The Jade Butterfly. Jeffrey Round
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a man starved for sex. The kiss ended and they pulled apart, regrouping for a counterattack. Dan felt as though he might become absorbed by this man’s need if he weren’t careful.
Ren put a hand to Dan’s face. Fingers closed over his eyelids, traced the outline of the scar that angled down his temple like caught lightning, given to him by his father when he was late coming home from school at the age of ten. The hand retreated and Dan opened his eyes again. Ren cocked his head, a grin transforming his features.
“You are a tough man, I think.”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “I am a tough man.” Right now I am anything you want me to be, he thought.
He reached out to touch Ren’s chest. A reptilian reflex twisted the hand up and aside. Dan felt the pain, his wrist pinned against the wall behind him. He didn’t resist, curious to see what else this game presaged.
Ren’s lips twitched, perfectly formed half moons joined by a silver thread. His breath was fragrant, a surprising rose garden at midnight.
“What you like to do to your lovers?”
Dan shook his head, denying the burning pain in his wrist. “Not to. With.”
Ren tightened his grip. The half moons crumpled, turned cruel. “No, tough man. What you like to do to them.”
Dan leaned forward.
“I like —” their lips met and parted again “— to kiss … to intoxicate them.”
A tingling in Dan’s groin said this was going to be one of those rare sexual encounters that would make all his synapses come alive. An energy transfer, pure animal magnetism. This was the beginning of real sex, not just a simulacrum of pleasure. Deep and devastating. A dance through fire. A shedding of defences, shattering and annihilating. He’d experienced it a handful of times before. It was like giving yourself up to the soft caress of Death and seeing where it led. All the while knowing you were doomed, no matter where it took you.
His hands slid down Ren’s abdomen, strayed along a waistband, slipped inside. A quickening of desire as his fingers crept into the warm cleft behind. Ren’s hand stole up to Dan’s throat. They stood, combatants armed to the death, each waiting for the other to strike the fatal blow.
Dan felt his breathing constricted, surprised to find himself lifted off the ground, his back pressed into the smooth wood behind him. Sparkles outlined his vision as he encountered that brief separation of reality and unreality that presaged the beginnings of a blackout. Entering a new realm of experience. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what lay on the other side. If Ren didn’t release his grip soon … Dan raised his leg and kneed him in the groin, sending him reeling across the room.
Ren fell to the floor and lay there, looking pleased.
“Tough man,” he said, his eyes glittering with satisfaction. “I like you.”
Dan pulled him up and pressed him against the wall, yanking his shirttails free from his trousers. He knelt, pressed his mouth against Ren’s tensed belly, licking his way up to the pectorals, hard and smooth, the nipples like dark opals on a field of amber.
An erection strained Ren’s briefs, hard and fat. Well-dressed men were always dirtiest out of their clothes, Dan knew. There was something about an expensively tailored businessman that melted before his rough-and-tumble appearance. A sweaty T-shirt peeled over taut muscle charged the eagerness of a manor lord sneaking off to the stables for a brief romp with the stable boy under cover of darkness, slipping away at break of dawn with bits of straw clinging to his back and in his hair.
In the light, a gash gleamed across Ren’s thigh, the wound healed long ago. It was startling, like a worm revealed at the heart of a perfect rose. Before he could examine it further, Ren’s hands pushed him aside, forcing Dan’s face into his crotch.
Dan struggled to his feet. Together, they stumbled to the bed. Silk sheets, an Aladdin’s boudoir. No surprise there, Dan told himself as they tumbled down and over the ersatz stage. Inhibitions quickly gave way to feelings of euphoria that might otherwise have taken a great deal of alcohol to achieve. They slipped aside those restraints, pressed flesh against flesh, as daring lapsed into daring.
Dan was pleased by his lovemate’s body, a superb machine, its movements smooth and piston-like. Caught in the wall mirror, Ren’s dreamy eyes suggested a lineage of cultivated excess, a descent from opium eaters. This was a man born for pleasure, but one who knew how to trigger it in return, gauging the smallest seismic tremors to leave his partner trembling.
The condoms lay nestled inside a bedside drawer, a small stack encased in an ebony box. Dan expected no less from such a man. He ripped the package open with his teeth and spat out the wrapper.
Ren lay on his back looking up, his torso taut with the raggedness of his breathing. Dan shook his head.
“Not here,” he said, yanking him up and splaying him before the window.
Nerves jangling, Dan gripped Ren from behind and eased himself in. Ren tightened, twisting to experience all that Dan offered, as though his sensory antennae had been set to maximum.
When they finished, Dan peeled off the condom and let it fall to the floor with a soft plop. As far as he was concerned, rich men taking a brief detour from their family life should be able to afford discreet valets and chambermaids as well as discretionary concierges. If they couldn’t, then they shouldn’t be out playing around after dark.
A clock built into the headboard read 3:33 a.m. He’d have to dispense with the stagey shower. Maybe save it for another time.
“That’s what I like to do to my lovers,” he said, pulling on his pants and grabbing for his shirt.
“I like you, tough man,” Ren said.
“I’ll leave you my number.” Dan reached into his wallet and extracted a card.
Ren took the card and placed it on the bedside table without looking at it. There was a glazed look in his eyes. He was unlikely to call, Dan knew. Having served his purpose, he would quickly be forgotten — discarded like the used condom. Ren would soon be flying back to wherever he came from, returning to the wife and children and quiet suburban home waiting for him in whatever country he’d left.
Ren walked him to the door, standing in the soft light. His muscles gleamed with sweat, quivering softly like a racehorse after a particularly well-run race. There was no goodbye kiss, as Dan knew there wouldn’t be. Kissing was for arousal, not comradely communing or a parting thanks, no matter how well done the job.
A brief nod, the barest acknowledgement of what had transpired between them, and the door clicked shut. In the hallway, Dan grasped an apple, hefted it from the slot and bit into the tart sweetness, the juice running down his chin. A clanking alerted him. At the far end of the hall, a man with a cart was replacing the green apples with white pears. Of course, wealth had its rewards. It was only then that he realized he still had no idea what Ren did for a living.
Downstairs the desk clerk looked up, barely noting his passage through the lobby. Dan exited the shushing doors and wandered home through the misty streets, marvelling at the city’s stillness, as pleased with his recent conquest as any teenager on a first date. Little wondering where it all might be heading.
Five
A Good Girl Gone Bad
Getting up after four hours of sleep is one thing when you’re a nineteen-year-old university freshman recovering from the sundry joys of a pub crawl with your dorm mates the night before. Pretending you can do the same thing and keep a productive schedule while approaching forty is simply folly or, at best, self-delusion. Dan got up because he had to. There was a rising, but little shining to go with it.
Once again, his son sat at the kitchen table. Ked glanced up, noted his father’s restive features, the glazed eyes. His expression turned to a look of concern.
“Dad, you’re not drinking again, are you?”
Dan