VOICE OF AN ANGEL
Teresa Noelle Roberts
Jessie was hired for the costuming job at the Berkshire Opera because she had a great portfolio and several years of theatrical costuming experience.
Her knowledge of opera, however, was limited to what she’d learned from classic “Bugs Bunny” cartoons.
It didn’t really matter for the job. As long as the directors could explain their vision for a production and point her in the right direction for visual inspiration, she didn’t need to know that much. But plunging into a new world full of beautiful but unfamiliar music had piqued her curiosity. Most people in the company were glad to answer her questions, but she’d found a particular friend in the set designer. Nelson, a fiftyish self-described “flamboyant opera queen,” was delighted to have someone new to convert to his passion, and she often found his nonmusician’s explanations more comprehensible than those of the people with conservatory degrees.
So it was to Nelson she turned when the early discussions of a production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare left her confused. “I have no problem with crossgender casting. If the director wants Nora Murray to play Ptolemy, I’m glad to make the costume. But aren’t they going to have to transpose the part for her?”
“A lot of the Baroque repertoire is written for a castrato voice. Yes,” Nelson continued, seeing her wince, “it means exactly what it sounds like. Disturbing thought, but supposedly it produced a lovely voice, high but powerful. Mutilating boys for the sake of art is frowned on nowadays, though, so women usually get those roles.”
“If it’s a choice between cutting some poor kid’s balls off or making someone built like Queen Latifah look manly, I’ll take on the extra costuming challenge.”
“I’m glad that’s your department, not mine—talk about engineering! On the other hand, I do envy you getting to fit Daniel Gwynn.”
“The one coming up from New York to play Caesar?”
“A countertenor, and one of the best. A male alto or soprano, to oversimplify vastly,” he added, seeing the blank look on her face. “They’re rare, of course, and great ones rarer still, but Daniel sounds like you’d imagine an angel would, and he’s utterly gorgeous to boot. The idea of getting paid to have your hands all over that man and maybe see him in his underwear…my dear, I am terribly, terribly jealous.”
Jessie immediately imagined some pretty, fey, androgynous creature, Boy George with more class. Nice to look at, fun to costume, but not her type. Just as well, really.
When Daniel Gwynn actually walked into the first cast and crew briefing session, though, he wasn’t at all what Jessie had imagined. For one, he was tall, six-two or six-three if she estimated correctly (and after several years of fitting bodies of all shapes and sizes for costuming, she usually did) and nicely built. He wasn’t a broad-chested fantasy figure off a romance novel cover, but lean and leggy and gracefully strong like a great cat, not at all the androgynous sylph she’d pictured.
He wasn’t pretty, either, but handsome in an almost stern way, all about high cheekbones and chiseled features and pale gray-blue eyes that looked cold and remote until he smiled. He was dressed all in neutral colors—black jeans, charcoal gray sweater, lighter gray turtleneck under it to protect his throat against the chilly spring air.
When he smiled, his severe good looks were transfigured into something otherworldly yet very sexy, something like the way she’d always imagined Tolkien’s elves (the cute college boy appeal of Orlando Bloom notwithstanding). Jessie melted—right along, she figured, with everybody in the room who fancied men. His speaking voice astonished her even more than his looks: rich, resonant, lower than she expected.
“Aren’t you a countertenor?” she blurted out when they were introduced. “I’d expected your voice to be higher.” Then she bit her tongue, realizing that she’d sounded like an ignoramus.
He gave her one of those blood-igniting smiles. “Only when I want it to be,” he replied in a much higher register, still backed with all the power of years of vocal training. “My natural speaking voice is lower than my singing voice,” he added, in the deeper tones she’d heard at first. “That’s not uncommon.”
She felt herself blushing. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe I said that. I’m new and still have a lot to learn. The regular members of the company are used to my dumb remarks by now, but I should have spared you.”
He laughed, and even though Jessie was convinced, after her faux pas, that it was at her rather than with her, it was still a glorious sound. “Don’t worry about it. You’re a costume designer, right?” he said. “I don’t understand how you do what you do, either—I’m color-blind, I’ve got the design sense of a wombat, and I can’t sew on a button—but I do appreciate someone who dresses me up and makes me look good.” He winked. “I’ll look forward to chatting with you more during fittings. Maybe you can finally teach me to sew on a button.”
Then he wandered away to talk to some of the other singers, leaving Jessie still flustered and repeating to herself firmly that the wink meant absolutely nothing. She would not, repeat would not, get a crush on him, although he was just as good-looking as Nelson had claimed.
She managed to keep that resolution for a couple of days.
Then she actually heard Daniel sing.
As the costumer, she wasn’t expected to attend most rehearsals, but in the early stages, when the company was still working out its vision of the production, she found it useful to sit in on a few before she got too committed to costume sketches that just wouldn’t work. Besides, she was intensely curious about this particular production, and, to be honest, about what a countertenor sounded like.
She scrunched down in the front row of the theater—forlorn and curiously stale-smelling now with no sets, no costumes, no special lighting—prepared to take notes on any costume ideas that popped into her head. In Handel’s day, it was perfectly manly to wear brocade and lace and accepted practice for heroes to be played by high-voiced castrati, but in the twenty-first century the male soprano emperor and the female Ptolemy had a hip, gender-bending quality, at least on paper. Might she be able to work some of that contradiction into the costuming?
As soon as Daniel began to sing, though, she understood there was no real contradiction.
The story was purely a coat hanger for the music, the glorious music.
And the music was designed to show off a voice like Daniel’s.
He sounded as otherworldly as an angel, yet sensuous. She’d heard boy sopranos singing in a similar range, but their voices were light, innocent, almost disembodied. Daniel’s voice was definitely bodied, and in a pretty damn amazing adult male body, and although it didn’t sound “masculine” in any of the ways she was used to, it unquestionably was. That should have seemed weird, but instead it was hot, as if he were turning the whole notion of gender on its head in a way that made Jessie even more aware of his body and hers.
This music didn’t carry the raw emotion of some of the nineteenth-century opera she’d gotten to know earlier in the season, let alone the gritty, let’s-get-down passion of rock. There was no mess involved. It was all about technique and elaboration. Yet its beauty, and the implausible glory of Daniel’s voice, seemed to go straight between her legs and vibrate.
As she sat transfixed, listening to that gorgeous voice coming from that gorgeous body, Jessie could feel her nipples perking. Her labia were swelling, throbbing, pressing against the seam of her jeans, and she could feel her panties getting sticky.
Male yet not male. An emperor yet a soprano.
She would dress him in lace and brocade, drawing on the wildest extravagances of the Baroque era, but in a way that showed off the strength and power of his body. Make the breeches the more fitted ones that became popular shortly after this opera was written, to show off his long legs; make the coat really full-skirted and over-the-top—maybe a loud but glorious brocade lined with Imperial purple—but make sure it emphasized his shoulders.
And Nora…Nora and the other women playing male roles would dress like Baroque drag kings, with obviously padded crotches, and blatantly fake mustaches and goatees. Make them all strange and beautiful, partaking of both male and female, to support the beauty of the music and play up the aspects to that a modern observer seemed strange.
As she made notes, Daniel kept singing and she kept getting wetter.
As she began to make some sketches, Daniel and Fritz, a baritone, had a brief song exchange.
She’d always liked Fritz’s deep voice, thick and golden as caramel syrup, but with Daniel’s angelic tones weaving around it, soaring and trilling in ways Fritz could not, it sounded grounded, mundane. Just a guy after all, though a guy who could sing better than most men could dream.
The director came forward. “Thanks, Fritz. Daniel, Mei, I want to hear your first duet now.” Mei Wong, who was playing Cleopatra, stepped forward, looking even tinier than she actually was next to Daniel’s height.
Jessie set down her pencil and closed her eyes to listen. She’d been wondering about the romantic duets, how the two voices would blend. Until she’d actually heard Daniel, she’d thought the two high voices together in a love song might seem strange, at least to people who weren’t aficionados of Baroque opera. She wanted to hear Daniel and Mei together the first time without visual cues.
Shame not to see Daniel, though, she thought as they began to sing. It must be his good looks that were affecting her so.
It wasn’t.
If anything, the voice’s soaring beauty seemed even more striking without his face and body distracting her. And the way it wove in and out with Mei’s—astonishing! They were roughly in the same range, but with entirely different timbres to their voices.
It was as if Mei was being courted by a beautiful being from another world. Love among the aliens.
Make that lust among the aliens, because if anything the duet was tickling her clit more than the solo had. That voice…that voice!
Jessie opened her eyes to see Daniel gazing down at Mei. He wasn’t trying to act the role yet and didn’t look particularly romantic or lustful. (To be honest, Jessie wasn’t sure where the opera picked up the story. Was this even a love duet or was Cleopatra saying something more to the effect of “Get out my country, you great oaf of a Roman”?) But she still envied Mei for being the subject of his attention, his gaze.
His singing.
Jessie shifted in her seat, bit her lip to stifle a moan. This was more than she could stand. Quietly, she gathered her things and crept away to the bathroom.
Safely in a locked stall, Jessie peeled her jeans down, leaned on one shabby gray stall wall. One hand slipped between her legs.
She was slick as a seal, hot as an oven, and all without being touched.
She couldn’t hear Daniel’s voice from the bathroom, but with the memory fresh in her ears, it only took a few flicks of her fingers against her swollen clit to bring her over the edge.
Music soared in her head as she clenched on herself and muffled a betraying groan.
Afterward, as she zipped up her jeans and composed herself, Jessie scolded herself for being even sillier than a teenage girl lusting after—whoever teenage girls lusted after these days. (Justin Timberlake? Aaron Carter?) For heaven’s sake, she was supposed to be working with Daniel Gwynn. Costuming him. Dressing him up to be even more striking than he was in street clothes. Measuring him. Fitting him. Touching him.
Curiously, while that thought gave her a pleasurable shiver, it was didn’t compare to the thought of hearing him sing again.
Jessie tossed and turned that night, Daniel’s voice echoing in her head, enough to inflame her. Finally she grabbed her favorite vibrator, hoping it would end her torment.
As soon as she turned it on, though, she knew it wouldn’t work. That whirring noise—it was so ugly, so intrusive, drowning out the sense memories of Daniel’s singing.
Disgusted, she shut it off and went into the living room, rummaged around until she found some CDs Nelson had loaned her that, as yet, she hadn’t had a chance to play. He hadn’t had Giulio Cesare, but he’d passed on another Baroque opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea, by Monteverdi.
She skimmed the liner notes, figured out who the countertenors were, and selected an aria to put on repeat.
Then she settled back on her comfortable couch, spread her legs, and imagined Daniel.
Oh, this voice wasn’t quite right—glorious, but not quite right. For all she knew, this singer was better. He was someone famous, after all, someone who’d sung at the Metropolitan Opera and La Scala, not the young, up-and-coming talent that Daniel Gwynn was.
But he didn’t have the same effect that Daniel did. She felt a thrill of pleasure listening to the music, but an aesthetic thrill, not a sexual one that helped with the throbbing frustration between her legs.
Finally, she cursed and got the vibrator. It wasn’t what she wanted, wasn’t what she needed, and its noise fought with the strains of the music, but its familiar shimmering touch stirred her. That, and the music, and the vision of Daniel worked in concert. (Luckily, the upstairs neighbor was away and the downstairs neighbor worked the night shift, or she might be the first person ever to get the cops called on her for playing Monteverdi too loudly.)
If Daniel were here now, singing for her, he’d get quite a show, she thought. What would he think if he saw her like this, naked and splayed-legged on the couch, a vibrator pressed against her clit and two fingers working in and out, moaning, “Sing for me, Daniel”?
Would he like her breasts with their tidy maroon nipples, the line of her hips, the wet sheen of her shaved pussy?
She could picture those pale, astute eyes studying her, and felt herself flutter in response to the idea, one step closer to coming. Would he like what he saw? No way of knowing, but hell, it was her fantasy.
She imagined him stopping in midsong to enter her, imagined Daniel’s face, his hands, his cock—his voice in her ear, making sweet music of her name.
And with that, she exploded.
The next day, Jessie sneaked a small tape recorder into rehearsal and taped Daniel.
The sound quality was ghastly when she played it back at home. It sounded as though he was singing five miles away through a pair of old socks. Unaccompanied and unmiked, he was scarcely audible. Yet every night, she played it over and over again, coming and coming.
Thus armed, she was able to maintain some kind of professional demeanor during the preliminary work on Daniel’s costume, although it certainly wasn’t easy. Daniel smelled good, a bit musky, a bit like raw silk, and like the big, handsome cat he was, he seemed to enjoy being the focus of attention while he pretended to take it all for granted. Jessie’s skin pulsed whenever she got near him, but she took a deep breath, looked ahead to an evening with her vibrator and the recording, and tried to think of it as particularly torturous, drawn-out form of foreplay.
It worked until it came time to perfect the fit for his satin breeches. Doing the muslin for these had been trying enough, but she’d had an intern with her then, writing down measurements, handing her safety pins and chalk, asking questions, and generally forcing Jessie not to give in to the temptation to make a pass at him. (Jessie was half-convinced that Ayesha knew that her distraction value was higher than her value as an assistant that day. Some of her questions were too dumb, and some of her timing was too handy, to be entirely artless.)
But Ayesha had the flu and had been out for most of the week already, and the older Polish woman who also helped out in the shop had been called away for a family emergency. They were already a little behind schedule—what else was new?—and finally, she decided to go ahead with this, the third attempt to do Daniel’s fitting. It was definitely easier with help, but she had to get on with things.
Even if it meant being alone with him.
On her knees in front of a man she lusted after, separated from his flesh only by a thin layer of fabric that she would be tweaking so it fit snugly. It wasn’t just that she would be able to touch his thighs, his glorious butt; she was obliged to touch them in order to get her job done.
Jessie’s heart was racing as if she’d gulped down four double espressos in rapid succession, and her stomach jittered to go along with it. She was one Daniel-smile away from having the shaky hands to complete the too-much-coffee illusion, and that, considering that she was working with pins, would just be bad.
And, of course, he had to say something. “You seem a bit anxious, Jessie. Is anything wrong?” It was hardly sexy banter, but in Daniel’s amazing voice, it was good enough, or bad enough.
Some adolescent bit of her thought, He cares. He cares enough to notice!
Her nipples perked up. Her clit quivered. And predictably, her hands started shaking.
“I’m fine,” she lied. “Late night, last night, and a little too much coffee this morning, that’s all.”
“Good. I think I’m nervous enough for the both of us.”
“You’ll be great,” she replied. “And I’ll make sure you look fabulous, which should close the deal. The big companies will be beating down your door after opening night.” While the Berkshire Opera didn’t have the fame of some of the big-city opera companies, it was watched very closely by those same big companies. Making a splash here in a leading role could take Daniel from up-and-coming young singer to—would a male diva be a divo?
He gave her a devastating smile. “Thanks, Jessie. That helps.”
Something about the way he said it suggested it hadn’t helped enough. Oh well, he knew she was hardly an expert on opera, and what nervous performer ever listened to a mere costumer about their worth anyway? Their fashion statement, maybe, but not their worth.
The only way Jessie was going to survive this fitting was to pretend that Daniel was a mannequin. No more talking, she vowed. In silence, she went to work, smoothing and stroking the satin of the breeches against his legs, marking with chalk where she’d need to adjust the fit. She focused on the luxurious, smooth fabric, trying to shut out the heat of his body, the scent of his skin.
It might have worked, too, if she hadn’t needed to double-check that she’d gotten the placement of the buttons at the fly just right.
She’d been trying desperately not to look there, but she had to check—it would hardly do for the breeches to fit perfectly everywhere but there. And when she did, she saw Daniel had a hard-on.
A hard-on that suggested if his voice hadn’t been pure gold, Daniel could have found work in the porn industry.
A hard-on so nicely outlined by the tight, slightly stretchy fabric that she could see the mushroom shape of the head, even the way it was throbbing. The buttons were straining, and she was pretty sure he wasn’t wearing underwear under the breeches.
That explained the nerves: he was also concerned about getting through this very intimate fitting.
There was only so much a woman could take. Jessie set down her pins and chalk, took a deep breath and reached out. “May I?” she breathed, and Daniel nodded frantically.
Her fingers fumbled at the buttons, and she cursed the impulse that made her use this historically correct but currently inconvenient closure, instead of something more expedient, like a zipper. (It wasn’t as though it would show much under the voluminous coat!)
Then she forced herself to slow down and to make the best of necessity by playing with the teasing possibilities. With each button, she paused for a few seconds, stroking at the little bit of him now revealed, driving them both a little crazier.
By the time the breeches were open, though, Jessie was done with playing. She took him in her mouth.
He groaned, a deeper, more animal noise than she could have imagined him making, even in her wildest fantasies. She could already taste a bit of precum, salty and delicious. He was thick as well as long, not a candidate for deep-throating, but great to play with. She closed one hand around his base and began to stroke in time with her sucking, cupping his balls with her other hand.
Her sex was flooding. Lovely as it was to have him in her mouth, she wanted him inside her, fucking her. In a little while, she’d probably beg for it. But not yet. Now she was just enjoying the taste of him, the way he stretched her mouth a bit.
His balls tightened under her hand. “If you don’t stop—” he choked out.
She backed off but left her hand hefting his balls. They felt so right, there. “Thanks for the warning. Not that I’d object to you coming in my mouth, but I’d had other hopes for that cock of yours.”
He grinned, not the practiced performer’s smile, but the cat-with-the-canary smirk of a man who’d stumbled into sex he’d hoped for but hadn’t really expected. Then he caught her up and gave her a kiss that tickled down and touched places that shouldn’t have been reached by lips and tongues coming together.
Even while they kissed, she was peeling out of her clothes. The yoga pants she favored for crawling-around-on-the-floor days might not be elegant or sexy, but they had one advantage under the circumstances: they were easy to take off. Daniel’s clothes were a little trickier, especially the still-basted breeches, but one thing she’d learned in her years as a costumer was how to help someone undress quickly.
Normally, Jessie would want more kissing, some serious time spent toying with her nipples, some reciprocation for her oral teasing. But she’d been fantasizing about Daniel for so long that she was wet and eager.
She looked at the project on the cutting table (one of Mei’s gowns, a heavily boned confection of heavy gold-on-white brocade designed to look like something a person of Handel’s era might imagine Cleopatra wearing) and was briefly tempted to sweep it onto the floor.
No, it would wrinkle, and expensive white fabric and floors were a bad combination. Dancing internally with impatience, she took a few seconds to drape it neatly over a chair, out of harm’s way.
Then she hopped up on the table and lay back.
Proving his worth as a gentleman, he bent down to lick her, but she stopped him. “No,” she muttered. “I want your cock. Please.”
Again that smug grin.
Lucky guess. A table the right height for cutting wasn’t a bad height for fucking either (provided, at least, you had a partner as tall as Daniel), although it took a little fussing to get everything properly aligned. The extra perhaps thirty seconds this took was excruciating, and when he finally pushed inside her, Jessie almost screamed with relief.
He filled her pussy the way he’d stretched her mouth. She couldn’t move much in the position she was in, which was both exciting and frustrating. Exciting because it put her at Daniel’s mercy, depending on whether he stroked in and out slowly or pounded to the finish line, and frustrating because, at the moment, he was stroking slowly. All right, she should give him credit for realizing that when you’re well-hung, you need to take a little extra time and make sure your lover’s opened up and ready for you. But she was ready, dammit, more than ready.
Jessie grabbed his ass with both hands. “Please. Harder.” She pulled him forward as she did, pushed with her hips as best she could, trying to get more of him inside.
Daniel began to pump faster.
Yes. That was what she’d needed, a good, primal fuck, one that would leave her a bit sore afterward but right now felt really good.
Her abs fluttered. She could feel her pussy clamping down, making him feel even more deliciously huge inside her. Her nipples felt sharp and hard as blades. Yet she couldn’t quite come. This was just the kind of fucking she’d thought she’d needed, and it felt great, but it wasn’t quite doing it. New partner nerves, maybe?
She moved one hand to her clit, planning to give herself that extra little boost she needed to break the dam and let loose the orgasms she could feel were ready to pour out with a little more stimulation.
Just at that second, Daniel’s eyes widened. He pumped into her wildly for a few seconds, let out a small sound of surprised pleasure—a much smaller one than she would have expected, given the power of his voice—and ground against her. She could actually feel his cock jump inside her as he came, a tiny but delightful movement that still didn’t quite push her over the edge.
He spent about fifteen seconds looking happily dazed and smug before the smugness gave way to embarrassment. “Sorry. It’s been a while and I’ve been thinking about doing this with you way too much lately, but that’s no excuse.”
“It’s all right,” Jessie said feebly, trying to be polite. Damn, and she’d been so close!
“No, it’s not. I pride myself on a good performance.” The stage smile again, but with a playful wink. “You wouldn’t let me lick you before. Will you now? I’m told I’m quite good with my tongue,” he added in a teasing voice. “I think it’s from learning to sing in Italian.”
Tempting. Very tempting. A few licks right now ought to do it, and she had no doubt that Daniel’s tongue was skilled. But the mention of singing suggested another idea—one that the sudden contraction of her pussy told her was a good one.
“Would you sing for me?” Jessie begged. “Sing for me while I touch myself? Please? Your voice turns me on so much.”
First Daniel blushed and looked bewildered, but another look, sexy and mischievous, replaced it. “Only if I can touch you instead. I want to feel you come on my hand while I sing for you.”
Just the thought of it made her spasm a little.
He settled two fingers on her clit. Circling it gently, he began to sing.
His voice poured over Jessie’s bare skin, caressed her all over, circled around her clit following his fingers.
She spread her legs wider, picturing the song slipping inside her—and jumped as Daniel’s fingers slipped in instead. Still wet and open, and slick with his come, Jessie took his index and ring finger inside her easily. He seemed to know exactly where to touch, where her G-spot was, how fast to pump her (quick and forceful as industrial dance music), how much pressure the other hand needed to put on her clit (delicately, gentle as a waltz.)
Or maybe everything felt so right because his voice was also working its magic on her, intimate as his hands, yet impersonal as an angel on high.
He hit a particularly lovely high note and trilled it, a technique that she knew had a name if she’d had enough brain cells left to care. She didn’t.
It worked like a musical vibrator.
Jessie contracted. Her hips bucked up, pushing herself harder onto his hands. The room spun as she cried out “Ohgodohgodohgod.”
The orgasm was a long one, and he kept playing with that note the whole time. Finally she flopped back on the table, feeling, if not quite sated, then damn content.
He kept going, though. Kept singing. Kept touching her.
Suddenly she understood. He wasn’t done with the piece of music, and if he’d finished prematurely before, he wasn’t going to this time.
One of the things she’d picked up about Baroque opera was that an aria could be ornamented and varied for as long as the singer’s invention and lung-power allowed.
She’d learned from sitting in on rehearsals that Daniel had plenty of both.
That was the last coherent thought she had for a while. Occasionally her brain would kick in long enough to admire some lovely trick of his voice, but then some equally lovely trick of his hands would set her coming again and her cries almost drowned out his voice. Or maybe it was the other way around, that she focused on the hands, but the voice triggered the orgasm.
She lost count at five, but it seemed that there were more.
Finally, she caught his voice faltering, at about the same time she was starting to get almost too sensitive. She grinned wearily, clapped, and croaked, “Bravo!” while pushing him gently away.
“What, no encore?”
“You need to save your voice for rehearsal later,” Jessie said, amazed she could form so coherent a thought. “And I’m worn out. But I’d definitely like an encore sometime.”
He grinned. “And to think,” he said, his voice a little shaky, “that some people think Baroque music lacks passion.”