Chapter 6: Miri Never Sleeps
"I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone." - Song of Songs 5:6
Reader note: If you read this before July 9, the woman you knew as Sera is now Miri. Nothing in her story has changed. I’d simply been calling her by the wrong name, and why it was wrong won’t be apparent until Book 2. Hold onto “Sera,” though. It isn’t gone. It was just early.
Well, if he doesn’t sleep, then I wouldn’t either.
Of course I wanted to sleep. My eyes were heavy with it but my mind was a waking fever dream. I was the reporter, reporting on myself to an audience of…me. About things I was not ready to disclose. Not to myself, not to anyone — certainly not him — and he had promised to honor the privacy of my mind, right?
One channel, full of static, broadcast a pitched debate between my faith and my fractured understanding, as their arguments — my arguments — devolved into something dangerously close to self-loathing. Another channel, lower down, clearer, televised a relay race of sensations running laps between my heart, my nipples, and my pussy.
I wondered if he was watching my broadcast, despite myself. Despite his words.
Something devious in me hoped he was.
How could I sleep now? Convicted. Confused. And so close to c—. I couldn’t bring myself to finish the word.
I lay in the hotel bed with the covers pulled up and the lights off and the air conditioner on blast as I turned over every second of the evening like a woman possessed, which, given the occasion, was less a simile than a statement of fact.
His face when his hands wouldn’t close on my hips. The panic in those unnatural, opalescent eyes. The outrage. Like a king discovering his army won’t march.
And the sound he’d made when I pressed against him on the dance floor. That low, involuntary wreckage of interior composure that no cavalcade of centuries had managed to civilize.
And the wall.
I had been pushed against walls once or twice in my life. Men get a certain look in their eyes when the negotiation is over and what comes next is for the woman to survive. I curated a small inventory of emotional tools for such survivings.
But the look in his eyes when he pushed me against the wall of that building off Red River Street was nothing like that.
Those strange, foreign eyes held reverence. A reverence that made the foreign and unnatural feel loving and familiar.
I’d seen that look somewhere before. In the jungle? In the awareness that eclipsed my periphery and distanced my demons?
Not in the eyes of mortals and the men who take, but in eyes that give. Eyes that hold eternities while doubts and lifetimes fall away.
I dared not linger on the comparison. Christ is love, the most natural thing. Eternal, yes. Immortal, yes. But this? This was about as far from natural as my fractured reason could still conjure.
And even when his eyes flashed by turns with anger, then passion, then fear, I knew even these were contained — and reverence was their container. I was terrified. Or exhilarated? I don’t know.
My pulse was pounding as I lay there, remembering his reassurances. I began to chant them aloud in the room, barely above a whisper. They matched the rhythm of my heart. Nothing to fear. Not tonight.
The way he cradled my head against the coarse brick. This, too, felt reverent. Caring. His hand slipped through my hair as he lifted it to place both palms against the wall above us. The gentle tug of his fingers through my curls coaxed a ghost of sensation from the sensitive skin at the back of my skull. It prickled even now at the memory.
His arms framed my face. I gazed up at him and he at me, the linen of his shirt pulled taut as his shoulder blades flared, his ribcage widening to encompass my vision until I felt how tenuous and contingent my next few moments had become: the unyielding brick behind me and this statuesque, immovable — and yet so often trembling! — presence pinning me in place.
I had been afraid to touch him and afraid to push him away. I had nowhere to go and thought I should come up with someplace to be, and quickly, but I only wanted to stay right there.
And I was back there now. In my mind. In the broadcast. In the relay race. No debate, no accusations, no self-loathing. Just overwhelming heat. Was he watching my replay?
His face a finger’s width above mine. A welcome, now familiar chill coming off his lips. That chill that had moved my hips on the dance floor. The chill that moved me between that wall and him, sending shivers down my body, piercing the humid, stifling air around us. A chill that moved me even now.
Where did he want me next? Show me. Breathe me.
Slowly, very deliberately, his hands began trailing the wall to either side of me. Trailing down. Where was he going?
He began to lower himself. Never breaking eye contact. Never looking anywhere except my eyes.
Fuck, it was hot. The night, the weather, and whatever this was.
What are you doing? my eyes must have been asking.
He reached the level of my skirt and my heart stopped.
He settled on his haunches. I was incredulous. He was kneeling in front of me! I felt the sweat on my body like an intruder against the cold thrill of desire that coursed through me at the sight.
Eyes still locked, holding mine. Then he blinked and slowly turned his gaze downward. Where? What was happening?
I watched in slow motion as his eyes reopened and his gaze fell on the inside of my left knee.
He leaned forward then and brought his mouth to within an inch of my skin. What?
And then…he exhaled.
His breath on my knee was an explosion of cool. I don’t know why I expected different. I had thought, if anything, that whatever lived this deep inside a man that it forced him to suffer, to shudder, and finally to kneel might be uncontrolled…feverish. That it would match the intensity in his eyes and the tightness pooling in my belly.
Instead, his breath was calming and focused. Like it had been when he led our dance. And it was so very welcome. The way marble floors and spacious interiors feel in summer.
I felt…safe. Even as my body tightened. Even as my awareness narrowed on that single point of contact between my knee and his breath.
The cool moved up over my knee. The muscles in my thigh responded, sending a new wave of tension upwards through my core. His mouth followed the strain of my muscles, still never touching me, however much I now found myself wanting him to.
An inch up my thigh, he exhaled again. The cool melted across the skin of my upper thigh, terminating in a small involuntary whimper that escaped my lips, the sound transforming the reverence, or pain — or was it longing that painted his face? — into the faintest of smiles.
The tremors traveling up my legs had now settled between them, and Simeon followed my body’s subtle invitations. He breathed over my hipbone. The gap between my camisole and skirt allowed his exhalation to slip beneath my clothes — and my fingers gripped the brick behind me to reinforce my faltering stance.
Simeon noticed my balance straining but did not stop. He continued his onslaught against the season’s excesses over my lower belly, and here he opened his mouth wider before breathing out with more force. The air came heavier now; I sensed more of him against the soft of my flesh through the weave of my skirt. The sensation wrapped its cooling satin around my hips as if my clothes were imaginary and his breath the only fabric covering me against the city night.
My toes lifted. His attention followed. The stream of air from his lips coiled around my waist and up my torso, cocooning me in a private climate that turned the Texas heat into a seaside breeze. I shuddered again as his breeze lifted the silk of my shirt away from my chest. I felt momentarily exposed — almost naked — as the gust of air rushed against my breasts. The silk settled back on my nipples, and this, too, sent a wave of sensation through my body. Did he know? Did he notice? Did he intend this?
But as the cooling unction shimmered up my sternum, I noticed that Simeon hadn’t moved. He remained kneeling at the level of my belly. He had been wisping currents of his supernatural climate across my body as if to guard it from the oppressive night — without ever hovering where we had not yet negotiated his welcome.
I had a strange and intriguing thought that this was what it might feel like to be anointed with the very rarest of distillates. An ancient pneuma that had aged over centuries to decant onto a skin that was very ready indeed to offer terms.
Simeon looked up at me from below. He smiled and my eyes fluttered as he held my gaze. I must have been holding my breath as he spent his, because I inhaled so deeply at that smile, it felt like the first time all night I’d remembered that I’m the only one of us who actually requires air.
We stayed like this a beat until he noticed my right hand gripping the wall behind me for balance. He broke our gaze to lean over and attend to it, sending a kiss of air against my fingers. They released their desperate hold on the wall, so I pressed my ass into the brick to remain standing.
His breeze found the sensitive skin on the inside of my wrist and I let out a sound between a whimper and a cry. I saw his brows furrow then. His eyes tore away from my wrist to burrow back into mine, questioning. I shook my head. I meant don’t stop but he must have thought don’t because he cocked his head as if to ask again. So I uttered the first thing I could think of:
“Please.”
He smiled and looked down again, shifting his weight to find my left hand, which was now picking up the slack in my posture while the other hung listless and cool against the summer night. He breathed here, too, and my hand gripped the brick, but just barely, fingers trembling, arm shaking. I heard a chuckle as he moved up my forearm, finding the tenderness inside my elbow — the next willing recipient of his attentions.
When he exhaled, the thin skin there received him like a cooling flame, a contradiction of sensations that made my breath catch in my throat. This was my spot, one of many non-obvious secret passages my body had for heightening pleasure without straining propriety. A weakness and a shibboleth.
I gasped. My head — hanging low, watching his genuflection with awe and disbelief — fell back.
He was up in an instant! Before I could even see it, before I could even register his movement, his hand caught my head once more — cupping it before it made contact with the wall for the second time tonight. It happened inside half a second. Impossible.
The supernatural proof that I had nothing to fear — not from the wall, not from him.
Standing above me now, he stared directly into me, one hand holding my head, the other hovering just over my collarbone. His eyes narrowed. His lips parted. My legs, I think, did too.
He moved his hand to the wall above me, the other still cradling me, and bent his head in a way that looked disturbingly like he was finally preparing to lunge for my throat. I should have been scared, but I didn’t move an inch. I was safe — I would not die by his hand — and I was prepared to stake my pleasure on that safety. If only for now, only for tonight, for however long this anointing lasted.
He moved into me with devastating purpose, mouth open, but only his breath claimed my throat. He traveled this way along my collarbone to my shoulder, bending all the while over me like a predator scenting his prey.
Nothing to fear, I reminded myself. But something to want — yes, this I wanted. I wanted it closer — him closer. On my neck. On my lips. Come to me.
As if hearing my thoughts, his current returned to my neck. I felt it drape like a curtain of cool velvet down my nape, between my shoulder blades, along my spine. It chilled the beads of sweat gathering there into pinpricks of ice and I yelped in delight, the sudden contrast forcing me to arch my back. Away from the wall. Toward him.
A moment of alarm flashed across his face. His eyes widened. He stepped back and all the air of Austin rushed into the space where he had been. All the air except his, on skin he had made ready for anything but its absence.
I felt so hollow I almost panicked. He caught it before I could protest and, brushing his hand through his hair in visible consternation, he advanced on me again, closing the space between us in a rebellious fury. His palms slapped — hard — against the wall on either side of me. His body left barely an inch of armor between him and whatever perilous, otherworldly fire constantly threatened to engulf him in anguish and me in craving and grief. But he fought it — or else that inch of armor was enough to hold the pyre at bay — because his lips were already at my neck, torturously close to a touch that never arrived as he blew circles against my earlobe, against the skin beneath it, and into the hair that billowed against my neck, adding to his sensorial assault.
He breathed into my ears — first one, then the other — and the cool entered the canal inside my head like words, forming a resonance I understood as my own yes, yes, yes.
He blew along my jaw and I tilted my head upwards, lifting my toes higher to give him more access. He moved to my mouth and the cool from his barely-there lips against mine nearly undid me. His near-contact, his self-control!
God! I was losing mine. My eyes fell shut and I swam in my own darkness with a most acute awareness that his eyes were still open, still drinking every minute response of my pliant body.
I knew my lips were shaking, and I knew he noticed it, because his exhalation on them made them freeze in place. He blew on my lower lip and it fell open. I thought I’d finally taste him so I stood terribly still, as if any movement might distract him — might make him change his mind.
But he made no attempt to kiss me. Instead, it was the gentle ministrations of his marble breath that made me catch mine. I was trying not to move and yet my whole body was quaking. The shivers caught in my lips and he kept breathing them still. They shot down my throat to my belly, and settled deep inside me. A white hot kind of cool. Camphorous. And very, very assertive.
I do not know how long we stood there. Time had taken on an abstract, theoretical quality. I was drunk. I was out of my senses.
But then, sometime in the liquid and distant future, I felt him straighten. The all-consuming now in which I had been floating rudely collapsed into the reality around me.
My eyes shot open. A street. A wall.
In the hotel room, too, my eyes shot open. I remembered it with a stinging pain in my heart.
How he stepped back. How his hands never touched me except to cradle my head during his campaign of liberation from the too-hot Austin night.
His mouth never pressed into mine. But his breath anointed and primed every available inch, and I was ready for anything he would have asked of me.
The swelling pain I felt now: was it privation or gratitude I was feeling? It was so confusing. So dizzyingly strange.
As I stood there — as I lay here — I thought of how he looked to the street around us. How he had looked away. Away from me.
A cab pulled up to the corner. He waved it down. I watched his movements, bereft of whatever it was that I had been waiting for.
To the driver, Simeon said, “She’s up the street past Lavaca.”
And then he turned to me. “Sleep well, Miri,” and it landed like a blow.
I straightened out my posture, my skirt, my self-esteem. “Will I see you tomorrow?” I asked before I could stop myself from nearly begging.
“I do not know. There is something I have to take care of.”
“I don’t understand,” my mouth betrayed again.
“Please, go,” he implored, but I had already started toward the cab before he finished speaking.
I climbed into the back and looked up at him through the window. “Simeon—” I tried again.
“I am sorry. I will not be able to—” he seemed in search of words. It reminded me of how he paused before the word meditation in the bar four hours ago when he could not quite commit to what he meant.
“— to be near you. For a little while,” he finished, then closed the cab door.
We pulled away from the curb. I watched him through the rear window. He stood leaning in the same place his breath had held me pinned. I saw now that he was shaking all over, the carefully orchestrated control from mere moments ago slipping out in ripples across his entire form.
But he never took his eyes off me. Not until the cab turned the corner and we could not see each other anymore.
Remembering it now, I pulled the covers off me and sat up on the edge of the bed.
The cool from the AC blasted onto my body and it felt like his breath on my skin again. I could still feel where his breath had arced over my breasts, my nipples rising and tenting the silk of my tank top.
They rose again now. I could hear my affirmation where his breath brushed against my ear. The yes inside my head. And now, I was also in possession of a cavernous hollowness in the place that he had passed over and that had been waiting for his anointing.
I had not prayed. Not today. Not tonight. But I am certain I had been worshipped.
I was a Christian woman who had accepted devotion from a thing that was not from Christ, and that had told me we are the same.
Again, I did not sleep. The sun rose. It was Monday morning. I walked into the shower and waited for it to steam, and then I let the hot water wash away the cool of the man — the monster. Wipe clean the slate. Buy me time to attend to the day.
But…I knew I was in trouble. I knew that something in my body — in my very sense of self — had been shattered irrevocably, and that nothing in my world would ever be the same.
