Spray of Hearts

Heather was no longer the woman I had just painted the town with. She'd become a creature of unknown origin with instincts unfamiliar and movements I could neither define nor predict.

The pretty spray of tiny red hearts I'd idly doodled all over her lightly freckled forearms – in the bar over the course of the long liquor-soaked evening – were now innate markings unique to her nameless kind. The relaxed conversation and getting-to-know-you chitchat that spanned the last five-and-a-half hours, now – a distant memory of someone else – another place and time.

I experienced a change too.

My cock was no longer my own. It was absorbed, assimilated, lost to her dominion. For one head-spinning moment, I feared I might never see it again. Just as quickly, I knew I didn't care.

I was afraid to touch her. I was afraid to break this eerily delicious spell.

I relinquished my pink slip – mentally handing this heart-spotted vixen the keys to my pleasure – knowing full well she held them already.

She possessed them the instant she'd dropped to her knees before me. She melted me to malleable man meat the moment she looked up at me, licked her shimmering pink lips and smiled wickedly.

"Let's test out that cinnamon hearts theory, shall we?'

* * *

We'd been playing with them as much as eating them – the candy hearts. As we chatted, we puddled the hard little bits in the many spills from our many drinks. Four cocktails in, we were absentmindedly giving one another tiny cinnamon-flavored tattoos with the redder-than-red dye that bled freely over the white Formica tabletop. I used the toothpicks. She used the narrow spike of polished nail on the end of her right pinky.

I thought I'd overstepped the bounds of appropriateness when I raised the rumored pleasure enhancing properties of the candy.

This wasn't even a date.

Heather and myself, each alone and unaware of any significant calendar alert, found ourselves unable to gain entry to what (we would later discover) was our mutual favorite restaurant. Couples had booked weeks in advance. They weren't about to set one table for one, let alone two of them. I overheard Heather's awkward exchange with the hostess as I arrived. She was as stunned and annoyed as I to learn it was February 14th. To my delight, she was quite vocal about her thoughts on the unwelcome disruption to her own plans for the evening.

I was grateful she'd saved me enduring the embarrassment in asking for my usual table for one, but more grateful still when she turned – red-faced, infuriated, but heartbreakingly gorgeous – fumbling to light a cigarette as she slinked past me toward the door. I followed her out, masking the true reason for my prompt pursuit by asking to bum a smoke, but I quickly admitted to the eavesdropping and to having made the exact same error.

We laughed at ourselves. We commiserated by mercilessly bashing the whole Valentines Day notion together. The warmth and release we both found in our instant connection – our union of dejected singles foolishly attempting to dine out alone on such a night – quashed our hunger and pulled us to the nearest watering hole.

Though it was a spot guaranteed not to appeal to celebrating couples, we were shamed once again by the complimentary cinnamon hearts that glinted at us accusingly from a tall glass vessel in the center of our table.

We teased our waiter about it. The nerve of a dive like this, decorating for such sentimental claptrap when their patrons were so obviously alone, lonely and disinterested. United in our cynicism, we looked down on the little folk with their romantic ideals and their unrealistic expectations and we raised ourselves to a higher plain.

That's when our twisted torture tests began.

Our gin and tonics proved the perfect medium for bleeding those condescending little red fuckers. We both gleaned an unhealthy perverse pleasure from it. We took turns drowning them in our drinks, seeing how many hearts we could suck the life out of at one time, and showing off our freakishly stained tongues to one another.

She dyed my lips with their expended juices. I let her.

Conversation flowed as easily as the too-stiff drinks and the too-red dye. Even when I found myself lingering too long in perfecting the shape of each tiny heart I adorned her with – marveling at the softness of her skin – or each time my eyes dallied in admiring the shape of her lips as she spoke, I never felt the uneasiness I so often do on an actual date.

Heather had a bitingly cynical sense of humor that kept me in stitches. I, myself, seemed wittier than I thought possible in the midst of such strong – and ever growing – attraction. Everything I said was met by enthusiastic agreement. Everything she said blew my mind.

I grew thankful for the combative effects the liquor was having on my prick, though my body wrestled against it every time I looked at her mouth.

Time flew.

We were both stunned when the bar staff began stacking the unoccupied chairs, preparing for closing.

Through a haze of laughter and a thick cloud of gin, Heather and I stumbled back out into the street – five weird and wonderful hours after our chance encounter. We swayed arm-in-arm (half dragging one another along, half holding one another up) to a gated lot – the large ominous doorway to which seemed to appear from out of nowhere.

The benign banter ceased on the other side of that secret portal.

The lights from surrounding buildings cast a strange blue glow. Heather's ice-blue eyes seemed to be lit from within. She stared hard into mine as the pending transformation beckoned from beyond my knowledge or understanding.

She raised an eyebrow, filled her lungs with cool night air and stretched her long pretty neck. Then she dropped out of sight, leaving me blinking dumb-founded into the nothingness before me.

I felt the gentle tug at my zipper before my mind had processed her whereabouts. My mouth opened, but words failed me. Only the unexpected breeze told me my jeans were around my knees. Now I cursed the effects of the gin I had thanked earlier. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and conjured up the vision of her mouth. I needn't have worried. Her words broke through the haze to recall my slip in conversation, the reference I felt sure had gone too far since she hadn't acknowledged hearing it.

"Let's test out that cinnamon hearts theory, shall we?"

Blood proved thicker than gin and I stiffened against her breath.

Heather pressed her pale pink nails into the back of my thighs. Without hesitation or exploration, her beautiful mouth engulfed me. I felt the heat from my knees to my ribcage. I about lost my balance – too much sensation, too fast. Unexpected. Indescribable.

Amazing.

I've never been held so wholly inside a woman's throat. It neared unnatural, bordered on alarming, but wrapped me in such exquisite warmth and vibrating pressure I could not imagine ever wishing to be released.

Wild eyes flashed up at me, wet and shining with the unknown thoughts behind them. I could feel the soft pull of her tongue along the bottom of my mislaid organ, the brush of her yielding lips at its base, the gentle rhythmic suck as she swallowed.

Whether the tingling candy contributed any enhancement or not, was the furthest query from my mind. I could not believe I was inside that mouth – the one that had challenged the hostess, sucked gin through a straw, engaged me in five riveting hours of titillating repartee, blew perfect smoke rings, stole the hue from a cinnamon heart with one expert roll of the tongue, summoned my eyes back to it's soft pink wetness again and again – no matter how hard I fought against it.

The impossible heat that held me so completely gave way to a sudden rush of cool air, just in time to quell the growing threat of my cutting this far too short. I gasped. Dizzy, I had trouble adjusting my eyes to see her in the strange light. The sudden chill was as painful as it was pleasurable. The trace tingle of the simulated cinnamon did not escape my attention now. The cool night air brought it to life. My back arched as I thrust into the sharp foreign sensation.

Warmth returned again as I felt Heather's long fingers wrap tightly around my sopping cock. My sight followed. I watched as she pulled upwards, nuzzled in beneath and caught my left ball in the sultry dampness of her open mouth. Her wide eyes fixed on me, boring into mine, telling me sordid exotic tales from places that don't exist and challenging me to impossible quests in a language I could never hope to comprehend.

Heather's hand squeezed gently in time with the rhythm of each slow ardent suck, while I fought reflex – desperate to keep my eyes from closing on the magnificent sight of the glowing patterned nymph at my feet.

I felt the committed suck slide from my throbbing ball up the length of my shaft, as her hand languished reluctantly out of the way.

I remember the deliberate pause – excruciating emphasis – before the flicker of hot wet tongue against the tightly stretched skin just beneath the head of my cock, before her unimaginable warmth enveloped me again. I remember hearing and feeling her moan as I slid once more into the exquisite clutch of her hugging throat. I remember wanting to hear her voice in my ear as I ran my hands up over my own forearms, their own spray of tiny red hearts flashing back at me with unintelligible missives for my overloaded brain. I remember aching to touch her, though my hands seemed to slip right through her shoulders without resistance. I remember pouring into her all I could not voice or understand. I remember calling out her name, hearing it echo back to me, calling out again. I remember forgetting to breathe. I remember feeling something my cynicism had no word for.

* * *

I awoke in a soggy puddle of bleeding hearts.

It took me three days to expunge the dye from my skin.

Maybe it's not quite what the makers of those potent little confections had in mind – nor was it likely the vision of the card companies who invented this questionable occasion in the first place – but I've never made a cynical crack about Valentines Day since.

I even treat myself to a packet of cinnamon hearts when February rolls around, but I never saw Heather again.

Part of me is not entirely sure she ever existed. Part of me thinks she was conjured up too. I just haven't quite worked out how the greeting card companies are benefiting from it.