Mara, part 2

Hi PD, 

Here's the second and final part of "Mara"! 

If you missed part 1, here it is. Sorry the story's only two parts - but this one is a long and steamy one. :)

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“C’mon in,” he says from the doorway, a little breathlessly. “Can you get my bag?” As she nods, he stretches his left foot down to reclaim his shoe. He stuffs both the card and then his foot into the shoe. She stoops to grab the handle of his backpack, then pauses to take one last look over her shoulder into the courtyard behind them. A few other people are hurrying by, glancing anxiously at the sky; nobody takes notice of her. She takes a breath, feeling as if she’s about to take a dive, and follows Pete into the building.

The door closes them into a dim, air-conditioned foyer with a slate-tiled floor. Mara sets Pete’s backpack down and watches as he retrieves and replaces the card in his wallet, the wallet in the backpack, all with his foot. His hands are curled more tightly, as if in concentration.

“Can I ask,” she says carefully, “when you decide to do stuff with your feet, and…?” She tells herself that if her face is cold, it’s because of the sudden air conditioning, and not that she is, on some level, petrified.

He gives her a look that’s hard to read, then sits down abruptly in front of the backpack. After a moment, she realizes that he was positioning himself so he could shrug the backpack onto his shoulders. “I don’t like making people wait,” he responds after another moment. “So like if there’s a line at a store, I’d rather ask for help. But if it’s just us…”

“That makes sense,” she says, still carefully. He stands up and turns to go up a short flight of stairs. At the top, he turns to stride down a hallway; outside, there’s a muffled roll of thunder. “So do you go to NYU?” Mara continues, once the thunder has faded.

His laugh echoes slightly as it floats back down the hallway toward her. “Nope.”

“Um, okay. So…?” Why are we in the NYU French department? She rubs her hands slowly over her upper arms as she follows him down the hall.

“I just like figuring out how to get into places,” he says, as if that were enough explanation. He’s stopped in front of a door and taken off his backpack again; this time after he’s taken off his shoe and reached in, his foot reemerges holding something that looks like a metal ruler bent into a flat “L.” He hops back a few steps and then raises his foot to slide the L into the side of the doorframe, alongside the doorknob. He’s leaning far back to counterbalance. After he’s been sliding the tool up and down for maybe ten seconds, Mara again hears a soft click, Pete says, “Yes,” and the door drifts open.

He sets his foot down, the metal L ticking on the floor, and turns to look at Mara. “Don’t worry, I’m not, like, a criminal mastermind or something. I don’t steal shit. And my friend is a grad student here, he helped me get the card. But anyway, I don’t blame you if you think that’s all bullshit. We can go somewhere else…”

Mara shrugs. “I did always want to get into urban exploring.”

He grins with unexpected brightness as he replaces the tool in his bag. “Well, cool. Although maybe an abandoned hospital or subway station or something would be more your speed.”

“No,” Mara says, “this is perfect…” The office on the other side of the door is high-ceilinged, book-lined, with a vast, handsomely scarred wooden desk, a gleaming leather couch, and a trio of tall, arched windows opening onto the courtyard. Outside, the rain has started coming down; an occasional gust of wind sends it pattering cozily against the panes. “God, is this what it’s like to be a professor?”

“Okay, McGonagall,” Pete says. He’s leaning against one of the arms of the couch, smiling slightly. She wants to touch his lips. “Magic: real or not?”

“Ah, shit.” She puts her back to the door, leans against it to shut it.

“Yeah, I didn’t forget.”

“Okay…” She looks at the ceiling, thinking about where to begin, tapping a fingernail against one of her rings. “Have you heard the phrase, ‘As above, so below’?”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“It goes on. ‘As above, so below. As within, so without.’”

“Like the Klein bottle.”

“Hey, why not. Let’s put all the metaphors in one basket. So, it’s an old saying about magic—‘As above, so below.’ The whole idea is a microcosm/macrocosm thing. Like, you should live in a way where you believe that your personal, emotional reality reflects something about the larger nature of reality. God, this sounds so stupid. I just sound like I’m high.” She pulls her hair back from her face with both hands, distractedly.

“No, we’re just getting started, keep going.” He’s still smiling and has started scuffing his left foot back and forth across the floor.

“Okay, so the idea of quote-unquote real magic is that if you’re used to thinking about that relationship, between ‘above’ and ‘below,’ and you’re disciplined, you can work with it. Through it. Rituals, magic circles—you’ve seen that in movies and stuff?”

“Of course.”

“Um, the idea with all that, is that it puts you in a space that helps you make outside reality reflect your inner will. You focus on your within; within becomes without.”

“That doesn’t sound that crazy unless your will is, like, fireballs, or a flying squid.” And then he yells suddenly, looking up at the ceiling, “My will is thunder!”

They wait and then, when it doesn’t thunder in the next ten seconds or so, they laugh. His eyes glint in the half-light.

“But no, you totally nailed it,” she resumes. “It’s this weird sliding scale, depending what you’re looking for. Like, if I cast a, um, ‘spell’—” she’s careful to use air quotes “—a spell for money, and then I find five dollars on the sidewalk, how many times does that have to happen before I decide it’s magic and not just a coincidence? And a lot of people frown on doing it for mundane stuff like money, anyway. So… if you’re into this kind of thing, it’s kind of a weird mix of self-help and candles and trying to see coincidences as meaningful, but not too meaningful. If you boil it down, the baseline is just being interested in interpreting things as if they were stories. Including your own life.”

It does thunder, then. Mara licks her lips and watches Pete.

“You managed to make all of that sound,” he observes, “both weirdly interesting and weirdly unglamorous.” He’s lounging back against the couch now, one foot drawn up on the seat, and she tries not to fixate on the way that one of his hands is resting lightly on the back of the couch.

“You’re welcome. It’s this special thing I do, called ‘trying not to sound totally crazy.’ But maybe we can get into moon phases and sigils and stuff another time. What about you?”

He pauses. “Pastor’s kid.”

“No shit.”

“No shit. Presbyterian, born and raised.”

“And how did that go for you?”

“Well, it’s very interesting when people think your ‘special features’—” he rolls his shoulders, his hands, backwards “—exist to help them figure out how hard they can pray. Or, you know, that your mom did something wrong to make you come out that way.”

“God, that’s sick. I’m sorry.” The pit of her stomach is sour.

“Nah, I’m sorry, that came out really whiny.”

“But did your parents…?”

“No, they don’t think that way, thank god, no irony intended. But you know, it just takes one or two people pulling you aside after service and being like, ‘I’m praying for you,” and it was way more than one or two people. Times almost every Sunday of my childhood. My parents are pretty cool, though, all things considered.”

“But you don’t go to church anymore.”

“Sometimes Easter. That was always my favorite, anyway.”

“Hmm. Resurrection?”

“Yeah. Spring. Something to look forward to, in a big sense. The world wakes up again with you.”

She finds herself smiling at the dreamy look on his face, as he watches the storm with half-lidded eyes.

They let the rain fill the space in their conversation. Outside, a widely forking bolt of lightning lights the view eerily grey-pink, and a crash of thunder comes startlingly close on its heels. The rain lashes against the window with new energy.

Mara moves to the windows, unlatches one, and pushes it open, extending one of her arms into the rain. The rain hits her skin like needles. Slowly she rotates her hand from side to side, feeling the water driving against her skin with fierce insistence.

There’s another bolt of lightning and a crack of thunder overhead, and Mara freezes, not because of the thunder, but because Pete has come to stand just behind her, and he’s pressing his lips against her neck. She stays still, her heart hammering; the reverberations of the thunder tremble around them. She feels the gentle warmth of his lips. She takes one breath, two.

Pete pulls away. Finally she can turn and look at him. His face is expressionless. “Not interested?” he says.

Mara bites her lips and looks aside.

“That’s fine,” he says coolly, “but just tell me.”

“I’m just a nervous person,” she begins.

“Yeah,” he says, not meanly.

She bites her lips again, and can’t look at him. “I think you’re gorgeous. And fun. But there’s something I should tell you…”

“You’re seeing someone else.”

“No!”

“You just remembered you’re not into men.”

“No! Come on, let me talk.”

He shuts up, but his face still says, I’ve heard it before.

She opens her mouth, closes it again. She bites out a little “fuck!” under her breath. Finally she says, “I’m sexually attracted to people with disabilities.”

She’s rehearsed it so many times that when it finally comes out, she hears herself as if from a distance, and it sounds as if it means nothing at all, as if she randomly selected words from a dictionary and put them into a sentence.

Pete freezes for a long moment, and then slowly rocks backward, his fingers curling in. She wouldn’t know how to describe the expression on his face. “Oooo… kay.”

She watches his face. Her lips feel ice-cold, and she feels goosebumps standing out on her rain-wet arm. A few drops fall from her fingertips to the floor. She wonders about the possibility of sinking into the floor, herself, and never coming out. So below…

He’s looking aside, thinking. When his eyes finally move back to her, slightly narrowed, he says, “So this being a thing isn’t, like, new information to me. I’ve spent enough time on the Internet… And honestly, I’ve had a couple of guys come on to me before in a way where I was like, What are you really going after, here?”

“Really?” Mara says, despite herself. She feels a frantic kinship with those men, at the same time that she wants to shout, That isn’t me! That will never be me!

“Really. I mean, this is New York. But you’re the first girl.” His tone changes abruptly. “Is this why you’ve been so nervous the whole time?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh,” he says, and then, “Huh,” again. He looks aside, thinking, his mouth slightly open. Lightning flashes once, twice, behind Mara, and thunder follows.

Mara digs the tips of her fingers into the cold, wet skin of her wrist.

Pete rolls his head back to look at her again. He’s giving that lazy smile again. “Well, why not, I guess? Just don’t be an asshole about it.” He says it with a kind of matter-of-fact playfulness that softens any sting, without wholly blunting the warning.

Mara feels her heart squeeze in her chest. She tries on a smile, and it feels so good that she almost wants to cry. “I can be not an asshole.”

“Good. Because I was having a good time.” And he leans forward to get up from the couch. “And it would be a waste if you brought us a storm for no reason.”

She smiles again, and he moves in to kiss her, against the window. The sound of the rain outside fills their ears. He touches her nose with his gently, a kind of greeting, and then twists his head to brush his lips over hers, a little open-mouthed, feeling. She closes her eyes to enjoy the exploration, and then presses her lips more deeply against his. Her heart is beating so hard that it feels like a stabbing, and slowly she reaches out to slide her hands up his waist, running one hand up under his loose shirt to feel his warm skin. He sighs.

The other hand she traces up his side until, finally, she reaches the underside of his hand. Her breath quickens. Disbelievingly, she moves her fingertips over the soft juncture of skin where his wrist would have been, the warmth of his palm, the small, immobile thumb. She opens her eyes briefly, to find that he’s watching her motions from the corners of his eyes, as he leans his forehead against hers.

She slides her fingers to interlace with his. She’s holding his hand, now. His fingers tighten against hers, slightly, and no more. A feeling of impossible tenderness fills her, and desire. He moves to kiss her hard, and this time his tongue darts out to flick against hers, and she feels an echoing flicker deep inside herself. When they break the kiss, she’s breathing hard, and he’s smiling. This time when he leans again, he pushes his face into her thick black hair, breathes in deeply, then pushes through till he can kiss her ear, slide his lips down her neck, gently bite the crook of her shoulder, kiss her collarbone.

She breathes and breathes and grips his hand, running her thumb slowly over its back; her other hand she slides down his lean belly until she can press against his groin, finds him hard. He gives a deep “Mmmm.” She finds herself thinking, inexorably, about the simple fact that he cannot touch himself this way. She slowly runs her hand up and down his length, and he leans into her touch, exhaling.

She’s pulsing with heat; her insides feel golden, molten, and her skin registers every second of contact with his. Now resting his forehead against her shoulder, he grinds once into her touch. Then he lifts his face to her again. “Go lie on the couch?” he murmurs.

Slowly she parts from him, slipping her hands away regretfully; though she’s intrigued, all she wants is more contact, more kisses. She kicks off her sandals and lies back on the cool, creaking leather, which glints dully in the low light; he watches her with a slight smile on his lips, lounging back against the window ledge. The pane that she left open creaks behind him, swinging in the wind, and then slams itself shut. His eyes slide back briefly to it, but he doesn’t react otherwise.

“Now pull up your dress,” he whispers.

Her black tunic dress has long slits up each side; she hooks a finger into one slit and slowly draws it up, revealing her pale legs, one at a time. Finally she lifts the skirt high enough to reveal her full hips, her sheer black panties. He’s smiling more widely, leaning forward a little. “Do you want to touch yourself?”

In answer, she slides both hands down into her panties and presses deeply against herself, her whole body contracting around the thrill of pressure as he watches her, and she watches his strange, armless silhouette—like an elegant scarecrow—against the window. She sighs.

Watching him, she sits up a little straighter. She holds one hand up, and then makes a little show of it as she deliberately slides the heavy rings off of her index finger, setting them on one arm of the couch. Then she slides her hands back down her hips and against her sex.

After another moment, she slides her bared index finger deeply into herself. Her body thrills to the contact. She lingers for a moment, then withdraws her finger. Before she can question herself, she holds that finger up for Pete to see. This time, the dim light gleams on her moisture.

Her heart beats hard as she hears his exhalation, watches the tension of desire run through his body, like a new kind of gravity.

She holds her hand up for a moment longer, then sits up and swiftly pulls off her loose dress, her bra; she tosses them to one side and leans back against the couch again. Meeting Pete’s eyes, she brushes her hands down the sides of her full breasts, her waist, her rounded hips. Again she brings her hands to rest at the delta of her thighs, and then lets her head drop to one shoulder, to keep watching Pete from an angle.

Against the windowsill, his lanky frame is charged with tension. “What are you waiting for?” he whispers.

“What are you waiting for?” she responds. And she forces herself to trace her fingertips back and forth, but this is the truth: she’s so aroused that she’s afraid that if she touches herself, really touches herself, she’ll come within moments. Her fingers are trembling and her pulse throbs.

He peers at her for another moment, and then says, as if he’s decided something, “Okay. Check this out,” and he steps toward her. With the last step before he reaches the couch, he steps out of his right foot, and then pivots so that he falls back on the couch, at her feet.

The rush of blood, of shock, is so strong that her vision actually, for a second, blacks out. His right foot is a prosthesis; he’s left it standing a little distance away from the couch. His right leg ends in a tapering stump, capped with the white sleeve that had fitted into the prosthesis. He pulls the stump up on the couch to rest alongside his left foot, dimpling the leather.

When her vision reorients, he’s looking at her with slightly widened eyes. “Damn,” he says, “you were serious.”

“I was fucking serious,” she whispers back. The mixture of shame and desire runs red-hot inside her. As quietly as she possibly can, as lightning flashes outside, she says, “If you touch me, I’m going to come.”

His eyebrows go up further, and he flips over to his knees, bending over her, between her outspread legs. He kisses her again, then draws his face down between her breasts, smoothing his cheek over her belly, and then comes to rest above her waist. She feels his warm breath puffing out against her. Then he pulls the band of her panties down with his teeth and kisses her there, kisses her deeply. A soft moan escapes her. She holds on for as long as she can, but then he thrusts his tongue out firmly, commandingly, deep into her, and she comes, falling back into a kind of bright darkness. Her hand gropes for something to hold onto, and she finds his thigh, grasps it hard, dimly aware that she’s crying out as the pleasure heats her body.

When she stirs again, her vision clearing, he’s lying with his head against her shoulder. Despite the intimacy of the posture, the wariness is back in his eyes; it softens a little when she turns and kisses him. “Thank you,” she whispers. Outside, there’s a long roll of low thunder.

She lifts her hands to run them over his face, stroke her fingertips along the muscles of his neck—he closes his eyes—and then run them down his chest, coming to circle lightly around his groin. Then she lifts them again to pull off his shirt, letting her hands brush by his hands as she does so. Even with the warm glow of orgasm still on her, her pulse quickens again as she touches those delicate fingers. She moves her hands down to his jeans, realizes that the waistband is elastic, catches him watching her in the moment of realization. Swiftly she pulls both his jeans and boxers down; as he’s focusing on kicking them the rest of the way off, with limber, practiced motions, she reaches down to cup his erection with one hand, firmly, and he makes a noise deep in his throat. And then she pushes herself—Be bold—and slides her lips along the back of his near hand until she can slip the tip of one of his fingers into her mouth.

He stills, and she instantly releases him, and whispers, “Is that okay?”

His eyes dart towards hers; they’re dilated, and the storm light catches them strangely. After a pause he says, “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

Slowly she parts her lips around his finger again, extending her tongue to slide it along the underside of his finger, which presses back weakly against her. At the same time she reaches to finally, firmly grasp his cock. He moans and presses into her touch; she savors his heat and hardness, the velvety skin. It’s easy, dangerously easy, to synchronize her motions this way, slowly suckling his finger, slowly stroking his cock with her palm, and he’s moaning deep, deep from within his chest.

She feels feverish, her eyes moving in quick glances, trying to take it all in: his lean form pressing against her, his hips occasionally pulsing to follow her motions, his dark eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks, his lips parted, taking in deep breaths. And the beautifully strange sight of his right leg tapering to a slender stump midway through the shin, stirring below his left leg. Deliriously, for a moment she thinks of the slim legs of deer.

He is, she thinks, perfectly incomplete; she can’t imagine him being any other way. She pulls back and whispers to him, “You’re gorgeous.”

He opens his eyes and gives her a searching look, and she can tell he’s getting ready to say something sarcastic. But then the edge fades, and he answers her first with a long kiss, and then simply by repeating her own words back to her: “You’re gorgeous.” His tone of happy discovery undoes her, and she has to catch her breath, smiling.

He catches her attention again by shifting his shoulder so that his fingers tap against her jawline. “I am also,” he whispers, this time tinged with sardonicism, “not going to last much longer.”

Mara breathes out from between gently pursed lips. “I have a condom,” she whispers after a moment.

He raises his eyebrows, and then inclines his head with a little smile that says, Be my guest.

She sits up, stroking one hand along his side, before leaving him on the couch to rummage in her bag where she left it by the door. When she returns, he’s sitting up with his legs drawn up on the couch again, giving her an intensely expectant look. As she tears open the wrapper, she can tell that he’s watching her with fascination so pointed that it’s almost accusatory. He gets it, has anticipated the arousal that stabs through her fiercely as she carefully rolls the condom over his cock, the arousal that comes because this is something that he, with his strange hands, would never be able to do. Her breath shudders through her.

As she finishes, she realizes that he’s reaching out his right leg to slide it into his prosthesis again. “Against the wall?” he suggests in a whisper, with a strange smile on his lips, a combination of humor and affection.

Mutely, she nods and moves to the wall next to the windows. Outside, the rain is still steady, but softer. She tries to steady her breath as she watches him walk towards her. When he reaches her, he bends to kiss each of her breasts lingeringly, then looks up to meet her eyes. When he sees her desperate affirmation, he presses against her once, then slides his hips until he can find his way into her, one of her hands guiding him.

He exhales hard, leaning his head against the wall over her shoulder; her breath immediately goes to a high-pitched moan, and then he starts thrusting into her, smoothly, steadily. They’re both panting now, and she wraps her hands first around his waist, and then around his ass, pushing each of his strokes even more deeply into her, each one setting off a thick, sweet, urgent pulse of pleasure deep inside of her. He presses his forehead against her neck, and she revels in the wildness of his breath, the sounds he’s making, the sight of his hands just in front of her face, the way he fills her with each stroke…

He comes, shuddering and moaning, holding his last stroke deeply inside her. And listening to his breath, feeling him, she feels the heat burst inside of her again.

They’re sweaty, entangled; she holds tight to his leaning form.

Their breaths slow. Sliding her hands around his waist again, she presses a kiss to the back of one of his hands.

***

  

Later, as they’re awakening from a doze on the couch, he asks her in a murmur, “So, did you cast a love spell to catch me?”

She laughs softly, rearranges herself around him, enjoying the warmth of his back against her belly, the feeling of his hair brushing her lips occasionally. “No. Love spells are considered very gauche. You’d be violating free will.” She taps his shoulder in time with the words of her last sentence, in mock-reproving emphasis. Then she pauses, resting her chin against his shoulder. “But… I did do something to make sure I wouldn’t chicken out from telling you that I like… you know.”

She watches as he smiles. “Very considerate of you. I’m glad I got me a good witch.” He is neither teasing her, nor entirely serious.

“Mmm. Do we have to get up?”

“We probably should. Unless you want to stage a revolution and declare this office the Free Republic of Witches.”

“And to the republic, for witchy stands…”

Their drowsy nonsense spins on and out into a comfortable silence. Outside, the sky is gradually clearing; they’ll see a little blue sky before the sun sets. And Saturday will go on after that; the weekend will go on after that. None of it has to stop, Mara thinks, holding Pete and watching the sky.

***

  

“Where,” says Mara into her phone, “are we going this time?” It’s two weeks later, late at night, almost 11 P.M. She lies on her bed, staring out the window at the apartment building across from hers, its gold-lit panes stretching up into the light-stained New York City night. She runs a fingernail up and down her sternum. Her skin feels warmer when she thinks about him, when she listens to his voice.

"Williamsburg,” Pete replies. “South 4^th Street.” She’d promised to meet him in an hour, without knowing where, till now.

“And why are we going to South 4^th Street?”

“Because there’s an abandoned subway station there. And it’s full of art.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“It’s an abandoned subway station,” he repeats, “full of art. You know, like street art. Except it’s completely dark, and we might fall off a platform and die.”

“Oh,” she says. He brain is lighting up with images: painted caverns, a derelict underground cathedral. “Wow. Yes. Let’s do that. Minus the dying part.”

“Only you can prevent foolhardy railway deaths,” he says in a Smokey the Bear voice. “But get this. It is officially considered…” and he enunciates carefully, “a ‘six-track ghost station.’ I thought you’d like that. Maybe if we die, we’d be upgrading it to a six-track, two-ghost, ghost station... Anyway, yeah, we’re doing this, if you picked up the headlamps.”

“I did…”

“Great. See you soon.” And then she can hear the smile in his voice: “If you get scared, you can hold my hand.”

***

  

They take the last G train; they arrive at Broadway station a little before midnight. The station is empty, dank after the day’s heat and humidity.

Pete’s eyes glint with anticipation as he leans for Mara to fit the headlamp onto his forehead; she clicks it on for him. “Thanks.” Drawing himself up before the darkness of the tunnel mouth, he flexes his shoulders, enjoying her enjoyment of the motion as his slender hands rise and fall. “Ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.” A cool, stale breeze breathes out of the tunnel at them. Mara clicks on her own headlamp, watches it wash the darkness a shade paler. She shifts nervously on the platform, feeling as if she’s waiting to hear a voice calling to them out of the tunnel.

Pete sees her nervousness, pauses to kiss her on the cheek. Then he leans back, just looking her over and grinning for a moment, before he turns away into the tunnel, setting off confidently on the narrow walkway flush with the damp tunnel wall.

Mara takes a deep breath, and then she follows him; she follows his silhouette into the darkness, with the light dancing before it.

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Thanks for reading, PD; I hope you had fun with Mara and Pete! And now I am off to keep working on a sequel to "Jazz Age."