The Lady Smut Book of Dark Desires (An Anthology) Page 9

  She couldn't think about that when he took her face into his hands, his thumb near the side of her mouth, which somehow made her whole body pulse and throb. Now her pelvis was acting up again. It was alive, and seemed to have a mind of its own. It throbbed hard, speaking clearly about what it wanted, which was to grind against him.

  Her resistance shattered. The atoms of her body bunched up to explode into a million pieces. She felt herself squish against him, her eyelids closed as she waited for what seemed like a crazy long time before he finally kissed her up-tilted lips. He captured first the lower one, then the upper one, taking his time, using firm pressure. Then his lips spread hers and his tongue moved slowly, slowly into her mouth, feeling along.

  It was like being kissed for the first time. The trail his tongue explored brought into being hundreds of nerve endings she'd never felt before. While the nerve endings sang out their glory at being alive, her head felt like the world was tilting on its side. She was feeling the heavy little tabs of felt on her eyelids as they fluttered closed. Her hands was gripping those pliant, firm muscles in his shoulders and biceps.

  Her arms barely had time to wrap around the strong slope of his shoulders and dig in, really feel the muscles under her hands bunching, before he was drawing away. Which was unfair, and mean, and evil. But he was too tall and too big for her to make his head come back down to her mouth. She wanted it to, so she could feel all those nerve endings come to life once more.

  She tilted her head up, her lips eager to taste him again, her pelvis eager to feel the hot thick bar under his fly. He was already stepping back like she'd done something wrong.

  He gave her a look of utter betrayal, mixed with some utter puzzlement and combined with a little disgust, before turning away.

  What did she do? She didn't understand. She wanted to protest, but he was already pressing the emergency button back in, the elevator did a little jump up to their floor, and the door was open. One last moment was left hanging in the air between them. He walked out to the left, then gave her one last look of frowning puzzlement and was gone.

  It was him this time, not her, she thought. Walking rapidly up the bridge, she went through the glass door and back to her room. It was him. He was weird, he was inexplicable, he was playing games. A secret part of her brain said, oh and wouldn't you like to believe that? But wasn't it more likely that she was a horrible kisser, she was not the hotty-patotti he'd thought? Her self-esteem was about two inches high by the time she reached her room.

  Her cell phone was ringing as she opened the door to her room. It was Nadia.

  "What was going on? I went to check the monitor to get some base levels and your heart rate suddenly went through the roof."

  “I saw Turner in the elevator." Jenny explained.

  Nadia's laugh was cruel and indifferent. "As long as the device is working," she said, before turning to leave. “See you tomorrow morning. Don’t touch those dots or else.”

  Jenny worked on typing up her notes from the morning session on her laptop. After emailing them out to everyone she climbed into bed, the happy feeling she had just a few hours earlier eroded. It was him.

  At the same time a part of her brain thought it not at all unusual that someone seeking her out would be some kind of freak. Or, the devil in her head suggested, what if he was responding to her so oddly because he thought she was stalking him?

  She also worried she should have mentioned Johannes to Nadia. She met him on the plane over to Thailand. He was so gorgeous, a model from Budapest. She'd been nervous about traveling alone for the first time. By the time they'd gotten through the airport they'd decided to hang out. They both spoke a little German, so their time together had involved a lot of pointing or shrugging. Soon somehow they were holding hands, embracing, and such was Johannes's skill that, almost without words, he got her into bed that night.

  He was so handsome, and she kept thinking she should feel ridiculously lucky. Yet it all felt a little unreal—just like with Turner—though Turner was far beyond Johannes in that respect. The fumbling amongst clammy sheets in the cheap poorly air-conditioned Thai hotel had left her feeling more than usually pathetic the next morning.

  But Johannes had crazy dark bedroom eyes—or was she simply sick of being so lonely? Once his clothes had come off, it was disturbing to see how thin he was. She slept very poorly afterwards with rotten nightmares all night. The next morning when she woke Johannes looked positively unwell, with raw purpleish pink hollows around his eyes and even thinner ribs. But even though he looked like the walking dead, he'd been full of pure good cheer and held her hand even more tightly as they walked around all day and explored.

  He'd even tried to give her his necklace at the end of the vacation. It was a metal coin slightly larger than a half dollar with a square opening in the center. She fingered it, feeling the lines etched onto the surface in the shape of a maze, and then fingered the slender notch going through the side.

  "Doesn't it fall off?" she'd asked. He'd smiled and shook his head, showing her how the frayed white thread he had strung it on was fatter than the open notch so the coin couldn't fall off. She wouldn't take it, and all his cheer had faded. He'd looked at her with some kind of alarm registering in the back of his eyes. Or maybe it had been guilt?

  She'd worried from that moment on that something was wrong. That even though they used protection she'd somehow picked up something from him during their encounter. Sie ist crank? She'd asked over and over. Nein, he'd said, denying he was sick. So she'd put on the necklace to appease him and he'd been satisfied. He'd left before she woke the next day, and she'd left the necklace behind on the bureau. Let a maid have it… the feeling of the two-night stand had made her want to scrub herself clean and forget the whole thing had ever happened.

  Once she'd gotten home she became convinced he'd somehow given her AIDS. Her doctor gave her an AIDS test, and then every other test in the book. He'd finally told her she was fine, and prescribed the Ambien. But what if she had some kind of sleeping sickness? Wasn't there a disease called sleeping sickness? Could she have picked it up while traveling in tropical Thailand?

  Her thoughts slipped from Johannes over to Turner again and she felt that forbidden wet little clench down low. Yes, the dreams she'd had about him—shockingly filthy—left her writhing. He evoked a primitive stabbing sensation right behind her pubic bone, a sensation as alarming as it was pleasurable. So alarming, so overwhelming, it was as if she would die of happiness in finally having him.

  Chapter 3

  The next thing Jenny knew, someone was knocking on her door. She blinked, her eyelids feeling gummy and strange. She opened them and found she was sprawled across the carpet with her head under her desk. Feeling shaky and exhausted, she pulled herself up onto the bed. The knocking continued. She wondered where her pj top had gone—she was in her white cami and aqua blue boy shorts, but that was all. She looked at her bed. The sheets were peeled back to one side, but no pj top was to be seen.

  She stared at the sheets until she heard "Jenny? It's me Nadia," through the door and went to open it.

  "You were a busy girl last night," Nadia said, sweeping into the room. Ignoring the stripped bed, she pulled the tipped over chair upright and sat down on it. Then she dug around in her bag with an air of suppressed excitement.

  "You've got the spike marks of sexual arousal with autonomic activation."

  Jenny had no idea what that meant. "My head hurts."

  She felt like someone had removed her blood and replaced it with neon green radiator fluid.

  "Of course it does. You didn't get any sleep. Come here," Nadia said. Jenny moved towards her. Nadia sniffed at her delicately and then took out two swabs. "Lift up your ponytail please."

  "Pony—my hair wasn't in a ponytail when I went to sleep last night." Jenny patted the high ponytail spouting at the top of her head delicately while Nadia stood behind her and ran two swabs across her neck.

  "That tickles," Jenny said.
"What's it for?"

  "You, um, stink a little, like you've been perspiring heavily. These measure the salts on your skin." She popped the swabs in a small paper bag and then tucked that into her larger bag.

  Jenny sniffed under her arm. "I need a shower."

  "Did you feel warm when you went to bed?"

  "No. I was cold. They turn the a/c up so high at night and I was under the all covers." Jenny plucked at her white cami and looked around again for her pj top. It was over on the other side of her bed. She went and put it on. "I was almost shivering."

  "Well your heart rate was sky high around, oh, two or so, then again off and on for three hours. Maybe you were doing jumping jacks in your sleep to stay warm."

  Jenny sniffed at herself again. That musky stank was about her again. Almost as if someone else inhabited her body at night and was marking their territory. She looked around.

  It wasn't unusual for her to wake up and find the place messier than when she last remembered it. She didn't want to believe in monsters, but deep down she felt like it had been in her room again. It had been blindly trying to escape the room, destroying the place in the process. Though whether in panic or anger she didn't know.

  She sat down in her undies on the naked bed. Her knees and elbows felt sore, raw and sore, and her back had a kink in it… She tried to stretch, but that only made her head hurt.

  "Last night you had several abrupt spontaneous arousals from SWS."

  "What's S-W-S?"

  "Slow-wave sleep." Chuckling to herself, Nadia pecked at her iPad then looked up. "Let me get those little electrodes off you. They're quite expensive little buggers so we don't want to lose any."

  She brought forth from her bag the white plastic board where the little felt pads went. She began peeling them off Jenny—first the ankle one with the needle.

  "Ow."

  Amazingly they were all still in place. They did not peel off easily, but Nadia distracted her by saying, "I was worried this equipment wouldn't work at all, but it did. My friend Karl is modifying the lab equipment we usually have to use in order to eliminate all the crazy wires. He said you could be up to five miles away and I could still take readings on my laptop. From here to the lab is probably less than a half mile, but he was right—I got an excellent readings all night long, clear as a bell."

  She seemed to hardly notice Jenny's state of dejection, but when Jenny didn't respond she patted her shoulder and said, "Cheer up. Figuring out what's wrong with you is the first step to curing it."

  "Then there is something wrong with me." Jenny knew it. It just felt different to hear someone say so out loud.

  Nadia used the edge of her fingernail to scrape off a purple dot. "Yup. It could have taken us much long longer to see these findings in the lab. You understand most people don't display their symptoms in the lab like they do when they're at home."

  "So what did you find?"

  "I think you've got NREM Arousal Parasomnia. In fact, it's so evident, I can even write you a script for it, if you like."

  "You can?" Jenny felt a wave of relief break over her, like sweat. It was that easy—less than a day after meeting Nadia, her problem was fixed.

  "Sure. I'm a doctor, why not? The common prescription is Clonazepam. What's this?" she asked, stroking Jenny's neck on the left side.

  "What?"

  "On your neck, a bruise here."

  "I have no idea." Jenny stroked her neck. "I can't feel anything."

  Nadia shot her a look then went back to removing the dots, almost humming with pleasure.

  "I forgot to ask you," Nadia said, keeping her eyes on her work. "What's your alcohol intake like these days?"

  Jenny confessed that back at her college the other faculty were heavy drinkers. She had upped her intake of alcohol a lot in an attempt to fit in, but now that she was at the institute for the summer, she wasn't drinking at all.

  "Stress, sleep deprivation, and alcohol. The magic three." Nadia pursed her lips, and focused on the dots again. "Classic," she muttered to herself.

  "I still don't understand. Why are you so excited? Am I sleepwalking?"

  "Oh yeah."

  Jenny felt her sense of desperation hike up a few notches while Nadia continued removing dots.

  "Hey," Nadia said, putting the black cover over the white board. "At least it is not one of the other autonomic disorders—like bedwetting. Be grateful for small favors."

  After all the dots were removed and she'd showered and dressed, Nadia wanted her back at the lab. She asked if she could draw some blood to compare to the sample taken during the night. Then she asked if she could take a vaginal swab.

  Jenny inwardly balked, but finally agreed. After all, Nadia was doing a full work up on her free of charge—no insurance deductible, no nothing. She had Jenny sign a release form so that Nadia could request her medical history and use the medical intake and history for publication, if the findings were relevant and worthy of study. "You'd be anonymous, of course," Nadia assured her.

  Lovely. After having her feet up in stirrups, Jenny went back to her room and showered again until the hot water ran out. She missed breakfast and couldn't face up to the morning session with Bonifellow, Rick, and the rest of the econ fellows, so she played hooky instead. She felt guilty about it, but she went over to the library trying to stuff the feelings down.

  She dived into her email on her laptop to get caught up on some departmental work back at the college, feeling her tummy rumble, and her head hurt. She was a mess. She reminded herself there was a plan. She was merely following the plan.

  The plan was for her to stay out of the way until after lunch. Nadia was going to try to reach out to the guys. "I'll flirt with them a little, then ask them if they noticed anything strange about your behavior at night," Nadia said.

  She'd waited for Nadia to get back to the part about sexual arousal. She hadn't, but said she thought the guys would have observed something but that they might be more candid without Jenny around… especially if it was something embarrassing.

  After a few hours’ work, Jenny felt her tail was dragging so low she finally put her head down on a table in the periodical room and took a cat nap.

  Her phone woke her an hour later.

  "Those guys," Nadia huffed, "are total assholes."

  "Welcome to my world."

  "I thought they'd downplay things in front of you, but they are foul." Nadia said some bad words in a foreign language. "They wouldn't mention anything specific, but obviously they know something."

  "How can we make them talk?" Jenny was surprised at how ruthless she felt."Screw them. I'm going to rig your room and the floor with cameras so we can watch for ourselves. You said there's an afternoon session? So they'll all be together somewhere this afternoon right?"

  Jenny tried again. "So I am sleepwalking?"

  "Jenny, the way the guys are acting, I think you may be doing more than sleepwalking."

  Jenny's stomach lurched and she bent over, holding onto herself with her free arm. "Like what? What do you mean?"

  "We'll observe tonight and see."

  "Nadia. Tell me."

  "You showed several sexual arousal spikes. Most of us dream we're running from monsters or being naughty with the man we desire and our body remains asleep, paralyzed. Rarely is an individual actually out there running around or …doing other things. You may be one of the exceptions."

  "What other kinds of things?" Jenny felt her windpipe closing, her heart jackhammering.

  Jenny could hear Nadia typing out a note on her iPad. "A few years ago a man got in his car while asleep, drove to his in-laws and killed them."

  Jenny frowned at her phone. "What are you saying? I'm a potential homicidal maniac?"

  "I don't think you're dreaming about killing people, though the way those idiot colleagues of yours act, I'm surprised you're not tempted."

  "Murdering people. God, I hope not."

  "I think you're dreaming about having sex."

&n
bsp; Gulp.

  "That, or you're possibly masturbating… that's commonly what we see with in patients who have readings like yours."

  It was like horror movie. It kept getting worse and worse.

  Nadia was saying something about the psychological underpinnings that led to sleep disturbances, but Jenny's head filled with the buzzing of a thousand bees. She thought she was going to pass out. She tried taking a big deep breath but couldn’t manage to fill her lungs.

  "You're saying I'm some kind of sexual deviant?"

  She felt suddenly clammy all over, her skin wanting to creep and crawl. She had an overpowering urge to go back to her room and hide under the covers. But who knew what that could lead to?

  That's why… Jenny licked her lips. They felt sore and puffy, which took on a whole new context.

  "What can I do?" Jenny asked, her voice a hoarse whisper. She'd just spotted someone lurking at the back of the library. Someone tall with messy hair. Automatically she started packing up her computer into her bag. The need to run and hide became paramount. "Didn't you say there was some drug I could take?"

  "Before we start taking drugs, let's see if we can catch you in the act, as it were. We'll stick to the plan for now. I'll meet you at your room around ten pm tonight," Nadia said. "I'm running over there right now to get the hidden cameras in place. In the meantime, feel better."

  "Why should I feel better?"

  "You're not wetting the bed and you're probably not a murderer."

  "Nadia, your bedside manner stinks."

  Suddenly the tall messy hair moved from out of the reference section.

  It was Turner.

  "Nadia, I have to go." She hung up and headed for the exit. She got there and put her head up to find he was blocking the way. They stared at each other across the atrium for a long time.

  "What?" she finally said.