eyes roll back, her lashes fluttering against her cheek. She curls up against me.
I don’t move until her breath gets quiet and even, until I can tell from the sounds of her body that she’s dreaming. Only then do I extract myself from her, and it’s almost painful, that separation of our skin. Outside of the blankets, the air is frigid, and I wrap her up tight and arrange her head on one of the pillows from the couch.
The fire flickers, giving off its paltry warmth. I don’t want to extinguish it, not in this dark, terrible cold. At least it sounds like the storm is over. The winds are silent. Everything’s still.
I think of the rows of empty lakes houses. People always leave things behind when they flee my violence. I saw it in ’65, in ‘71, in ’87—but I mostly remember the aftermath of 2001, whenVeritas finally died for good. After I revived, I spent days picking through the dusty remains, gathering up clothes and shoes and canned food.
Clothes. I’m going to need clothes if I’m going to go out in the snow.
I leave Chloe to sleep in front of the fire. If it spreads out of the fireplace, I’ll smell it. And I tell myself I won’t go far.
Then I explore Chloe’s house, moving quietly through the cold air to open each shut door. Rooms I never bothered to look at before. Why would I? Chloe wasn’t in them.
One of the rooms is being used for storage, the space stacked high with cardboard boxes. That’s where I find some men’s clothes, the smell of their former owner so faint I know he left them here years ago. Jeans, a flannel shirt, tennis shoes. No jacket. They don’t fit well, but they’ll be good enough to get me to the other houses.
