SOPHIE

“May I make a request?” I said carefully as we climbed, decorous as any old married couple, into bed.

“So civil,” Veek said, smiling.

“Well, you got all ombrageux with me last time I asked for—for something,” I reminded him.

“I apologize for that. A sex demon has no business refusing service to a lady.”

“You see, we never did work it out, how that happened. The first time I dreamed of you—I knew it was really you. Not just a dream. We did those things. You touched me in such extraordinary ways. But I was asleep!”

“That was disrespectful of me,” he said seriously.

Puzzled, I said, “I thought that was how you serviced all Jake’s clients.”

“It was. But they paid for that disrespect. They were overworked, desperately trying to make their families’ lives perfect, exhausted with the struggle for control. They paid to be swept away, willy-nilly.”

“I see.” I thought about this. “I didn’t mind being swept away.”

“It was wrong.” He touched my hand diffidently. “I did it in a desperate attempt to get control of you. You carried me away the moment we met. I blamed Jake. I blamed the false navel string made of beef liver. I blamed Samedi, thinking he had joined our hands and fused us together somehow. I suspected Yoni’s music of casting a spell to make me susceptible to you. I even tried to feed you a love philtre—and then I drank it myself by accident.”

My jaw dropped. “What?”

“In the restaurant. Your vodka tonic. It served me right.” He waved it away. “What matters is that nothing I could do worked to keep you at bay. I felt—” He shook his head slowly.

“Caught,” I suggested.

“Yes.”

“You said that before. And from the moment we met, Veek, I felt that I belonged to you.” My breath was hot in my chest. Why did he fight me so? Didn’t he like being in love?

“That doesn’t excuse what I did. In your dream.”

“What I am trying to say, Veek, is that I loved it, but I wished we could have done it when I was awake. And you could explain to me what was happening. Can I have it again?” I begged, with both my hands on his arm. “Please?”

His smile became a head-shake. “You look behind the curtain at the theater, don’t you? I’ll bet you take music boxes apart.”

“And I meet rock stars in their dressing rooms to find the human being behind the illusion. So? Don’t you want to be a human being to me?”

“Don’t blame me if you are disappointed when you find it’s all tricks.”

I smiled. “You never disappoint me.”

Then he wanted to shower—separately, to my disappointment. “Just the way it was in your dream,” he reminded me.

I rolled my eyes.

We crept into bed, I feeling a little trembly, he looking worried.

“Don’t you remember what you did?” I said.

“I do. But will you?”

“You can remind me.” I flopped back on the pillows. I was possibly happier at this moment than I had ever been in my life.

“That’s not how I found you.”

“No. No, don’t tell me.” I closed my eyes, remembering. Then I turned over on my side. I pulled my knees up. I tucked my arms against my chest like a sleeping hare.

“No, more like this.” He moved my hands, gently, one at a time, closing them loosely and positioning them at my mouth as if I were sucking my thumb.

“I want to open my eyes.”

He sighed. “Open, then. But then we can’t be as true to the dream as you wish. In the dream, we were at Montmorency.”

I bit my lip. “You were in my mind.”

“I was, yes. It’s one of my gifts.”

“If I imagine it, can you join me in my imagined place?”

“I don’t know.” He mused. “I’ve never done it with someone who was awake.” He shrugged. “Oh, well. We’ll try.”

“Now I close my eyes and imagine the place. Montmorency.”

“The maze,” he murmured.

“The grotto,” I whispered.

“Afternoon—sunshine—the marais full of singing birds and insects.”

“The scent of salsapareille,” I remembered, and then I was there. It was warm there, and I smelled more than the flowers over the grotto. There was new-mown grass, too, and the smell of sunbaked moon carrot flowers and bedstraw. I whispered, “You approached. I heard the chuckling of kingfishers. I heard your footsteps in the maze.”

And then I heard them. I opened my eyes. I was in the grotto, just a space between the stones that made the maze wall, really, but dug out by generations of Montmorency children, lined with sand, then cushioned with fragrant dried plants. Sunlight fell through gaps in the stone cave. Veek’s feet made hardly any sound on the grass outside, but I could feel him approaching.

His intention toward me hummed in the air. My blood quickened. The light from the grotto’s opening flickered and went dark.

He knelt there, looking in. He was naked. His eyes were wild. “Is this like your dream?”

“This is just how I remember it.”

He looked at me a long time. Then he reached past the cave opening and plucked—yes, I remembered, the salsapareille bush grew just outside, hiding the cave. He sprinkled the flowers on me. My head filled with their scent.

“The smell of home,” I sighed.

“And now,” he whispered.

“Oh, yes.” I rolled onto my back and offered him my body, propping my foot against the cave wall.

“It’s very disconcerting, having your eyes on me,” he murmured.

“It’s very satisfying, seeing how disconcerted you are,” I said, eyeing his erection.

“Mon petit choux,” he whispered, “I am going to disappear now. But I won’t go away. I’ll be right here.”

I tightened. I couldn’t help it. “You’ll be here?”

“If I’m to make love to you the way I did that day, I must become vapor. Try, if you can, to sense my presence.” Indeed he faded from sight. His voice got fainter and fainter. Yet his warmth drew near me—and nearer yet. He must be between my legs now. My sex gave off its own scent. I was ready for his visitation. I let my head fall back on the cave floor and drowned in the smell of salsapareille.

Slowly, imperceptibly, I became aware of a hot spot on my sex. Then, gentle pressure.

Then I heard Veek’s voice in my ear, warm and reassuring. “I become the scent of the flowers. I hover. You are very beautiful. Your blood beats under your skin like the sea. You barely feel my cock at your portal.”

I wanted to squeeze, but the smell of grass and flowers had got into my brain. His cock slid an inch inside me. I felt drugged. “Are you doing that? Are you drugging me?”

“You are drugging yourself with sensations of home.” He breathed in against my ear and sent a shiver down my side. “And you drug me also. I feel the intoxication of your skin, how your limbs open to me. And here—do you remember this?”

A light breeze stirred. My nipple crinkled suddenly. I gasped, and in my ear, he gasped also.

“That,” I murmured, “what is it? I feel it like—like an echo of pleasure that fades but never stops.”

His voice came soft and low, as if his lips brushed my ear. “I’ve entered your body through your senses. You construct all this beauty from memory—the heat, the birdsong, the smells, the caressing marsh breeze—and you share it with me.”

“Yes.” I was hypnotized by his murmuring voice.

“I dwell in your flesh, your nerves. I share your senses. When I am inside you, I feel it with my own nerves, and also with your nerves. I feel it the way you feel it. I tickle your nipple with a blossom and we both feel the frisson. Your sheath opens reluctantly to me, but I can make myself so smooth that when I enter, my excitement becomes your excitement. Your slipperiness welcomes me. You stretch.”

I stretched. We stretched. He was deeper inside me this time than before. He was an invisible companion who knew my heart and shared it. “Now,” I gasped. “The thing. The tease. You drove me mad.”

He chuckled. I felt the palms of his hands on mine, brushing them, electrifying them until I could feel his, even if our hands were inches apart. We played with that feeling of energy between our hands, rolling it, squishing it, letting it balloon and then sink.

And then he did the thing. “What am I doing, Sophie? Can you feel my body as I feel yours?”

I shut my eyes. He was invisible anyway, but I couldn’t picture him without retreating into the featurelessness behind my sunlit eyelids—his hands are here—his cock is here—and he pulled out. I gasped and whined. He chuckled again and pushed back into me, but so slightly! The tip of his cock became the tip of my cock, and I could tell how strongly I was controlling myself, holding back from diving into this woman and drowning myself in her. We pushed just the tip inside, then pulled out, over and over, while we tightened around it, making pleasure echo back and forth between us. We whimpered. Our vulva grew more slippery, and a scent like a wild animal came out of it, rank and roaring, making us want to fuck like sledgehammers. Who was I? Veek or Sophie? We breathed slowly, deeply, sucking in air as if for a scream, but instead the scream was in our bodies, demanding release.

“Veek?” My trembling voice echoed in my ears, Veek, Veek, Veek . . .

“Sh.” Sh, sh, sh . . .

Pressure mounted. His cock teased me, and he felt my yearning as my hips rose to meet his. I squeezed him as he taunted me, and he gasped with me. We both got the exquisite burst of pleasure when a woman’s secret muscle closes on a man’s cock. It was wonderful—but then he began to slide away!

No, you don’t. Keeping my eyes shut so that his invisibility couldn’t confuse me, I curled, pushed against the cave floor, ran my cheek along his invisible cheek.

“Don’t go!”

“Sophie—if you want it the way it was—”

“I want you to fuck me,” I growled in his ear. And then, finding it by touch, I pulled his invisible head down toward me, opened my mouth wide, and bit down hard on the back of his neck.

With a cry, he slid into me all the way, smacking against my button and making stars burst. I fought for breath. The tightness inside became tightness everywhere, and he plunged and plunged into me.

I wanted him with me while I shattered. I wanted us to be one again.

How did that work? He said, Through the senses, through scent.

I smelled my harsh, wild-animal smell and imagined throwing myself into that cave. I snatched at my cock with my sheath, first with intent, No, you can’t leave yet, and then involuntarily as the spasms began, first in me, then in him, then together, echoing back and forth like a roll of thunder, unifying us like lightning marrying the earth to the sky.

After a time I realized he was fully material again—heavy and sweaty, panting on my neck and shuddering like a racehorse. I opened my eyes. His blackness darkened the cave.

“Hey,” I muttered, my mouth crushed under his shoulder.

He lifted himself off me on one hand. “Yes?”

“We had a bargain.”

His head shook, and his sweat dripped down on me. “Not for another ten minutes. Twenty. I think you’ve killed me.” Slowly he eased onto his side next to me, scrunching his legs up in the tiny cave. He picked crushed salsapareille flowers off me and crushed them more between his fingers, then put them to his nostrils, closing his eyes.

I reached up one finger and touched the dragonfly tattooed on his cheekbone. “I think I can prove my part of the bargain now.”

His eyes opened. “Will I have to move?” He closed his hand over my breast, as if to say, j’y suis, j’y reste.

“Only a little. I want you to look outside.”

“At what? The full moon?”

I smacked his arm. “Are you blind? That’s sunlight falling on us between these rocks.”

“In your dream. In your fancy.”

“Just look.”

He drew a long breath. “I can tell I love you because I really don’t want to move. But I go.”

He clambered over me and exited the cave feet first, licking me, nose and shoulder, as he passed over me.

The cave opening darkened as he left.

I waited.

His voice came. “Very nice. How do you know what I can see?”

“I don’t. I’ve been here before, of course, but I’m not doing the thing we just did. What’s it called, when you are me and I’m you?”

“Insanity,” he said absently, his voice a little farther away.

I scooted on my behind through the opening until I could get out of the cave, too.

He was standing naked under the French summer sun, shading his eyes and turning slowly, staring. I joined him.

“What are all these trees doing here?” he muttered. A row of thick trees encircled the maze.

“Cherry trees. Planted by a small boy who spat out the pits along the whole border of the maze, more than eighty years ago.”

He climbed up on the rough rock wall of the maze, swearing. “Can’t you imagine me with shoes on? These rocks are sharp.” Then he stood again and stared in all directions. “Is that the belvedere? And beyond it, I see the chateau.”

I smiled and waited for him to understand.

And then he did.

He looked down at me from his perch. “Sophie, what happened? We’re—I’m home.”

“Yes. Not in my imagination or my dream, or even in yours. You’re really home. We did this. Together.”

He jumped down and took my hands in a strong grip. “How?”

“I don’t know exactly. The same way we did before. The way Yoni and Baz can make a miraculous rain of rose petals, I suppose. She told me some things that happened, and I told Madame Vulcaine, and she suggested that I—”

“What?” There was warning and dread in his voice, and skepticism in his face.

“She said I would have to want it. I knew you wanted to come home. I wanted it for you. She thought if I wanted it enough, and if we were ‘joined in our desire,’ those were her words, then we could make it so.”

I started walking through the maze, looking for another hiding spot. Veek grabbed my hand and walked with me.

“Because you are the jam bois, the spirit of our land, you can come here. Because I was born here, it’s in me, too.”

“The marais,” he breathed, as we came to the entrance of the maze, where another whole grove of ancient cherry trees bloomed.

“My love?” I said.

He just stood there, staring at the great flat green fertile marsh as if he could eat it with his gaze. “Home.” His voice broke. “I’m home.”

I hooked my arm through his and surveyed our kingdom. A vast-winged heron floated over the canal and landed without a splash. Purple marsh orchids waved at the sky. Cowbells clanked in the distance. “So we will look for each petit bois together.”

“Hm?”

“Your pilgrimage for Baron Samedi. All the places you and Jake stayed? You must consecrate them. And I think I know how.” I smiled wickedly.

“Possibly,” he said in a stuffy Montmorency voice. “But not by freight train. If we can do this—” He scanned the horizon with satisfaction. A great sigh fell out of him. He seemed about to walk toward the chateau.

“Wait!” I reached into a crevasse in the maze’s rock wall and pulled out a plastic bag. “Clothes.”

“You hid clothes in the maze?”

“I put them here when I visited last. After you abandoned me in my papa’s hotel that night?”

“Practical Sophie.” He smiled.

“My dreamer.”

From the bag I took a shift and a pair of sandals. “Get dressed, M’sieur le Vicomte. You must dress to meet your servants.”

“My—” He hid behind a big cherry tree and looked toward the great house.

Wearing proper black and white, the household staff came running out of the house onto the lawn between the formal flower beds. They began to form two rows. All were looking at us.

He ducked back inside the maze. “Merde! Everyone is coming outside!”

I laughed. “I told them to watch for us to come out of the maze.”

He put on the clothes I’d put aside last month, while I was chasing him back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean: beige linen trousers, a silk shirt of discreet design, the belt with its chaste gold buckle, the wing-tips of our family’s pattern, the silk-linen jacket a poem of casual authority. “But these are mine,” he said, climbing feverishly into them.

“I got them from your roommate. You have very many pairs of shoes,” I said in mock severity. “And you scolded me for buying so many purses and umbrellas!”

“I’ll never scold again. How do I look?”

I brushed a blade of grass off his trouser knee. “Exquisite.”

Together we walked out of the maze toward the garden path leading up to the house, where waited two rows of our people. As we drew closer, they set up a cheer.

I squeezed his hand. “Welcome home, M’sieur le Vicomte.”