She flipped the mask around to the back of her head. It looked like she had her face on backward as she led him by the hand up a little cobbled lane built in a century of donkeys and carts. Burnt russet hair flowed around the edges of the mask, falling over her shoulder blades as he trailed her, gripping her hand as her lithe arm extended straight back. He was sorely tempted to stop short and force her to turn so he could see her face. He knew her. He wasn’t quite sure how or from where, but her hair and the eyes that had looked out through her mask triggered some shred of recognition.

He knew her.

But he knew she must have had her reasons for not revealing herself. Maybe she was famous or disfigured somehow. Maybe she was only playing games with his simmering imagination. Otherwise, they could’ve been any other naked couple on the planet, walking each other home through antiquated streets at dawn’s end of The Carnival.

The knuckles of her spine moved with a durable yet delicate kind of precision, as if she were all sinew, bone and lace. Her ass held the shape of inflated tear drops, flexing wearily as she navigated. Slow. Sure of the way. She was completely anonymous from behind, and boldly exposed ahead. Her palm tacky and hot as his own. She moved as if she were guiding them through oncoming currents of air, as if they were swimming toward daylight.

But the dawn was still, and the further they got from the plaza where they’d been masked in a sea of masks, the quieter the world seemed to become.

He should have been wary of where she was leading him. He should have been ashamed of his semi-inflated cock wagging like someone’s lost guard dog between his scissoring thighs. Someone would have to exit a building or pass the other way sooner or later.

His face was sticky with sweat and starting to itch beneath his mask. It was much like hers – black and gold visage of some haunted noble. The capes they’d been wearing to the party kept falling off his shoulder. He wanted to put his back on.

But she’d told him no with a wag of her finger. It was enough to let him know: if you’re coming with me, we go naked into this dawn together.

He wanted to curse himself for being captured by nothing more than a mask and waves of burnt silk hair. But it wasn’t like that. His nose was open wide and full of unseen tendrils of her aroma.

The universe this morning was reduced to synergy and hunger and the cloying need to drown himself in the suspicion of what or whoever she was or could’ve been.

Fucking questions. Fucking blood in his veins never stopping. Fucking strain to hold a nameless angel until she cast him down for not coming up with better sins.

She brought him around a corner down an even narrower street. Sitting in front of the second building on the left was one of those old, black-shawled widows, scrubbing her face with dry, gnarled fingers.

He saw the old woman notice them and look bored. Maybe she’d seen this on Carnival dawns for the last hundred or so. She looked neither at nor away from his lazily swaggering cock.

He wanted to laugh out loud, and almost did, but then he thought of the old lady maybe once leading a man naked through the streets at dawn just as his russet-haired, possible beauty was leading him. Maybe he’d turned out to be the one man of a thousand dreams. The one who’d loved her through wars and impossible times and had told that same, time-mapped face she was his beauty and freedom.

Maybe. But it was enough to make him look back at the pendulous ass of the woman with the mask gazing backward at her follower.

They say when you come to those crowning moments in life that it all flashes before your eyes, but he didn’t know what to call it when everything flashing through his mind had yet to happen.

Back in the plaza, when she’d first started dancing with him, her cape had opened, revealing the buttery smoothness of her body. She was hairless to the distended V at the apex of her thighs. It wasn’t as if they’d been the only revelers naked under capes, but they were the only he knew of without body paint. At the time, it had seemed enough by way of common ground.

She remained as silent as their surroundings, although the city was beginning to show signs of awakening. Back in the plaza it had been too loud to talk, and they’d done their communicating through gestures and nods.

When he saw her free hand reach back to pull the mask around to cover her face, he knew they must be reaching whatever their destination would be. She turned into a close alley between two buildings that came out into a courtyard. The rear façades of four buildings faced the courtyard, and the entrance to each was closed off by a tall, wrought iron gate. She led him to the gate opposite the mouth of the alley they’d just come through.

He felt the brief sensation of being lost when she let go of his hand to grab the bars of the gate and push, but the feeling was cut short when the gate wouldn’t budge.

She muttered some vague syllable of annoyance and turned. The tips of her breasts were a few scant shades paler than her hair. There was an angry flash of jade in the eyes peering back at him through the holes in her mask. He looked at her closely, then at the gate, which suddenly seemed taller, darker and more impenetrable.

The gate didn’t matter to him. She was there – supple and naked – close enough to push against those iron bars and devour.

But he didn’t touch her. Not then. He let the dangling capes fall from his shoulder and caught them in his hand before they hit the ground. He took a moment to separate them and held hers toward her, angling his masked face in gracious offering while his blood hammered steadily through his naked flesh.

___

from Fire at Dawn, available on Amazon