and Falling, Fly

The heiress’s godchild is divine. At least that’s what my tattoo says. Okay, if I’m honest, it just suggests it. But true twenty-first-century girl that I am, literal is my only metaphor.

Dublin’s tattoo parlors cluster into a few square blocks like American churches in a one-stoplight town. I began my pilgrimage late on a southwest corner and was turned away from the first four doors I entered. But Dani has tattooed over surgery scars before and only warns me about the pain. “You’ll wish you were dead,” he tells me. “The nerves are closer to the surface in scars.”

He tells me to break the work into sessions, but I offer him twice his posted rate to finish tonight. It takes nine hours. We don’t talk. He’s grudgingly impressed that I don’t make a sound while the needle drills scar tissue and bone, and he stops only to pee. He doesn’t hit on me. I’m not his type.

It’s early morning when Dani finishes. He offers me a pint, but I say I need to get on the road, and he understands. I had wanted to go to Glendalough, to see its famous bell tower pictured on the tourist guides, but I’m following the hand-drawn map instead, driving into the heart of Ireland on the small roads—unnamed on map or sign—that vein the land. Several times I stop and get out of the car to look around or just listen. I am absurd, as more of the landscape unfurls, hopping in and out of the car to stare at each new convolute and coil, somewhere between inspiration and idiocy. It seems impossible that the vampire bars of New York that I left behind so recently could belong to the same world I now inhabit.

I am waylaid again and again by the glory of this strange land. For miles, as far as I can see in any direction, the road I’m driving is the only sign of human work. I leave the rental in the road; there is no shoulder to pull over onto. In fact, there are no lanes—but there are also no cars. I’m staggered by the indefinite expanse and silence and beauty. This landscape could be anytime—the earth before mankind, the Garden before the fall. And yet, I feel at home inside it.

The Rock of Cashel is a geologically drastic stone outcrop burst from Tipperary’s lush and gentle landscape. I imagine people have lived or worshiped from its lofty vantage as long as there have been people, but I’m just glad you can see it from a long way off. This is where my map delivers me.

I spend an hour and a half systematically following every road that radiates from the rock. On the fourth of five roads, I chance upon a ruined abbey, late in the afternoon, a little off the road and across a field of grazing cows, dull and placid in the un-mystic sun. Behind the church, I discover two headstones, and stretch out in the soft grass to watch the prototypical spring clouds in the bright blue sky. Tomorrow will be May. There are more cold days to come, but right now, the sun is low and warm. I’m deeply relaxed, almost slipping into sleep, when it occurs to me that interred beneath me are men who buried their lust beneath their desire for union with a perfect god and so managed, their whole lives, to avoid sleeping with a woman. It seems cruel of me to lie above them now, so I get up. “May you sleep ever with the angels,” I pray.

I am climbing the abbey’s interrupted walls again, when I see a man across the field. Something in his confident stride suggests urgency. He is not wandering or exploring. He is pursuing. His shoulders are broad, and his hands ball into taut fists. He will not be brooked, whatever his search. I put my head over the parapet to watch him.

He’s handsome, hair glinting red in the sunset’s bloody light. There’s something of the warrior in his lithe body, and he jumps the low stone wall easily. He stops at the ruined threshold. His eyes, blue as a sword’s edge, run across the edifice, but he doesn’t see me above it. He walks through the doorless opening in the wall I sit atop, into the grass-carpeted nave. He looks up, gazing through an empty stone window toward the cloudless, blue sky. I walk soundlessly down the spiraling stair.

“Olivia,” Dominic whispered. He turned from the window and found her dressed for roaming the Irish countryside in jeans and a sweatshirt, wearing running shoes in the soft grass.

“Hi,” she said again. She was slender and pale, beautiful in an unexplainable way, but almost shy, looking at him and then down. He took a step to put his arms around her again—at last, but she stepped away.

“I’m sorry. I have a terrible memory,” she said. “Please don’t take it personally. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” She shrugged prettily. “Too many drugs,” she smiled.

Rage welled through Dominic. If he could believe in God, he would hate Him for this. “No,” he ground out, striding away from her, away from the no-longer-moonlit abbey, away from idiocy, idealism, and undying love. He would have killed Gaehod in that moment, for convincing him to hope. Or Dysart for cautioning him against it.

“Wait!” She followed him to the boundary of ancient edifice and present pasture. “Let’s sit down. You can tell me everything, okay?” She patted the rough stones of the wall beside her. “The cows won’t hurt us, will they?”

Dominic could not make himself obey her, and stayed standing, silent, twisting a small rock from the low wall between his fingers. “When I was fourteen,” he said at last, “I dug up two million dollars in Civil War-era gold on my grandparents’ ranch.”

“Maybe.” Dominic threw the stone hard away from himself. It bounded off the church wall and vanished into the grass. “Or maybe I remembered where I had buried it a hundred and fifty years before, afraid to be hung as a thief if anyone found that kind of gold with a black man.”

He looked at her. The setting sun burned the sky above her, staining the clouds, and even the air between them, a honeyed red. Utterly beautiful, black wisps of hair blowing in silken shadows across her heavenly pale skin. She was asking him for more than his opinion.

“And I’m a scientist. I’ve spent my adult life and most of the proceeds from that gold I found searching for testable, concrete answers to simpler questions, and all I can tell you is that the infinite reaches of outer space are well-mapped compared to what we know about the human mind. Each of us carries a vast and disobedient terra incognita inside our own skulls.”

The spectra of the setting sun framed her like a halo, making Dominic squint against the apocalyptic red. He sat down beside her, so that looking at her no longer blinded him.

“And even . . .” Dominic pressed on. “Even if science gets to the place where we know, on a molecular level, the mechanics of thought, it won’t tell us anything definitive about the purpose of thinking, or why, abstractly, we are capable of abstraction. Science is good with fact, but it’s useless with meaning.” He glanced at her uncertainly.

“I love—” Dominic caught her hand midpoke. The sun was sinking, taking its warmth with it. The night would be cold. “I used to think knowledge and love were linked,” he said to her soft fingers. “I thought we could only hate what we could not comprehend, and that I loved knowledge.”

“I love not understanding.” Olivia did not look away. Dominic remembered her piercing teeth in his throat and the soft ashes of his death. He remembered her searing embrace in the place between consciousness and death, where every touch from her had wracked him, but where he fought to stay. He would shoulder his curse again happily—face infinite deaths, to stay alive to her. He looked at their clasped hands.

She stayed silent a while, then lifted his arm by the hand she held and wrapped it around her slender shoulders. “I used to complain,” she said quietly, “that I wanted only impossible things.”

“No.” The night was darkening quickly. Dominic strengthened his grip on Olivia’s small body, tucking it against his own. He couldn’t see her face, but he knew it would be twisted in the delicate knot of brows and forehead he had seen before when she faced danger. “What if mysteries want to be understood?” she asked softly against his chest.

“I actually did recognize you,” she said shyly. “I’ve seen you in the papers. You’re the brilliant American neuroscientist. My god-mother gives money to your university in America. You came over here to do some work for her, but were brutally attacked in the process. You’ve been in a coma.”

“Olivia . . .” He hesitated. If he believed her, if he was just a scientist—and there was no proof otherwise, since Trinity had retrieved nothing from his blood-soaked machine—if he believed her, how could he explain the welter of emotions, desire and terror, tenderness and rage, scouring him? He stood beside her and closed his eyes.

“A side effect of cult-deprogramming hypnosis.” She shrugged. “Or a very long fall.” Her steady gray eyes held his, her hands soft but strong in his own. She was asking him for something impossible. But he already knew he would give her anything. His life, his blood, his belief . . .

“Yes.” She bowed her forehead to his chest, and Dominic put his lips against her smooth hair in a devotional kiss. “But no more difficult than what you’ve been through—the attack, the coma . . .”

“Not anymore,” he said. She blinked black lashes, and he was flying upward in her sheltering arms through shattered glass, bending to her raised lips and bottomless eyes. “Olivia . . .” He touched her elbows with his fingers, and she stepped toward him. The weight of her brought to ground for him was more than he could stand. It had been easier to die.

“Olivia, I know we’ve just met . . .” Tears stood in her eyes, dark puddles of gratitude in the night. He took a shuddering breath and tried not to clench his hands too hard around her delicate arms.“By one of those strange coincidences that put two American tourists at an obscure Irish abbey, but I”—her eyes were like the midnight clouds, deep and distant and they soundlessly spilled twin, twisting shadows down her moon-burnt cheeks—“but I think I’m falling . . .”

Nothing in this world, beneath, or above it, could have kept his lips from hers. It was the only way to say it. Everything he could not speak, he said, and heard her confessions in the bones of his shoulders where her hands coiled, like Eve’s snake, over his back.

She was better at this than he would ever be, better at straddling worlds, spanning truths. He pushed the tears from the warm, pale planes of her perfect face and curled his fingers into her black hair. And his second kiss said only one thing. When she drew her lips away, she slid her fingers into his hand and stepped over the wall behind them. He followed in the wake of desire.

“I’m tired of hotels,” she said, walking warily past the cows in the dark, holding his hand. “But I have the address of a great little bed-and-breakfast in Cashel.”

“Legends?” Dominic asked. He had reserved a room there a month ago, when he first made his travel plans, when he thought Gaehod might let him stay on the surface. He’d booked it for four weeks. They might still have a room in his name.

Thunder growled in the darkness, and Dominic looked into the fathomless sky, remembering the last time he had followed her out of this field to their waiting bikes. He had wanted her then, but had fought against it, furious with her delusions and with his own. He had wanted her then, and she had thrown it in his face.

She was the angel of desire. He had never had any choice but to want her. He wanted her still, wanted her now, but as the silent black clouds above them gathered rain to spill, he knew Olivia had been right then, too. Desire is an angel. It can get us closer to God, can raise us out of despair, out of Hell, out of death. Desire is immortal, and inherently impossible. As impossible as love, but Dominic loved her all the same.

The Rock of Cashel rises like a blasted tree stump across the narrow lane behind Legends Bed-and-Breakfast. I’m nervous, and slip my hand into Dominic’s when he gets out of the car. Now that a lifetime of waiting has ticked down to hours, I find it blotched with doubt and anxiety. What will it be, finally, to open my arms, my lips, and my body to love?

Dominic is hungry, but it is ten o’clock, and I don’t know if we will be able find a restaurant open in Cashel. I only want to touch my lips to his again. His full-moon kiss in the abbey’s black grass had tasted timeless, of gardens and memory, of lilacs and the cool, sudden spring rain that made us run together, laughing, the last few yards of cow pies and cold iron gate to my car. I slipped once, but he caught me, and the smell of warm field and wet night stayed with us in the rental car’s sterile plastic interior.

Huddled on Legends’ doorstep now, he puts a protective arm around me and knocks a second time. An American voice shouts, “I’ve got it!” from behind the wood and brass, which opens in a gust of peat smoke and candlelight. I step in at once, past the heavyset man holding the door wide, but Dominic is rooted at the threshold.

A slow smile cracks Dominic’s handsome face. He takes his searching eyes from the corroded face and looks straight at me. “Somehow, I don’t think so,” he chuckles, but he steps into the cozy entryway and claps the man’s meaty back. “Professor Dysart, this is Olivia.”

I smile and say hello, and together we follow our enthusiastic escort through a deserted bar into a small dining room. A cheerful cry greets us, and a small, round woman with a blazing white corona of hair rockets to her feet.

“Mom! ” Dominic sounds stunned, but a broad grin is melting every hard angle of his face. Dominic’s attention is completely arrested, but even through the confusion I feel another’s eyes on me. I face the sculptured blonde across the table directly.

She whispers “uncanny” under her perfumed breath, as Dominic holds out his arms to the white-haired woman. She stands by the seat she sprang from, her fingers gripping its high, cushioned back.

Maeve launches herself at her son. “You didn’t know me! Didn’t know my first name! We looked at photo albums. I brought them from . . . Oh, Dominic, I’m just so glad!” Arms full of soft, shaking woman, Dominic smiles over her head at me, and beyond me to Dysart, who stands awkwardly beside me.

The emotion is too much for me. I was strung out when we got here. Now, with Maeve still clinging to Dominic and Dysart shuffling uncertainly, I start to giggle. “My boyfriends’ mothers usually don’t start crying until after they’ve met me.” It’s a stupid thing to say, but Maeve smiles deeply, and I know she sees me as I have never been seen by a woman before.

She turns her face up to look at him, pats his cheek with a wrinkled hand. Then she turns back to the table and sits down again, looking completely at ease. She’s the only one.

“Yes, well . . .” Dysart clears his jowly throat. “A few more introductions here. Dominic, I know you’ve already met our quaint hotel’s celebrity guest, Madalene Wright.”

The queenly blond woman across the table from Maeve, who is still searching my face, smiles cordially and raises a glass. “I believe I may be the only person here they both already know. Of course, there’s my professional connection to Dr. O’Shaughnessy, and Olivia”—Madalene’s keen eyes scan my face hungrily—“is like a daughter to me.”

Dysart beams across the table at Madalene. “I believe everyone in the world knows you. Or wants to. Right. Only one more person for the kids to meet then,” he exclaims, wedging himself behind his vacated chair and Madalene’s to rap briskly on the swinging door behind him. “He’s listened to us all fretting about you for hours now, our miraculously generous host—”

The kitchen door swings open. Beside me, Dominic’s intake of breath rasps like a sword unsheathed. The G is on both our lips, but the old man stops us with a glance. “Gaehod,” he says, “the innkeeper. So lovely to meet you both.”

His rolled-up white sleeves and pin-striped trousers are partially covered by a crisp white apron. He hands an impressively populated cheeseboard to Dysart and pushes a loose tendril the color of snow and blood back from his face with a familiar impatience. “I’ll just clear a spot on the table, Francis . . .”

The table is actually two of the B&B’s three dining tables dragged into a central column. Covered with a patchwork of white tablecloths, it is littered with opened wine bottles and emptied bread baskets, which Gaehod collects as he speaks.

“I’m so glad the two of you could join us. So nice to have young people tonight. I’m rather old-fashioned, you see, and fond of the old rites and rituals. This is Walpurgis Eve, the night before May Day, and I am long in the habit of marking the occasion in the old style with whatever guests my humble establishment has collected for the evening. I hope you’ll join our feast?”

Maeve jumps up to take the wine bottles from Gaehod’s hands, and he gestures for Dysart to put the massive wooden platter into the cleared spot. The table rearranged, he turns his calm eyes back to us and smiles. “It would appear you got caught in one of our sudden April showers. You’re both quite bedraggled. Francis, do you have something Dominic might wear? Madalene, I’m sure you could assist your goddaughter?”

Madalene’s eyes are blank only a moment before a surge of movement sweeps Dominic and me from the table. Madalene and the professor escort us apart—me to Madalene’s room, he to Dysart’s.

She peels the tattooist’s plastic from my back without comment, and tenderly washes the no-longer bleeding skin. It’s sore where she touches it, but her eyes meet mine in the mirror, and we both smile. She zips the dress over the bright black lines and turns me full to face the mirror. Crimson flows across my body like a living thing, pouring over my breasts in subtle pleats, and lying flat against my belly. It both molds and reveals me, and the color is divine.

Madalene fusses over me for half an hour, but I enjoy it. I feel like an American stereotype—a homecoming queen, or a bride. I tell her I don’t wear foundation, but she proves herself a magician in her preferred media, applying a weightless patina of blended neutral hues and contouring shades to my pale skin. “It’s going to take a little getting used to,” she says, holding my eyes in the mirror. I walk downstairs on her arm.

Dominic makes a funny little noise—a sort of strangled gasp—when I reenter the dining room. Even if I hadn’t enjoyed Madalene’s ministrations upstairs, Dominic’s reaction would have made it worthwhile. Rising to greet me, his strong, capable hands touch the tablecloth, clasp before, and then behind him. He clears his throat.

He’s wearing Dysart’s jacket, too tight across the shoulder, too short in the arm, and swinging around his lean body like a cape. His blazing eyes leave no doubt he desires me. My gaze, meeting his, is as hungry. Twinned, our desires claim and are claimed.

His eyes touch both what is his and what is mine. As mine do. In a perfect balance of lover and beloved, a knot of interwoven freedom binds us. I hold out my hands to him, and he takes them gratefully, twisting his strong fingers into mine.

“The last time any of us saw you,” the genial doctor chides Dominic, “you were in the hospital recovering from a nasty head trauma. They were starting you on a new thiamine protocol overnight, so I was eager to see you, but when I arrived at the start of visiting hours, the charge nurse said you’d checked yourself out against medical advice. Dominic, there’s so much we could learn from your recovery . . . tests we should run, assessments . . .”

“Darling girl, that—Clare, was it—the nurse?” She glances across the table to Dysart, who nods confirmation. “Clare. She gave us this number. Said it was where you had been staying.” Maeve burbles on, “But Gaehod told us, when we phoned, that you had been missing for almost a week. We drove out hoping to find you here. Or along the way.”

“No,” Dominic agrees, “because it’s to your left. But I thought you were leaving for New York, Madalene?” Something in Dominic’s voice lilts Bengali to my ear.

Gaehod returns from the kitchen with a heavy, steaming tray, and Dominic springs to help him. In the chaos, while fragrant plates are passed around the table, Madalene excuses herself to take a call from someone with a cat’s name.

When everyone lands again, Dominic has dragged the room’s last table up to make space for all the food, and Dysart has moved eagerly from Gaehod’s right to his left beside Maeve. As plate after plate of food is passed around the table, everyone relaxes and begins to float on the smells and tastes, the light and promises of the night.

“I don’t know how Gaehod does it,” Maeve marvels, looking at the loaded table. “He must have been cooking for weeks, and I can’t imagine you can buy dried morels locally.” Gaehod waves the praise away, but the food is truly sumptuous, gratifying to look at and delicious, and the wine weaves the tastes and people together in easy loops. Under the table, my legs press against Dominic’s like roots around rock, anchoring me. I am ready to be alone with him.

The room is filled with the warm glow of wine-flushed cheeks, candles, and conversations allowed to wander and twine. When dessert—a delicious rose-infused cake—is finished, Dysart sets aside his wineglass and pours burgundy into his water tumbler. He climbs a little blearily to his feet, glass raised. “To love!” he declares.

“Yes,” Gaehod says, looking across the table to us. “To love, because we are powerful in love, especially on this night, halfway between perfect balance and the longest day. Love reinvents us tonight. Makes us angelic, titanic.”

“Here, here!” Dysart roars and bumps his tumbler to Maeve’s glass. Gaehod salutes Madalene with his teacup, and Dominic’s deep eyes hold mine as we raise our wine to one another. But Dysart reaches across the table to clink both our glasses and then to Madalene’s, and what began as a simple toast becomes a tangled dance of arms as we each find every other glass to touch.

“I believe so. If Dominic and Olivia will share a room?” His shrewd eyes hook mine and I nod. “I’ll open the third floor. The room up there doesn’t get used much, a bit old-fashioned, really, the bridal suite, but it will have to do. Shall I show you two up?”

Her words slip under me like the tiny, washing waves on a pebbled shore. I slip my hand into Dominic’s proffered elbow and follow Gaehod upstairs, floating on the smiles and waves of Dysart and Maeve standing beneath us.

Gaehod stops on the second landing and touches my hand. “Olivia, I’m expecting a significant uptick in new arrivals at my hotel in the coming year. I wonder if you’re looking for work?”

“They’re doing such important research there.” Gaehod’s voice is soft, but it holds Dominic completely. “Potentially very beneficial to so many, I think, here and elsewhere.”

Gaehod and Dominic are watching me closely, and I see myself reflected in their eyes. I was invisible when I entered the hospital. Is enough to have met the terms of Gaehod’s test? Light that feeds a leaf can kill the root. “I’d like that,” I say.

Gaehod ushers us into a small, pitched-roof room whose sole window offers an unobstructed view of the rock. Dominic and I stand together, looking out at it, holding hands. A small rain falls faintly through the starry, blue Irish night, against the illuminated Rock of Cashel, on the graves behind the abbey, and into the dark, swollen Atlantic. Dominic rubs between his eyebrows.

I follow the tilt of his chin into the partial dark between the electric lights illuminating the rock’s stone towers, and our snug room. Ophelia stands under a dripping tree, in the hungry grass, her pale throat elongated and hideous, her tiny body obscenely distorted by a belly so distended it pulls her body toward the ground.

I look again. Ophelia has become a hungry ghost, faded so thin she has slipped from the crypt that imprisoned her, and now steals into houses and shops, breeding sinners, an immortal, howling emptiness creeping over lives. Nothing in this world can fill her.

But she’s climbing down the bell tower wall, feet facing the moon, and her black hair, pulled tight as a violin strings, whispers back to me I need the light to hunt by.

“Your things,” he says simply, and places them—one long, shallow and light, one compact and heavy—on the bed, like offerings on an altar. “Give them to each other.”

Dominic bends down and picks up the heavy box. “Olivia?” he says softly. I meet his clear eyes as he puts the bound stack of scroll, tablet, and sheaf in my hand. “You should have these.”

Standing by the window, holding my freedom, his life tucked against my breast, he kisses me. His mouth is strong and soft, and eloquent, and I am keenly aware of how my flesh imprisons me, creates a barrier between us. His strong kiss deepens and hardens, feeling it too, trying to eat it away. I slip my hands under Dysart’s borrowed jacket and slide them up the hard, broad landscape of his back. His hands travel from my shoulders down my spine, and I wince. He looks into my eyes questioningly, and I touch his proud face with my fingertips, tracing the worried lines that score it.

And suddenly I—who have been looked at forever, who has fed on the hunger in the eyes of men and changed to please them—am terrified of being seen. He searches my face. I turn my back to him, and he pulls the zipper of my borrowed dress down. His tremoring fingers feel too large pushing open the dress halves, and I am frightened. He slides my dress forward, and the exquisite red silk falls from me in a stiff puddle on the ground. I am naked now.

My exposed body throws a shadow against the wall behind him, but it mingles with his to form a single dancing darkness on the white plaster. He looks momentarily simpleminded. The sound he makes is something between a whimper and a growl, savage and awed.

He undresses, and I run unashamed eyes over him, tracking the twining strength of his masculine arms and legs. He should always be naked. His body was created for this. He comes to me, circles my waist low, beneath the unbleeding, black ink wings, and pulls me hard against him. I gasp at the feel of his bare flesh on mine. A thousand centers of sensation burst throughout me. No wonder man is so helpless in this.

His mouth finds mine again, and even our exploring hands fall still in the pure communion of our mouths and skin touching. His lips are caressing, but the force of his restraint sends tremors through him. He is afraid of hurting me, afraid for me, and I am afraid, too. But fear is grown familiar, and this is all so new.

Our kisses are a feast tasted, but not consumed. Every mouthful makes the hunger grow, and I feel it—not in my gums, not in the hollow places of my mouth—but in all the full and swelling places of my body. At the peaks of my shuddering breasts and the depths of my pulsing sex, a flameless fire licks me. Although desire stakes me to him, my body begins to twist.

Finally, I break the kiss, gasping. But his lips burn down my throat to engulf a shivering nipple, and my sex ignites. My breath comes in tiny pants through kiss-scorched lips showering slow sparks down my body. And all my awareness is caught in the storm flashing from my suckled nipple to deep between my legs. When his strong fingers take my other breast I cry out, and he takes his lips and hands away.

He lies on his back in our bed and pulls me to him. I straddle his strong hips with my knees, and the hard tower of his cock stands shockingly vertical from the landscape of his body. I’m uncertain what to do, and lean over him, knowing his kiss will guide me. But I don’t need it to. My flaming nipples graze his chest, his fingers make strong circles on my ass, and his cock touches a focus of sensation that almost blinds me. This is the sister locus of the inferno in my sex, a sentinel of pleasure—precise, minute, and raging. I scrape it against the shaft of his straining cock and sob with wanting more.

But he will not rush this. Although his panting chest moves swift and hard beneath me, although I see the agony of his restraint in the rigid cords of his shoulders, he does kiss me again. My living sex shudders. I feel coiled too tight, and every twist of my writhing body, pushing cock against sex, breasts against chest, no matter which direction I turn, only tightens the spiral. It is wound both ways, and there is no loosing it save the final torque which will release and launch and fragment it.

He kisses me, and my blind hips answer the slow suck of his summoning mouth, pulling my back into an arch and curling it forward again, dragging the opening of my searing sex and its twitching sentry along the pulsing length of his cock. His lips move imperceptibly against mine, no longer kissing, whispering, praying.

I wind my hungry body under his strength. He moves over me until the tip of his stone-hard cock kisses the mouth of my liquid sex. He does not move, but I slowly raise my willing hips to him. His body plunges into mine, opens me. His hard arms are trembling, and his eyes, gazing into mine, are fringed with fear for me. It does hurt. The wings on my back against the mattress hurt and the inexorable advance of his cock into my sex hurts, but I want this.

He holds his pulsing body still inside mine and drops his seeking lips once more to my full and swollen breast. His warm mouth there raises a radiating heat in my stretched-wide sex, and I let the desire mount in me until my helpless body convulses, clutching at his rooted cock. My sex sucks at the flesh that chokes it, pulls in more than it can hold, and his body answers, pushing hard.

Every place his body touches me ignites. He tries to kiss me, but our breathing comes too quickly, our bodies drive too hard. So he looks at me, eyes in mine, as his flesh is in mine. I grip his arms with human hands and wrap my clay feet behind his back. I am time and timeless, freedom and surrender, body and soul.

His perfect face is twisted, focused on me, but mindless, and I am caught as well, release and restraint, the orgasm climbing higher. His cock is ruthless now, no longer striving for gentleness, but only for reunion. And I grind my sex against him. I want everything and nothing else. My body summons his invading sex, my breasts lunge toward the crushing chest.

Our breathing is tortured and entwined. The pleasure climbs through me, balances—and for a moment I am dying—locked in a rigor of agony, mortality made too real too soon. Pleasure grips my belly in a cruel fist, and a glory of trembling takes me. I can’t breathe, am howling, have found the perfect totality of sensation, and scream to be released. My sex spasms, pleasure leaps. Dominic cries out. Another seizure takes my sex, washing me in the pure free-fall of orgasm flying through me.

This is love. This is how mortals live with our too-few chances to bridge the rack we’re stretched on. This is how we look death in the face. With no Heaven I can ascend to and no God to cast me out, I stand, briefly, for a moment, in the love of a man and the joy of our bodies.

Then I am falling. I am falling and see everything, always, one last time, falling into sleep. Dominic and I will buy a house between Dublin and Cashel. We will be happy there, living and working together. But right now, my secret sisters, safe in their places underground, are welcoming our first new guest. I notice she looks like me.

Dominic’s mother and Dysart drink whiskey in the bar, while Madalene puts a call in to her son across the ocean. Outside my window, Ophelia’s ghost whispers filth into the Irish night. But Alyx, high above her, sleeps peacefully at last. And Gaehod, below us all, in the owner’s cluttered deep basement suite, writes to the undiscovered damned of the twenty-first century: My darling ones, Reborn and Undead, Damned, Cursed, and Misbegotten—Hell calls her absent children home.