FIC: A Little Night Magic

[laguera25]

Title: A Little Night Magic

Author: laguera25

Fandom: Rammstein

Rating: R/FRM

Pairing: Richard Kruspe/OFC

Word count: 11,215

Disclaimer: Richard Z. Kruspe is a real person, with family and friends who love him. I am not one of them, and the events depicted herein are entirely fictional. No defamation or infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

A/N: This is a companion piece to Die Sprache der Blinden, written from Calliope's point of view. There might be more of these, but there are no guarantees, and even if there are, each can be read independently of the others.


She wakes in the night with her face buried in the cool rumple of sheets, and she smells smoke. Not the smothering, acrid tang of burning plywood and plaster, but the stale, yellow haunt of old cigarettes. It's embedded in the sheets, deep within the fibers and beyond the masking reach of fabric softener, and it's unpleasant in her nostrils. She snuffles and sniffles to expel it, but it's permeated the very air and walls, and it simply resettles on her skin. She grunts and wrinkles her nose, and then she blinks and shifts beneath the sheets until the dead, white sea of bedsheets is replaced by the illusory, quicksilver darkness of the bedroom. Everything is piecemeal and ghostly and incomplete--the milky reflection of the streetlight on the drawn curtains and seeping across the hardwood floor; the blunted edge of a nightstand; the muddy, collapsing obelisk of the gift bag; the indistinct stack of the journals that had emerged from it; the stricken, white pucker of the lampshade that looms above the lumpy dune of blankets beside her.

And the man buried so snugly beneath the blankets, of course. He's little more than an outline, limned by the milky seepage of the streetlight and the moonbone reflection of moonlight on snow. Most of him is concealed by layers of sheets and blankets and the heavy down comforter he favors. Only his head and shoulders are visible, and these are cast in shadow, mere surmises of the truths she knows them to be.

He's lost to the deepest waters of sleep, body slack and lips parted, and she's tempted to touch him, to peel back the blankets and let her fingers dance along the smooth skin of his arm and the gentle slope from ribs to hip. She wants to feel the cool night-dryness of him, feel his dreaming skin quiver and contract and pucker into knots of gooseflesh. She's touched him in the night before, of course, but then, he'd been feverish and flush with desire, slick and taut and all guttural commandments as he moved against her. It had been lovely, she cannot deny, lovely and intoxicating and addictive, and as she thinks on it, longing curls and coils in her belly as if the smoke of the room has slipped inside her, but she wants to feel him when he is spent and dreaming and remote as tomorrow, a ghost of will and memory in an empty room.

But her hand remains still beneath the cocoon of covers. He deserves his rest. He had been ever the gracious host this evening, solicitous and tender and attentive to her constant prattle, but weariness had been evident in the slumped set of his shoulders and the smudges beneath his eyes and the deepening of the grooves in the corners of his mouth. Frankly, she's surprised he made it as long as he did before the remote had slipped from his lax fingers and his body had sagged into the mattress with a grateful sigh.

He is sleeping deeply, sprawled bonelessly among the sheets and pillows, one arm hanging over the side of the bed and the other lying across his belly. His snores are loud in the stillness of the room, loud enough to muffle the dyspeptic chuff of the radiator that squats beneath the bedroom window like a baleful bulldog, stubby and watchful and inelegant, but stolid as it battles the bitter Berlin winter. He snorts and smacks his lips and emits a dry, rattling click, and his face turns into the pillow, as though seeking its warmth.

She resists the temptation to stroke his cheek. Instead, she curls her covetous fingers into a tight fist and watches and listens. It's peaceful despite the droning, sonorous snores and the contemptuous chortling of the radiator. There are no social graces to uphold now, no words to choose with care or subjects to avoid. Here in the dark with none to see her, she is free to unfurl and let the wonder of this unexpected present flow through her veins like mulled wine, heady and sweet and dizzying. And so she does. She closes her eyes and turns her face to the distant, cold light of the moon and the kindlier light of the streetlight, and she stretches her legs until they tremble and fill with a sultry, languorous heat that kindles the wanton desire to purr, a cosseted cat curled before a cozy fire. She doesn't purr, but straightens her feet and splays her toes, wills the honeyed heat of her calves into her soles. She props herself on her elbow and her cheek on her knuckles and lets her gaze roam over his face with a freedom she cannot grant her envious hands. She wishes there were light enough to watch his eyelashes flutter.

The world is thinner at night, and there is more magic in it. At night, the years fall away, vanish with the sun's scathing light, and it is easier to believe in the fancies of children. When she was a child, she had lain in the bed in the room she had shared with Antigone and Io, covers tucked snugly against her chin, and imagined she could see the real world just beneath the fraying, peeling layers of the earth. She'd imagined that the shadows that had danced and fluttered against the bedroom wall like images on a torn, flapping drive-in screen weren't the leaves as they clung to the gnarled branches of the dutch elm that stretched its ancient fingers across their small backyard like a shielding hand, but the silhouettes of fairies and pixies flitting through the branches. She and her sisters had been princesses, nymphs born of the autumn leaves that fell to the earth like locks of shorn hair. The dry rustle of bedclothes and her sisters' steady breathing had been dragon's breath from beneath the beds, and she had seen them there, peering from the underbed gloam with their glittering eyes and curled possessively around their treasured hoards, sulphurous breath pluming from their nostrils. The settling of the old, A-frame house had been the complaints of a sprawling castle groaning beneath the wight of its stony majesty. She had even imagined the pop and snap of pennants on the parapets. The scrape of her brother's socked feet on the wooden floor on the way to the bathroom had been the shuffling passage of a sentry on the watch. Without the daylight to rob it of its power, her imagination had been limitless, and it refashioned the mundane into its wondrous image with nimble, gleeful hands, and the stone castle of her daydreams had been truer than the grain of the house's wood beneath her passing hand.

The castle of her youth had disappeared along with the baby fat on her arms and legs and cheeks, but the power of her imagination had never waned. It had merely applied itself to the creation of different worlds. As the chubby arms of toddlerhood had thinned and narrowed to the knobby, gangly limbs of middle-school adolescence, the prowling knights and slumbering dragons had been replaced by flowing gowns and diadems and swords held aloft in her own name. No longer a princess, but a mighty queen, tall and sure astride the saddle and beautiful as hoarfrost in the barren branches. No longer pampered and helpless, but strong and fierce and without equal.

And in search of a prince, of course; one who bore an uncanny resemblance to the boy in her third-period math class or fifth-period history class save for the stippling of pimples along his hairline and the bridge of his nose. The physiques had been broader, too, more indicative of the men they would someday become than the awkward, squawking, concave-chested boys they were. Full lips and perfectly-windswept hair and eyes that smoldered with an urgency she had only begun to understand then, a coy want that had made her stomach flutter and her thighs clench.

There in her childhood bed that had remained unchanged save for the sheets, and surrounded by her prodigious collection of Piers Anthony, Nancy Drew, and Sweet Valley High books, she had watched the leaves dance upon the wall and pretended they were fairies still, older, perhaps, and more wary in their nocturnal dance, but still vital, still possessed of mischief and old, eternal magic. She had smiled secretively in the dark and pretended that the sterile, astringent stink of Noxema and Clearasil and her sisters' cold cream was the heady scent of attar of rose.

She had gone on imagining throughout the course of her adolescence, when the clumsy planes of twelve had blossomed into the swells and curves of sixteen. Nancy Drew and Sweet Valley had been supplanted by Toni Morrison and Paul Auster and the guilty pleasure of Stephen King, whose tales of monsters and the black-hearted truths behind unassuming human faces offended the sensibilities of her teachers and the self-appointed literati alike. And Harry, of course, reliable, brave, bespectacled Harry, a prince in a cupboard who fled to a castle and found himself within its walls. Her dreams had shifted again, had become more practical in many ways, but the castle had remained, though it had housed, not knights and daintily-slippered queens, but professors and artists and writers bent to their desks, dust on their skin like silt as they carved tomorrow's myths into paper thick as hide with the nibs of sharpened quills.

The princes had endured as well, and they, too, had changed. Backs and chests had broadened, and timid five-o'clock shadows had crept over chins and cheeks. No gilded broadswords now, but lacrosse nets and soccer cleats and messenger bags bulging with rare books. The smoldering hunger in their eyes had not changed, however, and she had grown to understand it in the fullness of time, and share it. She had tasted of it for the first time when she was fifteen. It had only been a half-measure then, urgent, sloppy kisses and fumbling hands beneath the bleachers after school, the prickle of grass against her skin and the smell of sweat and dirt and warm metal in her nose, and the rough, inexpert caress of Robbie Todman's too-warm fingers between her legs. She would not taste of it in full for another six months, sixteen and aching to shed the mantle of virgin, but the draught had been dark and bittersweet and unctuous as pomegranate juice on her tongue, and she'd imagined herself a voluptuous courtesan as she'd surrendered herself atop one of Nana Collie's blankets, the earth at her back and unfettered desire looming above her on trembling arms and pistoning hips. If she closes her eyes, sometimes she can still see him, eyes wide and mouth slack, lost to a wonder she could not feel. She'd felt only friction and surging weight and the tickle of her nana's wool against the cleft of her buttocks. Her wonder would come later, at the hands of another.

Her siblings had been dreamers, too, once upon a time, but one by one, they had forsaken the fragile sweetness of dreams for the bread-and-salt sustenance of pragmatism, sweat and ink and nice, nondescript men in crisp button-downs who smelled of aftershave and spearmint gum and warm vinyl interiors. Nice young men, all, but none of them a prince. They had traded the bright hope of dreams for the drab security of small apartments and regular if unremarkable sex.


Only Calliope had clung to the burning hope of dreams. She had dreamed her way through college and fed on the endless, nourishing meat of them as she'd willed herself through dry intro courses and incomprehensible hours of math and physics and other useful disciplines in which she had no interest. She had slurped their marrow as she'd balanced a full course load with a part-time job in name only, cramming for midterms between shifts as a dishwasher or busgirl and composing term papers inside her throbbing head while scraping congealing spaghetti from dirty dishes. While her suitemates had hobnobbed at ice cream socials and pledged sororities and sneaked into Manhattan hotspots with fake IDs, she had cloistered in her tiny dorm room with her mouse slippers and wrapped herself in the dreams of others found in books and preserved her own dreams in the pages of her journals like dried flowers. And after she'd written them down, she'd crawled beneath the covers and watched them play out on the ceiling, head pillowed on her hands.

Few had noticed her dreams, but none had criticized her for their keeping then. She had been quiet and cheerful and studious, and if she imagined herself to be a princess in exile while she scrubbed the floors or mucked the stalls at her parents' cabin in Fishkill, what of it so long as the chores were done thoroughly? Her dreams had never interfered with her goals of college and a laudable profession. If her parents had worried about her preference for books over warm-blooded boys with nervous smiles and fistfuls of throttled flowers, they had never remarked upon it in her hearing. They had been content to let her dream her dreams and forge her on path to heaven on the spines of the books she read and collected with such quiet fervor.

It had been her siblings who had teased her as childhood had blossomed to fair maidenhood and her love of books and night magic had remained stronger than her interest in boys of sweat and bone who had smelled of feverish skin and an unsettling, feral musk that they covered with aftershave and soap and obnoxious body sprays that had made her nose sting and her eyes water. Patrick's teasing had been good-natured, the easy nip of an old dog seeking an absent rub behind the ears before he lay his old bones down on the sagging porch to warm in the sun, but her sisters' taunts had been sharper, crueler, seasoned with a casual malice that had lingered long after the echo of their laughter had faded. Patrick had laughed and admonished her not to read her life away, had tugged on her plait and offered to buy her a cat for company; her sisters had whispered behind cupped hands and called her "bookworm" and "prude" and "nunnery-bound Nancy", and when she had foregone prom for want of an interesting date, they had burst into the room in the middle of the night, tipsy and giggling and intoxicated with mischief, and upended her from her bed. They had knocked her books from the shelves and trampled them under bare feet, witches in the throes of St. Vitus' dance. She can recall, with perfect, dismal clarity, the cracking of thick spines beneath thudding feet, eggs dropped to a tile floor. They had smeared whipped cream on her sheets and in her hair.

Since you're never going to get anything else on your sheets, Io had crowed, and sent a freshet of the sweet cream over her pillow.

She can still remember their shrill manic laughter, trembling fingers pulled over piano keys. Mostly, she remembers Antigone's weight as she'd straddled her on the floor with another can in hand, solid and crushing and graceless as a boulder as Calliope had bucked and heaved beneath her. She remembers that laughter again, and the rhapsodic expression on her face as she'd raised the can. Hold her, she'd commanded her twin, and Io, ever her faithful servant, had duly obliged. Manic, empty eyes and iron hands and expression gone stupid with adrenaline. We'll have to teach you to swallow, Calliope, because it doesn't look like you're gonna learn the old-fashioned way.

That's all right, Siobhan had slurred, her frenetic dance slowed to a lazy, stumbling slither. I'm sure she can get it from a book.

Her sisters had laughed, and then Antigone, her face flushed with lurid excitement and her eyes glazed with alcohol, had seized her bottom jaw and pressed her thumb to the joint, pressed until Calliope had screamed.

Open wide, she'd cajoled, and then sprayed the sticky, sweet foam into her mouth.

Thick, choking sweetness in her mouth and lodged in her throat. No air, only the strangling clot that threatened to plug her nose from the inside. She'd bowed and whipped her head from side to side in an effort to dislodge it, but Antigone had been oblivious, face alight with merriment as she'd cackled. Swallow, Calliope. That's what the guys like, she'd crooned, and sprayed a gobbet of cream into her own mouth.

It had been Io who had awoken from the spell first, who had seen her bulging eyes and mottled face. She had released her with a start and a revolted cry, clenching her hands into fist as though they burned, and Calliope's body had reacted on instinct. Her hands had shot out and shoved Antigone off her triumphant perch, and then she'd been on her hands and knees with her cream-matted hair in her face, retching and sobbing and gasping for air.

The silence had been absolute and ugly, punctuated only by her bubbling, ragged pants and thin, childish sobs. Even the crack of shattering book spines had ceased, and when she'd found the strength to raise her head, she'd seen Siobhan standing in a pile of her books with a glassy, distant expression, a coma patient rising to slow consciousness. She'd blinked at Calliope in logy stupefaction and shuffled her feet, and when the broken spines and crushed pages beneath them had shifted and crackled, she'd dropped her gaze to stare at them in blurry bewilderment. When Siobhan's eyes had met hers again, they had been filled with confusion and shame and an unmistakable disgust, whether at herself or her sniveling, filthy baby sister she had not known.

Calliope had risen to her knees and then sat heavily on her backside, coughing and sputtering and spitting the aftertaste of cream and propellant onto her skin in a fine spray. Strands of cream-sodden hair had painted wavering, asymmetrical lines on her arms and knees and dotted her with an inexplicable pox of smudged, white dots. She'd been hot on the outside, but frozen on the inside, and she'd longed to wrap herself in a blanket and take solace in the nearest book, but her blankets had been a rumpled, tangled heap of cotton and wool and whipped cream, and her most cherished volumes had a disorganized, ruined jumble under her sister's feet. So she'd drawn up her knees and wrapped her numb arms around herself and willed them to vanish in a puff of smoke.

Siobhan had wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and uttered a dry, croaking laugh. "Shit," she'd said dully, and swayed on the shifting pile of books. Antigone had snorted and released the can of whipped cream, and then she'd given a greasy, acrid belch. "Well, fuck," she'd said conversationally, and Io had erupted into a fit of giggling, eyes wide and wild and uncomprehending over her muffling hand.

It was Io who had tried to touch her, to draw the poison from the wound, but Calliope had batted her hand aside and scuttled backward until her back had found the solid brass handle of her old nightstand, which had wobbled precariously and threatened to send her touch lamp to the floor. Get out! she'd hissed, hands fisted on her knees and bunched in the cool fabric of her nightdress. Her anger had been dangerous, so cold that she had felt it cut the inside of her mouth and fill it with the coppery taste of blood and vengeance, spiced wine gone sour, but still potent and heady. The anger had been ugly and leviathan and tempting, and the temptation had frightened her. It had been exhilarating and erotic, the breathless moment between the parting of thighs and the joining of bodies, and she'd been terrified that she would succumb to it, would lash out at the nearest face with a clawed hand and add droplets of blood to the clots and smears of cream. Get out. Her voice had risen, and she'd clutched the fabric of her nightgown in hands clenched so tightly that they throbbed and trembled.

Io's solicitous hand had retreated, and she'd made to speak, but Antigone had silenced her with a knowing, warning glance, and she'd stopped, the hard consonant of her name cut off with the harsh crackle of a dropped radio transmission. She'd risen wordlessly and sought refuge beside her equally-mute doppelganger. Siobhan had cleared her throat and run her fingers through her hair, and then she'd stepped off her books, her steps mincing and unsteady. She'd blinked at the mess as though she'd never seen it before and scrubbed her lips with the back of her hand again, her eyes rheumy and wet.

Out! Calliope had ordered again. The strength afforded by her anger had begun to ebb, and she'd only wanted to close the door and collapse in upon herself.

The third time had been the charm, and they had filed out, disheveled and sullen and defiant, raw-eyed villagers disappointed in the kill as the uncast stones dropped from their hands. Only Io had seemed penitent, shocked and hunched and casting hunted glances over her shoulder, as though she had expected those stones to rebound upon her. Calliope had wanted to bare her teeth and bay at them, to scream that she had already learned that particular divine secret of the ya-ya goddamned sisterhood, please and thank you, but she'd been prudent even then, and too drained to do anything but watch them leave.

She'd simply sat there after they'd left, too spent and wracked to even close the door behind them. She'd sat with her back skimming the prodding brass handles of the nightstand and her knees pulled to her chest and listened to her sisters brush their teeth and flush the toilet in the hallway bathroom. She'd cried a little, short, hitching sobs she'd smothered in the crook of her elbow, and when the house had fallen silent, she'd scrubbed her puffy face with her hands and wiped the last of the tears from her irritated eyes with the back of her palm, and then she'd shed her blanket like a cocoon and set about cleaning up the mess. She'd stripped the bed to the mattress and piled the sheets and blankets into the wicker hamper beside her tiny closet, and then she'd bent to gather her despoiled books, a decrepit, swollen-handed peasant clearing away the killing stones. Some of the covers had borne Siobahn's footprints, and still others had developed an uneven sag. Pages had hung from bindings like loosened teeth or fluttered to the floor, and a few were tattered, torn, and illegible. She had gathered them all, her mangled helpmates, and returned them to their orderly rows and neat stacks, and when she was finished, she had clenched her fists to keep their dust on her hands.

She had hated her sisters then. Not the muddy, wild hate that had so frightened her, but bright and clean and cold. They had come into her imaginary castle in the middle of the night, thrown the windows wide, and let all the magic out. They had trampled it underfoot and buried it under whipped cream and mocking laughter and tried to choke it out of her, a priest driving insanity from the lunatic with holy water and bits of Eucharist. Out with the wonder of lingering childhood and in with the stultifying boredom of adulthood, with its rhythms of mortgages and student loan payments and squalling children who reeked of shit and sour milk. Adulthood was the true beginning of death as far as she had been concerned, and she had despised them for trying to drag her into it for petty, drunken spite.

She had been too exhausted to replace the sheets and wash the linens, and so she had shuffled into the bathroom, still damp and smelling of her sisters, to stand beneath the lukewarm, uneven spray until her head had begun to droop, and then she'd pilfered a set of linens from the hall closet and slept on the sofa in the den, lulled to sleep by the smell of dusty fabric and her parents' books, which had held vigil over her from the handsome teak shelves that lined the walls, sentries peering over the towering ramparts. When her mother had asked why she'd slept on the sofa the next morning, she'd laid blame at the feet of Demeter, and her mother had asked no more. Her sisters, haggard and tousled and bleary-eyed, had held their tongues and swallowed their guilt with aspirin and morning coffee.

The hatred for her sisters hadn't lasted; it seldom did. There was too much between them--shared blood and shared histories and shared secrets passed behind cupped hands like sacred totems. The sheets had been washed in the damp basement that had smelled of bleach and Tide and green things, and the bed had been remade. For weeks thereafter, she had come into her room to discover a new copy of a damaged book on the corner of her dresser, an act of anonymous atonement, whether from all or one of them she had never guessed, and she had never mentioned it. She had sensed that to do so would be to sour the milk of the kindness behind it, and so she had named it magic and been glad of it.

She still has most of those books, crammed onto the sagging, overburdened bookcases that crowd her claustrophobic apartment and strangle the flowers in her windowbox with their looming shadows, or secreted in the bottom of her depressingly-sparse hope chest at the foot of her narrow bed. They are old and fraught with must and yellowing pages and flaking ink and titles worn to illegibility, but they are tangible, priceless proof of her sisters' affection, and she will keep them until they fall to pieces in her hands.

Clean sheets and pristine pages. No trace of the incident except for the recollection of Antigone astride her like Godiva, head thrown back in exultation just before she brought the can to bear. Of the sound of cardboard spines snapping beneath Siobhan's pounding heels. Of her sisters lost to the jubilation of St. Vitus' dance, arms aloft and hips swaying like tongues of flame. No trace except for the split-second of unwelcome muscle memory that comes when she takes a man into her mouth like a sacrament and tastes, not skin and salt and the iron of his desire, but the cloying sweetness of cream that threatens to close her throat around him and throttle her until she remembers where and when she is and immerses herself in the lush pleasure of undoing him with every greedy sweep of her tongue. Just a flash, the bright, brief flash of a sulphur match, there and gone before it can cast either light or lasting warmth.

Time had achieved what her sisters could not. Adulthood had come whether she would or no, and with it had come experience, its remorseless, hard-eyed vassal who had taught her harsh lesson. Lazy hours whiled away in the drowsy comfort of make-believe had vanished in the face of hours of study and composition and literary analysis. Instead of reading for the pleasure of it, sprawled on the warm grasses of her parents' tiny backyard or curled in her favorite chair while summer sunlight slanted through the windows to warm her bare feet, she had bent to the task in library carrels and at cafeteria tables sticky with grease and spilled soda in the dirty student commissary, irritable and elbow deep in highlighter ink and minuscule notations in the margins and at the bottom of the page. She had ceased to be a starry-eyed wayfarer wandering through the pages to savor their textures and delights and revel in the secret wishes of the hearts and hands that had created them and become a squinting, hunchbacked anatomist, a cataloguer of God's wonders who ruthlessly dissected them to discover the source of their magic and killed them in the doing. She had rendered them lifeless, specimens to be collected and studied for their flaws. Reading had become a job rather than a joy, and when her murderous work had been done, she had washed her hands and tied on her apron and washed dishes until the soap cracked the skin of her hands and the blood pooled in her aching feet.

Pragmatism had ousted docile fancy with a conqueror's rough, bludgeoning hands and settled into her bones like rheumatism, and the latter wouldn't return from its exile until graduate school, when she would rediscover it over the course of a long, wet summer on the Thames, walking on the rain-slicked cobbles along the muddy banks and sipping tea in restaurants crowded with backpackers and fellow students. Until then, she had read because she must, because her taskmasters demanded it of her, and recorded her dry findings in the interminable pages of term papers that earned her high marks and equally-high praise and the admiration of her teachers, who had gladly provided her with letters of recommendation when the time had come to apply for grants and internships. Her love for books had become a means to an end, stepping stones on the staircase of the ivory tower for which she was destined, and she had used them with steely resolve, though not without a pang of regret for what she had become.

The princess had been the first to fade, swallowed by the less-glamorous facade of a teacher-in-waiting. No pretty tiaras or dainty velvet slippers or elbow-length gloves or a carriage drawn by white horses, just knit caps tugged low over her ears to keep them from chafing in the raw, winter wind and galoshes in which to slog through the butt-seeded puddles of July rains and cheap polyester gloves that had left her customarily-nimble fingers fat and stupid and struggling to grip her books or the straining strap of her bookbag. No carriage drawn by prancing white horses and flanked by footmen white with pomade, just lumbering buses that belched diesel smoke and rocking subway cars that lurched and thundered beneath the city streets. No attar of rose for her hands or rouge for her lips, but ink and graphite and the fine grit of chalk on her hands like a dowager's mark. No pretty sitting rooms overlooking the sea and lined with leather-bound volumes, but spartan reading rooms lined with bulky vending machines and soda machines that passed cans like gallstones, dropping them from their innards with the ponderous, tumbling thud of a falling brick. Drab dorm rooms with plastic chairs and terrazzo floors and views of the concrete wall across the alley. No handmaidens or ladies-in-waiting, only her initiative and her two hands and the thankless business of becoming.

The knights and princes had been next to go, banished by the beer-sodden mouths and hands of frat boys who catcalled her as she strode across a campus green with her copy of Norton's latest anthology of Classical literature held before her like a totem against evil, and of Poli-Sci majors who thought that the purchase of a dinner served on plates rather than inside Styrofoam boxes gave them the right to slip their hands beneath her skirt or inside her blouse, to blow hot, greasy breath against her cheek as they sought the tender flesh of her neck. Even those who seemed worthy at first blush had too often proven knaves and paupers in the end, liars who wove pretty words with their ugly, insincere mouth and brought her flowers and promised fealty, only to desert her when she failed to slip into the role they had chosen for her before the first pleasantries had ever been exchanged. Beautiful smiles turn cruel when there is no light behind them. Then they are but the prelude to a snarl, the twitch of muscle just before lips peel back and teeth sink through flesh and into bone. She has been bitten too often by mouths that said they loved her, and the scars left behind still itch and twist beneath her skin.

You're a great girl, but you're so predictable. You never want to party.

You're a great girl, but you need to live a little. Have a drink, go dancing. If you don't loosen up, you're going to be a lonely old cat lady.

You're a fantastic person and a beautiful woman, but our goals don't match. I want kids and a life on the cocktail circuit, and you're content with your books and research papers about dead men no one reads anymore.

You're wonderful, but not for me.

You're boring, Calliope. Boring and straitlaced and so vanilla it hurts. No one cares about your stupid books or your annual conference of spinsters, dykes, and fifty-year-old virgins. Yesterday is dead, and so are you. I only stayed around because you have an amazing cunt, but even that'll wear out eventually, and then I'll just be stuck with you.

Not all partings had been so painful, of course; many had been bittersweet and amicable, and a select few she carries with her still, nestled in the most fiercely-protected corners of her heart. The set of Aidan Moore's nineteen-year-old shoulders as he'd slung his overstuffed duffel bag over his shoulder and left her standing in the terminal at JFK with his goodbye still prickling on her lips. Neither of them had thought it was goodbye forever then, but it turned out that his love of country had been greater than his love for her. He had sent her an excruciatingly gentle Dear Jane letter from Camp Pendleton six months later, and the boy who had pledged his heart to her at eighteen had become a lifelong Army man at twenty. The letter she keeps in her hope chest; the memory of that last kiss she keeps far beyond anyone's reach, hidden from time's fading poison. He became Sergeant Moore, and then he became someone else Prince Charming in his Marine dress blues, and then he became someone's daddy, and every now and then she sees pictures of his brood on Facebook, all curly, blond hair and Kool-aid-sticky grins. He is someone else's love now, but he will always be her first.

There are others in the room of her heart that no one else knows, fragments of other yesterdays that she carried with her in defiance of time's relentless, lethal march. The raindrop that had hung like a jeweled bead from Tony Momello's oildrop lashes the night he'd ended it. She'd stared at it instead of his mouth while he'd mumbled apologies and platitudes and muddled explanations about family obligations because his mouth had held too many temptations, too many memories of candyfloss and oregano and kisses in the moonlight. Family she had understood perfectly, but she had also understood her need for that mouth and the corded, muscled strength of his thighs, and so she'd fixed her gaze on that impossible raindrop and gripped the armrest around the door to keep her hand from voicing a plea her stubborn, proud mouth would not, and when there was nothing between them but the silence and the idle of the car's engine, she'd swallowed the plea and kissed away the raindrop, and then she'd asked him to drive her home. She still remembers the aching silence of that ride, broken only by the tympanic, desultory patter of rain on the windshield and the plaintive scrape of the windshield wipers. She remembers the tightness with which Tony had gripped the wheel and the hot marble that had lodged in her throat whenever she'd tried to do anything but blink back tears and stare at her pinched, rain-spattered reflection in the rearview mirror. The waft of leather and spearmint gum when he'd leaned across her to open her door from the inside in a last, feeble act of gallantry.

'M really sorry, he'd mumbled as she'd stepped onto the steaming, dirty sidewalk in front of her dismal apartment building. It's just- He'd shrugged helplessly.

I know, she'd told him. She hadn't, but lies are often kinder than truth, and she had been too wrung out to be anything but tired. The anger had come the next morning when she'd awoken to the realization that the only suitors in her tiny apartment were the ones trapped within the pages of her books, and maybe they were the only ones that ever would be. She'd cursed his name with a thick, spiteful tongue and cried her way through her morning shower, and by the time she'd cracked her eggs into the pan, she'd been drying her tears and burying him deep.

But not all of him, no. That raindrop she kept, tucked it beside the set of Aidan Moore's shoulders and the whisper of his parting kiss. What became of the rest of him, she does not know.

She studies Richard in the dark and wonders what she will take from him when the time comes. His laughter, she supposes, the sheer, unalloyed brightness of it. He laughs with his entire face, throws back his head and lets it rise into his eyes, which crinkle at the corners and go half-lidded. His accent, perhaps, the odd melange of American English and German inflection, the alveolar stop he puts on dipthongs. His habit of descending into German when they're joined at the hip and lost to everything but the heat and friction and the tang of salt on the tongue. The intensity of his green eyes, so searching and clear that they'd startled her the first time she'd met his gaze at the produce stand. They're light when he's happy and calm and dark when he's unsettled or far gone in lust, mouth slack and muscles bunching and rippling beneath feverish skin. The suppleness of his fingers as they dance over the strings of his guitar, or the roughness of them as they move over her skin, the calluses small pebbles against her flesh. Maybe it will be the glimpse she'd caught of him as he'd worked in his home studio, fingers flying over the frets and strings of the guitar he'd cradled on his rocking lap like a child, feet tapping on the wooden floor to keep time and eyes closed and focused on a beauty only he could see. She'd felt like an interloper, as though she were spying on a man at the worship of his lover, and so, she'd retreated before he noticed her presence and preserved the memory in the black amber of her journal. She suspects it will be all of these things, or none of them. Perhaps she has yet to find it, the piece of him that she will keep when this dance draws to its inevitable close and there's nothing left but to take a bow and say goodbye.

That it will end is a truth she must believe. Fearless love is for the young and untested, and she is neither. Too often, her leap of faith has been met, not with the bracing, sheltering arms of her lover, but the loveless, brutal crash of dirty pavement that leaves her scoured and bruised and bleeding, hands and knees raw and eyes dazed and disbelieving as she licks blood from her lip. Her bones are too heavy for the weightless flight of love, though her heart longs to soar on its eddies and swells. Sometimes, she turns her face heavenward and watches the clouds scud across the horizon and imagines that she is among them, arms outflung and hair trailing behind her as the sun warms her skin and contentment flows like wine and her lover's lips nuzzle the shell of her ear. She laughs, and the laughter floods her soul and fills her mouth with the taste of ambrosia and honeycomb, and the vastness of love's possibilities makes her chest throb with unnameable joy. It is sublime and perfect, as perfect as love's first dance, but it never lasts. The moment is always shattered--by the honking of a cab's impatient horn or the strident, huckstering bellow of a cart vendor hawking his wares--and she slams to earth again, Icarus shorn of his wings, blinking and hollow and bereft as she stumbles clumsily along the solitary upward path, hands outstretched and groping as she goes.

Once upon a time, love and happily ever after had been real and eternal, sweet prizes to be awarded to the just and brave and good, but no longer. Now she knows them to be elusive and ephemeral as dust and fog, to be gripped but fleetingly, and only by a fortunate few. For the rest, satisfaction must come from the joy of pursuit and the indomitable, intractable thrill of hope. She has counted herself among the latter for years, since twenty-five slipped into twenty-six and two decades had become three. She still flips through bridal magazines when she finds them among the eclectic assortment of magazines at Moira's apartment, but she no longer looks upon them as glimpses into the rosy future. Rather, she views them as snapshots of what might have been, and she no longer envisions the day when she asks Nana Collie for a bridal quilt. She is a pragmatist, and sometimes, the road you walk is only wide enough for one.

And yet... In all the scenarios she has imagined for her life, she never expected to be here, surrounded by the night magic of a foreign city and watching Richard move through his dreams. She's still not sure why she accepted his invitation to this dance. When she'd looked up from her perusal of peaches to find him staring at her, she had thought him like so many others, an arrogant, cocksure playboy with more ego than expertise who was attracted to her hair and who wanted nothing more than to lift her skirts and claim her ginger cunt as a trophy. He'd been eyeing her with a familiar hunger, and his come-on had been woefully-transparent. She'd been prepared to blow him off with a curt dismissal, his accent and his physique notwithstanding, but there had been a flare of something unexpected in his eyes as he'd met her gaze, bravado mingled with shyness and a wary vulnerability, a golden retriever bracing for a punishing blow. It had startled her, and she'd answered in spite of herself, had returned his hopeful smile.

Still, she hadn't intended to exchange anything but civil plesantries that day. She'd settled into the solitary rhythm of her life, and she'd seen no reason to interrupt its dozy tranquility with the tumult of a new relationship. She'd been jaded by too many failures, too many empty promises and too much wasted time, and she hadn't the patience or the passion required to embark upon a dance that would only end in tears and disappointment. So she'd planned to wish him well and seclude herself in the cool, cozy sanctuary of her apartment, nestled on the couch with a bowl of ice cream and sliced fruit and the thin-skinned, grainy familiarity of a favorite book in her hand.

When he'd pursued her out of the produce stand, she'd turned with a firm rebuke on the tip of her tongue, but then she'd seen that incongruous bashfulness again, that bleakness, and it had stolen her breath, and by the time she'd found it again, her heart had been overruling her head and accepting his offer of coffee. She'd glimpsed the golden retriever again, doe-eyed and thumping his tail hopefully against the pavement, and she'd suppressed the urge to laugh.

She'd thought that evening of idle conversation in the coffee shop would be a one-off, a glorious fluke of chance, but then he'd found her again at the newsstand with her secret vice on full display, and the genuine pleasure on his face had made her stomach flutter. He'd laughed at her affinity for stories of Bigfoot and three-headed babies and lizard-men working in Chinatown sex shops as male prostitutes working to create a race of hybrids with which to infiltrate world governments, but there had been no cruelty in it, and the timbre of his laughter had been so full, his amusement so complete, that it had inspired a wave of happiness. She'd been tempted to close her eyes and bask in it as she basked in the sun, but pride and decorum had kept her eyes open and her spine straight. Then he'd been smiling and sidling and tapping on his jeans and asking her to tea, and she'd accepted without hesitation because she'd wanted to hear that honest laughter again, see his eyes light up with merriment. His laughter had been a bright, clear note in the din of the city, and she'd seized it like the beckoning, flapping tail of a kite and bid it carry her away.

She'd discovered in him a man of startling complexity, flawed and beautiful, brilliant and exasperating, vainglorious and painfully shy. He smoked too much and chewed his nails when he was nervous and was often so eager to share the roil of thoughts in his head that the words tangled on his tongue and emerged in fits and starts and endless streams, tight knots and loose skeins, but he listened as much as he spoke, and his attention was absolute. He watched her eyes and her face and the movement of her hands as she illustrated her point on the air, and he read body language like a master interpreter. He surreptitiously ogled her breasts and admired the line of her leg as she bent to adjust her sandal, but he also watched her hands drift over the table to fiddle with the sugar packets while they waited for baskets of warm bread to better occupy them, or her mouth when she spoke or took a sip of tea, her lips pressed to the delicate rim of her china teacup like a mother's kiss. He drew his fingertips over her temple in a reverent whorl or danced them lightly over her forearms and smiled as the fine hairs there shivered in response.

He was sly, for all his shyness, observant and keenly aware of her habits and peccadilloes. He learned quickly and stored that knowledge for future use. The day he'd met her at her office for their dinner date at Delmonico's, he'd brought her an assortment of tabloid rags instead of flowers because he'd remembered her contempt for the former in a previous conversation. He'd even chosen her favorites. To her, the line about flowers had been a bit of careless riposte meant to sustain their conversation, but he had marked it as worthy of notice, a student highlighting a crucial strand of text. In San Francisco, he'd even caught her eyeballing the raspberry-white chocolate truffles and presented them to her as an unnecessary peace offering after she'd sampled of her own foot at the candy shop. She still cringes to think of it, though she will forever associate those truffles with the sound of the sea and the sight of Richard in profile, wind in his spiked hair and one arm hanging out the window to let the ash from his cigarette catch a ride on the breeze. Raspberry and white chocolate coating her tongue and salt and sand and him in her nostrils, the latter wafting from the fabric of the suitcoat in which she'd swaddled herself while she'd lost herself to the undying thunder of the sea.

She'd thought him handsome as she'd drowsed in the cocoon of his coat. Sharp cheekbones and a strong chin and sunlight caught in his thick, blond eyelashes. He's handsome now, his features softened and blurred by the shadows, though his beauty is marred by the clucking, sonorous snores that erupt from his throat with the regularity of a clacking metronome. He's even lovely in the morning, when his face is puffy with sleep and the age lines stand out in the morning light and his hair is a profusion of wilted quills. He yawns and rubs the sleep from his eyes and unselfconsciously scratches inappropriate places as he shuffles into the bathroom for his morning piss, but he smells amazing, at least for the minute and a half it takes him to light his first cigarette of the day. Clean skin and conditioner and the faint residue of the cologne in which he douses himself. It's heady and musky and enticing, and it makes her want to bury her nose in the crook of his neck and breathe him in, to taste him with her tongue, to let it flick over the point of his shoulder and the spar of his collarbone. She never does, though; dignity and caution are jealous matrons, and their waspish voices whisper that she mustn't be needy, mustn't want too much. So instead, she scratches her bare thigh beneath the sheets and watches his ass as he disappears into the bathroom, and smiles at the memory of it beneath her hands.

He knows what he does to her. He is an observer and an archivist and a reader of body language, as you will remember, and he delights in divining the secrets that flutter and skitter behind her sealed lips. Sometimes he emerges from the bathroom with a cocksure smile on his lips and slips back into bed and offers himself for her unhurried delectation, bids her kiss those coveted spars and the tantalizing ridge of his collarbone. The more he offers, the more she wants, nuzzling and sniffling and nipping and laving until she's panting with want and he's shuddering and laughing beneath her and reaching out to smooth the hair from her forehead or draw her into a kiss.

And oh, his kisses, moments of perfect suspension in which her breath is not entirely her own and the world slides out of focus save for the insistent press of lips and the sinuous slither of tongue against teeth. His kisses unhinge her knees and turn her bones to water and leave her clutching and grasping blindly at fabric and skin and the fine hairs at his nape. Heart racing and head spinning and trembling knees struggling to bear her up. No matter how often he kisses her, she aches for one more, and one more, and one more, and each only feeds her insatiable desire. Her flesh yearns for them, a fire beneath her skin that cannot be quenched, and when he teases her, trails them along the shell of her ear or the hollow of her throat or the swell of her breasts or the cup of her navel, she whines--whines--and arches into him with garbled hosannas on her lips, offers him more. He grins against her taut, proffered flesh, and takes it.

Seldom has she felt such all-consuming desire. Maybe when she was sixteen, feverish with libido and the thrill of discovery, hungry for each ardent, fumbling caress of her lover's hands and squeezing her eyes shut to block out the voice of her parish priest, who pounded on his pulpit and thundered that she was drawing closer to Hell with every moan and every thrust of her hips. One appraising look from behind those lush eyelashes, and her mouth is dry and her cunt is not, and it's all she can do not to squirm in her chair and lick her lips in Pavlovian response. One whiff of his cologne through the haze of cigarette smoke, and need itches and prickles beneath her skin, sharpened by the sense memory of his skin against hers, hot in contrast to the coolness of the sheets and winter's biting chill, and his voice, rough and ragged and commanding in her ear.

It's exhilarating and embarrassing by turns to feel this much after a long and terrible winter of indifference. Every nerve sings, and every touch is magnified a thousand-fold, almost exquisite beyond endurance. Sometimes, when she's enfolded in his embrace or walking arm-in-arm through the city, she wonders if this is what it's like to be high on cocaine, wired and hyperaware. She's considered the possibility that it's a consequence of hormones, that perhaps she has fortuitously come to full sexual flower just as she's found someone with whom to share herself, but though the theory is sound, she can find no truth in it. She suspects the answer is simpler: it's Richard and his bewildering mixture of European reserve and unabashed joie de vivre. She had called this a dance, and so it is, but it is not one her feet recognize. It's sedate and graceful on the surface, a waltz in four-four time, but within the dancers' circle, it's a reckless, lunatic reel on a crumbling promontory. Sometimes it makes her laugh; sometimes she holds her breath and waits for earth to become sky, waits for the vertiginous slalom of her stomach as the she releases his hands and falls away, eyes closed and arms outstretched and hair streaming in the breeze. But so far his arms have been steady, and her feet have kept the ground.

Exalted. It is the only word to describe how she feels in his company. She has been respected for her mind and desired for body, but seldom in conjunction and never in equal measure. The lover who lifted her in his arms and parted her thighs to fuck her against the apartment wall showed no desire to see the world through her eyes, and the lover who hung on her every word and listened in starry-eyed rapture to her opinions on educational hegemony and the erosion of personal responsibility with the advent of group-directed curricula had little inclination to lift anything but a book from the bedside table unless sex had been previously scheduled. But Richard...

He wallows in her as he wallows in his music. When he is with her, she is the center of his focus, whether he is inclining his head to consider her arguments over bread and olive oil or yanking down her panties and bringing her to absolute, aching stillness with the promissory, predatory scrape and nip of his teeth against her pulsepoint. She is gloriously whole in his presence, a madonna at his table and Lilith in his bed, feminine and feral and appreciated on her own merits rather than because she is the piece that completes the set of the children Connelly, a good little poppin all in a row.

A word bubbles in her mouth like a swallow of champagne, light yet potent. It is a word of incalculable power, an article of faith in which she has believed since she was a little girl playing with teddy bears and Cabbage Patch dolls and pairing them off two by two, pressing cotton hands with fused fingers into hard plastic ones in instinctive connection. It is a faith made stronger by the years spent in her siblings' shadows, underfoot as they made their wedding preparations in a flurry of veils and tuxedos. She remembers her brother, Patrick, on his wedding day, grinning with his best man in the groom's room and wet-eyed and besotted as he watched his bride march down the aisle. The rasp of her sisters' veils beneath her fingers as she smoothed them, the feathery softness of wedding-gown bodices as she tugged and straightened and reassured. The wistful, hollow-chested pang as she realized that they had found their happily ever after. She had told Richard that she had little use for the traditional trappings of weddings and marriage, and this is true, but she is a fierce believer in the hope that inspires them, in that precious article of faith whose ember has kept her chin up when the world would break her back.

Her tongue curls and flexes behind her teeth with the desire to give it form and voice, but she won't, especially not in the middle of the night when magic is strongest. It is too reckless and too soon, and for all its power, the article of faith is a fragile thing before it is fired and tempered, inchoate as dust and fragile as old silk. It can be shattered by a heavy, overreaching hand, reduced to fragments of mirror that cast no reflection, blind and dead and an unnameable regret strewn across the floor of a dust-choked attic. The lessons of haste are etched into her bones and evinced in the empty spaces of her heart, and so she is resolved not to repeat the costly mistakes of her youth.

And there is Richard to consider. He is charming and sweet and passionate, but there are shadows behind his eyes that speak to wounds both deep and painful. She senses the scars in the sudden silence after an offhand joke, the wariness that flickers in his eyes when she asks him about his family. He is eager to share his laughter and his body, but not much else. He retreats when she unwittingly brushes these hidden hurts in her exploration, flinches and goes quiet and hides behind the concealing smoke of a cigarette while his fingers drum a nervous tattoo on his jeans and she swallows her confusion and waits for the moment to pass.

It always does. He always returns with a gentle touch and an uncertain, bashful smile, as though he is ashamed of himself and afraid that she will flee from his weakness, lips curled in contempt. It is the fragile, brave smile of a child who hopes for tenderness but expects a blow, and it makes her chest ache. She wants to know, but she never asks; she hasn't earned the trust required to peek into those rooms of his heart, and so she just hopes her returning smile is enough to dispel the shadow that has fallen over him and waits for him to resume the conversation at a more comfortable point.

The voice of the academic in her, a voice that bears an unsettling resemblance to her mother and her eldest sister, insists that she is a fool for refusing to test those doors so carefully closed, refusing to pry at the tarnished hinges or jiggle the knobs or peer through the keyholes. A man of so many shadows isn't a man at all, it warns, and certainly not to be trusted with something so precious as a heart. It whispers that a man so reticent to speak of his family must have terrible truths he cannot tell. His closet must be full, and some of the skeletons might stir restively yet, might cling tenaciously to strips of flesh that refuse to slough from their yellowing bones.

What if he's some coke fiend who pokes underage girls and beats his women? Siobhan hisses inside her head, scandalized and perversely eager. What if he doesn't talk about his ex because he has four restraining orders on his ass? You should know what you're getting into with this guy. These rocker types always have tons of baggage and dirty little secrets.

She watches Richard shift beneath the blankets. She's been sorely tempted to Google him, to sift the Internet sands and unearth its treasures, but it seems a terrible abuse of their friendship and a betrayal of his fledgling trust to ogle the most private aspects of his life in the prurient glare of her laptop screen, a voyeur leering at his public nakedness. How would she explain the information she wasn't meant to have, the half-truths and suppositions gleaned from old interviews and gossip websites? She would be Bluebeard's faithless wife, opening a door to which she had no claim and finding her sorrow there. So she forebears and prays that the decision isn't the last breath of her youthful naivete.

Besides, there are more tangible and immediate obstacles to their budding romance than the flimsy specters of drug addiction and domestic abuse. He is a nomad by trade, a wandering minstrel who makes a living from the music of his heart and the movement of his fingers. Music will always be his truest love, rivaled only by his love for his children, and he will follow it wherever it goes. She will ever be the lover-in-waiting, left behind while he chases his dreams around the world.

A sardonic laugh in the dark, muffled by the crumpled topography of the bedsheets. In all her imagined happily-ever-afters, there has been one constant, one unshakeable truth: she would be first and last in the eyes and heart of her lover, and he in hers. She would not be the whole of his world, no; therein lay the path to miserable obsession, but she would be the queen of it, and he her king, and she would brook no rival for his passionate affections. No children, no lovers for whom he pined when the night drew down and she slept unknowing beside him.

Now she finds herself sharing a bed with a man full of ghosts he will not or cannot name, and who pursues a mistresses she cannot see and with whom she cannot compete. How the Calliope of sixteen, young and righteous and arrogant, would rail if she knew, but the woman she has become only laughs and shakes her head and steps into this unforeseen bend in the road without hesitation, because this is the way of it, and she is no longer a child.

And then there are the children, the apples of Richard's eye. That he adores his daughter is clear; as far as he is concerned, Khira Li is the source from whence all light comes, and he would shod her feet in silk and starlight if she bade it. It is the way of love and biology, she supposes. He has unmade himself to create her, and blood calls to blood. She cannot fault him for his paternal instincts; that fearless, atavistic loyalty burns in her blood as well, binds her to her brothers and sisters, and to her parents, who love her with that same unquestioning devotion. But she cannot deny a pang of unease when she considers what it might mean to love a man with such divided loyalties. If asked to choose between blood and the intangible hope of love, a father will always choose blood, because that is what a father does.

There is Merlin, too, but about him she is less certain. Richard loves him, yes, but the love between them is different, darker and bitterer and fraught with a tension she feels but cannot place. Richard seldom mentions him, and when he does, it is brusque, as though he were speaking through a suddenly-remembered pain. It is the way her father speaks of Ciaran, that belated wisp of smoke after the fire of his other children Perhaps it is the simple friction of like encountering like, of seeing yourself reflected in a younger face, or perhaps it is a matter best left to fathers and sons, the inevitable result of too much testosterone and too much disappointment.

It hardly matters, she decides as she stretches her arms across the bed until her fingertips are a hairsbreadth from the Richard-shaped lump beneath the covers. What matters is that she will never be the stephania regnat of this kingdom. It existed long before her, and it will likely exist long after she is but a fond memory. The lion's share of his devotion will never belong to her, no matter how sweet his kisses or ardent his embrace. It is not a position in which she ever expected to find herself, a leftover woman who must fit herself into the spaces that remain, and it is not one she is sure she can abide.

Logic dictates that she quit the dance before her feet become too familiar with its rhythms and her body learns his touch too intimately. It would be safer to finish this trip and thank him for the wonderful time and leave him with sweet dreams and an offer of friendship that she would gladly honor, more responsible.

But lying in his bed with the bedclothes snug around her ass, she realizes that she doesn't give a damn for responsibility, for logic. Logic has left her nothing but alone, respected but loveless, warming herself by the vicarious passion leached from Gothics and bodice-rippers on Friday nights. Richard is solid and real, a real touch in the night, and if she leaves now, she will never know his sweetness again, never hear that vibrant laughter that seeps into her bones like clove honey and warms her from the inside out. She will never see those green eyes dancing with merriment or dark with lust, never hear German wielded like dark magic on his tongue. She will lose the right to these moments with the closing of his door, and the loss of them would make her ache.

Yes, this dance could end in ashes and dust on a shattered dance floor, but she won't know unless she sees it through, and she has never gotten anywhere by being a coward.

So she stretches her fingers until they slip beneath the blanket to graze his ribs.