The Hanged Man: Part 7: Beltane
Post #55: In which shame ambushes a young woman ...
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ROSE RED
Rose Red watched from the top of a tree. Her heart hammered. She breathed as shallowly as she could, afraid even to blink her eyes. Afraid to be seen? Afraid to frighten him away? Afraid. She remembered the feel of the fox’s tongue on her lips the night of initiation as he leaned forward out of Death’s rib cage and licked blood from her mouth. She shuddered and the fine hairs on her arms and legs stood up. Afraid? Or unbearably excited?
She’d seen a fox the night she awoke the trees. She remembered his tail brushing against her skin like soft fire. Again, a shudder rippled through her, spreading warmth in its wake.
She didn’t take her eyes off the fox. For a long moment, he stood perfectly still. Then he moved to a nearby tree, lifted his leg briefly, and backed up against the trunk, tail brushing back and forth. He stepped into dappled shadow and vanished.
Rose Red had learned patience in the woods. She stayed still and quiet for several more minutes. The fox didn’t return. Birds sang in tree tops around her, unconcerned. She took a long, deep breath and let it out. He was gone.
The urine smelled musky. When she put her nose to the tree, she thought of violets but then the impression faded and only the heavy wild smell of musk remained in her nostrils. She licked her lips. The scent stirred her in some deep, shadowed way.
She spent the rest of the day slipping through the trees. She’d decided to stay here until she knew what to do next. Artemis bade her come and she’d come. Now she’d wait for further direction. She felt perfectly at home alone in the woods.
She and Mary had talked a great deal about the night of initiation, but much of what Rose Red had learned and felt couldn’t be shared. She went over and over in her mind the dance, the fox, and the process she and Kunik had shared of making peace with their families. Now Maria had given her a glimpse of the path of self-hatred and where it led. Rose Red admitted her own harshness with herself, but it still seemed to her she deserved it
That night, Rose Red opened her eyes and found the long muzzle, stiff whiskers and pricked ears of the fox over her. The blanket had been drawn back and she lay in her tunic, uncovered in the cool night air.
“It’s you?” she asked in a low voice.
The fox regarded her. She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, but she felt the weight of his look. They breathed together. She lay beneath him as though captive, though he didn’t touch her. She felt a powerful longing for…something. She hardly knew what. She wanted to touch him, to be touched by him. Tears slid out of her eyes.
The fox trotted over to the spring and lapped water. Rose Red imagined the cold freshness of it, the slightly woody taste. She felt bereft. When she’d awakened and found the fox there, for a moment everything seemed possible. Then the feeling faded and she called herself a fool to make something out of a curious fox passing by. Her tears wet the blanket that cushioned her cheek from the ground. She lay still.
Movement. A presence leaned over her. Breath stirred against her upturned cheek. She reached out. Already she could feel the red coat, the brush of the tail… She touched flesh. Skin. She gasped and pulled her hand back, began to sit up.
“Hush. It’s me. Do you ask me to go?”
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“You know who I am,” he said. “I watched you wake the trees. I watched you face your past in the mirror. I’ve watched you for a long time. Do you ask me to go?”
She hesitated. “No.”
“I won’t touch you. I only want to smell you.”
Heat blossomed low in her belly.
“To smell me?” she whispered.
“And for you to smell me,” he replied.
She fell back, stunned. To smell…and to be smelled. The words curled hotly inside her. Feeling roared. When she thought again, she wondered if she would she smell bad to him. She’d been on the road for weeks. She thought of her mother’s table, littered with perfumes and creams, hair oil, cosmetics. She remembered the heavy silken fall of her mother’s black hair, her smooth neck, her creamy skin. For the first time, she wished her body to please, wished for artifice and decoration. And here she was with finger-combed hair, sweat of miles on her skin, wearing the linen tunic she always wore, embroidered with Jenny and Vasilisa’s love.
“You might not like the way I smell,” he said. She felt relieved. He had his own fears, then. He crouched over her, faceless in the dark. He didn’t touch her.
“I can’t see you.”
“Night is for scent and touch and hearing.”
She thought, whatever happens, no one will see. No one will know.
She thought he wasn’t wearing anything. She could lift her hand and find out, but if he didn’t touch her, she wouldn’t touch him. There was something poised and wary about him, as though it would take little to send him back into the night forest. Recognizing his tension revealed her own to her. She took a deep breath and consciously relaxed. He brought his face down to hers and she realized he sought her exhaled breath. What did he smell on her exhalation? Once he knew her scent would he be able to find her again in the dark? Would he know her from all others? For some reason, the idea excited her powerfully.
“I want to feel your breath, too,” she whispered.
He moved close. He licked his lips and opened his mouth slightly. She felt him inhale and closed her eyes as he exhaled. His breath smelled of spring water, green forest and a hint of roots nourished by rotting life. It smelled of musk and urine and blood. It was unmistakably, fiercely male. It woke a hidden, sleeping part of Rose Red that stayed awake the rest of her life. A powerful mixture of curiosity and desire swept her. Fear vanished. She lay beneath him.
“Again,” she said.
She breathed with him and then, playfully, breathed opposite, so his inhale became her exhale. The intimacy of it felt explosive. Her body responded with a gush of liquid she knew he could smell, the knowing making her more excited still. Her armpits and groin dampened and she felt sweat spring out at her hairline. She flexed the muscles in her empty vagina and felt wet heat.
Her clothes became an unbearable limitation. She must be free of them.
“I want to take off my clothes,” she muttered.
He withdrew, sitting back on his haunches. She felt the loss of his presence.
“Don’t go! I don’t want you to go!” Impatient and clumsy, she pulled the tunic off and then wriggled out of her other clothing. She smoothed out the blanket under her, moved to an edge. “Will you lie down with me? Please?”
He laid himself down with cautious grace. She bent over him and felt him tense.
“I won’t touch you,” she said. “I won’t touch you, either. But I want to smell you. I want to know you. Please let me?”
For answer, he relaxed and raised his arms above his head, letting his hands fall open on the ground and exposing his armpits.
To smell but not to touch. The power of that delicate challenge! The velvety self-restraint of it! Knowing if she extended her tongue she would taste his sweat, and wanting it more than she’d ever wanted anything before in her life! And it wasn’t just her. He wanted, too. She could feel it, read it in the tension of his body. She could smell it. He too, was slicked with sweat and he radiated heat. She descended into a kind of blind dream, without thought, without time. Only his body and its scent existed.
“Stop.” His voice woke her. She eased back on her heels and felt the ache in her back and chill air on her skin.
“It’s my turn,” he said. She thought she heard a smile in his words. She lay down, somewhat stiffly, and he threw a blanket over her legs.
“Will you know me again?” he whispered.
“Anywhere,” she said.
She thought no more about smelling bad. This experience of knowing, of discovering the smell of a life couldn’t be defined as good or bad. How amazing, that her mother had never grasped that. How strange that scrubbing away the body’s scent, or masking it, had become attractive. We’re lost, she thought, so lost! How did we get so lost?
“Rose.”
It was the first time he’d called her by name.
“Yes?” she whispered.
“Open for me.”
“Oh…” Again, she clenched against the emptiness between her legs. She put her hands over her head. Her breasts flattened and her taut nipples ached but she knew he could see none of this. She stretched, feeling the pull of muscles along her sides. She bent a knee and rested her foot against the inside of her other leg, the movement opening her congested labia and releasing, she knew, a thick wave of scent. He bent over her armpit
She could see the starry sky through a window framed by treetops. She willed this one night to stretch out into many. She felt his breath on her body. She imagined her scent in his nostrils. She moved with controlled sensuality, opening and offering her hidden places as he moved over her. She laced her fingers together and her breath came short and shallow. Her jaw quivered with tension.
His breath stroked her belly. In blind desire, she reached down and flung the blanket off. He paused, not in doubt, she thought, but in a kind of control.
She heard the sound of her own breathing.
“Please,” she said at last. “Please don’t stop.”
He bent over her damp pubic hair and drew in a deep breath. She felt moisture run down between her legs, adding to the damp patch beneath her. He moved over her hip and down her leg.
The blind exploration continued. The hair on her thighs prickled, reaching up to touch the one who scented. She turned on her hip and exposed the soft crease behind her knee. She extended her toes and arched her foot helplessly. It seemed to her she felt the scent of her body being drawn out of her skin in a fine spray of tiny droplets. She felt his inhale as well as his warm exhale, and every cell of her skin gasped for more. Every nerve ending waited helplessly for touch. If he touches me now, thought Rose Red, I’ll scream with the pleasure of it.
Smell but not touch.
He sat up, a dark shape beside her legs.
Rose Red felt helpless with desire. She took a deep breath and relaxed her hands, relaxed her shoulders, her thighs. She’d make him feel this — and more. She’d watch him strain and writhe. She’d feel his body beg, as hers had.
“Lie down.” When he did, she crouched at his feet. He lay on his back with his legs extended and his feet fell apart, relaxed. She smiled to herself.
She opened her mouth and let him feel her breath, let it stir in the damp hair under his arm and among the fine hairs of his body. She moved over the invisible landscape of skin and drank in his scent. He moved his head to left and right and let her smell along his jaw, his ear, his hairline and where the pulse beat in his neck. She swayed over him, going from side to side, moving around him. She moved down his body, mapping out unseen nipple, rib, concavity of belly, umbilicus, ridge of hip.
The soles of his feet smelled unexpectedly musky. The smell seized her with another wave of arousal. She remembered waking trees on the cold spring night of full moon, and it seemed a long time ago. She gathered energy from her breasts and sex; the desire to touch, to feel, to taste, from palms and fingers and tongue, and she imagined running her lips along his naked toes, exploring between them, pushing them apart with the tip of her tongue, the texture of the nails against her teeth. She breathed against them, breathed and imagined her breath warm on his wet flesh, breathed and pushed her desire out like green fire and ice, like sticky sap, like the slippery silver wetness of a live fish. She blew across the harmonica of his toes, blew promise of tongue and wet warmth, blew on the naked soles of his feet. She crouched low and felt her bare sex open in wet, slippery invitation. Knew he could smell it because she could smell it.
Smell but not touch.
When his legs trembled with tension, though not touched, no, not that, she moved up and he in his turn gave her the secret places behind his knees, grooved valleys between his muscles, hard bones underneath their thin layer of skin. She kept her eyes closed and saw none of it but captured every drop of his scent.
Now she smelled the roots of man, of fox, of life. The end place, the crossroads of texture, tissue, membrane and hair. The fecund garden where seed is born, stored and released. Rose drew in the scent of life and use and function, the unique chemical imprint of this unique body. She collected it on the back of her tongue and made it hers. She breathed and she blew a light, warm breath of greeting so hairs stirred, tissue rose up to meet her, fluid oozed, muscles tightened, sphincters clenched.
Smell but not touch.
The fox man growled low in his throat and Rose Red felt satisfied. Her own blood had cooled slightly, but she’d made him feel. She’d made him want.
She stretched out bedside him, careful not touch his skin. He radiated warmth and the skin on her arms and back was plucked into gooseflesh. She lay on her side, facing him, and his shadow flowed as he moved, flowed and diminished and something leapt lightly over her hip, brushing her with a thick tail, leaving behind an electric sensation like nettle rash. She gasped with surprise and felt the fox move up her backbone, the prick of stiff whiskers, the touch of a soft ear, the nudge of a damp nose. It moved to the nape of her neck and she felt the tightly restrained touch of teeth, not quite hard enough to hurt. She shuddered.
The fox walked the length of her body, rubbing along her back, buttocks and the backs of her legs. The thick coat felt like newly grown needles on a pine bough. She groaned and turned onto her back. Her nipples peaked into tight points, begging for touch. The fox stepped delicately between her legs and she spread them, exposing herself, opening to the cool air. The fox sniffed at her deeply, leapt to one side, trailing his tail across her belly. She arched her back to meet the caress. The fox sat like a dog looking at her displayed body. She cupped her breasts, feeling wanton and ashamed, but she couldn’t help it — she must feel his touch! The fox leaned over and gave a quick lick to a nipple.
“Oh,” she groaned, “Yes, yes, again!” and the fox slipped away. The warm weight of the man lay on her and she took his head between her hands and guided him, arching her back and tense in every muscle, and felt his mouth on her breast, his lips, his teeth, his tongue. She thought she would pass out with the exquisite feeling, yet it wasn’t enough. She guided him to the other nipple and then back to the first, beside herself with the sensation
Beside herself. Suddenly, someone lay beside her like a cold ghost, listening to her arousal, watching her naked passion, knowing the shameful scent of her desire. Someone who resided inside her but wasn’t of her. Not the child self she’d seen on the night of initiation, for the child was innocent and judged, not judge. Surely not the lovely, serene old woman. Some other, some outsider, critical, harsh and punitive. She saw herself through that one’s condemning eyes and found herself beyond pleasure in dark chaos. She couldn’t find her breath. She couldn’t find a coherent thought or a place to cling to. She felt overwhelmed, dissolved, shattered by her own nakedness. She reached out blindly and found herself in his arms. Her face pressed against his chest and his heart beat in her ear. The smell of his sweat was already familiar and comforting. Her jaw trembled and she was gasping. Desire tied itself into a knot like an angry snake and took the shape of fear.
She felt deeply and terribly ashamed.
Her sense of exposure was annihilating. She had no place to hide. He knew her scent, the truth of her, more naked than skin, more naked than eyes could see. And she’d been beautiful and…real. She’d met passion with passion. She hadn’t been afraid.
Now she’d destroyed their shared passion. She’d failed this deep connection, this chance to be beautiful and loved, this chance to be strong. In the end she was too broken, not worthy. Artemis was wrong. They were all wrong.
She willed herself not to cry, to retain some vestige of pride. She controlled her breathing. She made herself relax. She regained control of her voice.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. You don’t need to stay. I’m quite all right now.”
She felt his energetic shying away, though his firm hold didn’t change.
“Do you ask me to go?”
She lay in his arms in a state of brutal self-control that turned her singing, supple, pleasure-filled body to stone.
“Yes,” she whispered.
His arms loosened. She felt a swift stir of movement, brush of fur against her bare side, and knew she lay alone.
(This post was published with Edition #55 of Weaving Webs and Turning Over Stones.)