Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves TownDoctorow, Cory
Science
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Doctorow, Cory
Internet -- Fiction; Science fiction; Toronto (Ont.) -- Fiction
When he touched her wing, she gasped and shivered, indeterminately
between erotic and outraged. They were as he imagined them, these wings,
strong and primal and dark and spicy-smelling like an armpit after sex.
He gently guided the tip down toward the neck hole and marveled at the
intricate way that it folded in on itself, at the play of mysterious
muscle and cartilage, the rustle of bristling hair, and the motility of
the skin.
It accordioned down and he tugged the shirt around it so that it came
free, and then he slid the front of the shirt down over her breasts,
painfully aware of his erection as the fabric rustled down over her
rounded belly.
As her head emerged through the shirt, she shook her hair out and then
unfolded her wings, slowly and exquisitely, like a cat stretching out,
bending forward, spreading them like sails. He ducked beneath one,
feeling its puff of spiced air on his face, and found himself staring at
the hash of scars and the rigid ropes of hyperextended muscle and
joints. Tentatively, he traced the scars with his thumbs, then, when she
made no move to stop him, he dug his thumbs into the muscles, into their
tension.
He kneaded at her flesh, grinding hard at the knots and feeling them
give way, briskly rubbing the spots where they'd been to get the blood
going. Her wings flapped gently around him as he worked, not caring that
his body was pretzeled into a knot of its own to reach her back, since
he didn't want to break the spell to ask her to move over to give him a
better angle.
He could smell her armpit and her wings and her hair and he closed his
eyes and worked by touch, following scar to muscle, muscle to knot,
working his way the length and breadth of her back, following the muscle
up from the ridge of her iliac crest like a treasure trail to the muscle
of her left wing, which was softly twitching with pleasure.
She went perfectly still again when he took the wing in his hands. It
had its own geometry, hard to understand and irresistible. He followed
the mysterious and powerful muscles and bones, the vast expanses of
cartilage, finding knots and squeezing them, kneading her as he'd
kneaded her back, and she groaned and went limp, leaning back against
him so that his face was in her hair and smelling her scalp oil and
stale shampoo and sweat. It was all he could do to keep himself from
burying his face in her hair and gnawing at the muscles at the base of
her skull.
He moved as slow as a seaweed and ran his hands over to her other wing,
giving it the same treatment. He was rock-hard, pressed against her, her
wings all around him. He traced the line of her jaw to her chin, and
they were breathing in unison, and his fingers found the tense place at
the hinge and worked there, too.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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