Incubus

Britt awoke in the morning, muzzy-headed from last night's wine and more than a little disquieted by the dim recollection of a strange dream. Her sheets were a twisted mess and damp from sweat and something she was reluctant to investigate. An inexplicable post-coital funk hung in the air. She found herself naked and her nightie lay in a heap in the corner. She never slept naked. Must have been some dream, she thought.

She stood gingerly. Her head pounded dully and several nameless muscles in her abdomen and legs ached.

She padded to the bathroom and left the light off, not wanting to set off what was now only a low grade hangover.

What did I do to myself? she wondered. Her nether regions were chafed and sore, despite having been kept far from her boyfriend's hopeful overtures and groping fingers. Britt had begged off last night, stubbornly declining to go to Mike's place and steadfastly refusing to issue the expected reciprocal invitation. She was tired, perhaps a more than a little drunk, and not interested in yet another clumsy and inadvertent quickie that left him apologetic and prematurely wrung out and her wondering if that was all there was.

She stood before the mirror. Weak morning light trickled into the bathroom from between the slats of the venetian blind. A stray beam glinted off something brilliant and metallic at the center of her right breast. She'd left her glasses on the nightstand and had to lean forward and squint. Her head pounded.

It was a nipple ring.

She stared dumbly at its reflection. As though expecting a different result, she looked down.

Her nipple looked otherwise normal, if a little distended by the thick gauge of metal that ran through it. Gold, she noted absently. There was no sign of a wound and no apparent tenderness. It was as though the ring had been there forever, though it hadn't been there when she had gone to bed the night before. Of that she was sure.

She fingered the ring. It was thick and heavy and completely round. She could discern a design etched lightly on its surface. There were no ends, so she could not make out how the ring would have been inserted. Or, for that matter, how to get it off. She tugged at it gently to ensure that the nipple was indeed pierced. It was.

She lifted her breast in a cupped hand and squinted a little more. There. She could see it now. The ring was adorned with two little nubs. They looked something like horns.

At that moment, the dream that was suddenly more that a dream came rushing back to her.

"Oh God," she whispered, and sat heavily on the edge of the bathtub.

She woke in the dark to an immense weight pressing onto her, just below her breasts. She'd been dreaming of the witticisms she'd failed to articulate in time at the party. The clever retorts. The snappy ripostes. She knew she was beautiful and smart, but in her dream she was beautiful and smart and witty.

It was a moan that woke her. Hers, she guessed. The weight felt like it would crush her ribcage. It was difficult to breathe.

She opened one eye.

"It's about time."

There was what appeared to be a half-naked man straddling her, barely discernible in the streetlight that filtered feebly through the blinds.

"Wake up, princess." The voice was deep and mellifluous, like Barry White's.

She opened the other eye.

"That's better."

She thought, This had better be a dream...

"This is no dream, princess."

If this was no dream -- and it didn't feel like she was sleeping any more -- then there really was a half-naked man with a Barry White voice sitting on her.

She opened her mouth to scream and a large hand covered her mouth and pressed her head into the pillow.

"You don't want to do that."

She did want to do that. Scream like a banshee. Bite his hand. Fight tooth and nail, for there was no good reason for the presence of a stranger in her bedroom in the middle of the night.

"I'm not going to rape you, if that's what you're afraid of," said the figure. "It would be unseemly."

Unseemly? thought Britt. Who but old movie stars talk like that?

"Besides, incubi don't do that sort of thing. We don't need to."

If a large madman hadn't been sitting on her in a dark room, if she hadn't been completely naked (whatever happened to my nightie? she wondered), and if she hadn't been inexplicably aroused, she might have laughed.

As it was, she again opened her mouth to scream, with the same result as before.

"Before you go making a racket that will irritate me and embarrass you when you wake up your neighbors for no good reason, let me tell you something. You summoned me."

This time, Britt did laugh. A bitter, muffled snort.

The incubus lifted his hand.

"No screaming?"

Britt shook her head.

The incubus, if that's what he was, removed his hand entirely and allowed his fingertips to brush lightly against her breast, leaving a tingling wake that caused goose pimples to rise and her nipple to harden.

Her breath caught. I'm still drunk, she thought. Perhaps I'm hallucinating. A sober woman would be afraid. A sober woman would be fighting. A sober woman would not be focussed on a tingling nipple.

Perhaps if she kept him talking, he wouldn't hurt her. "I didn't summon you," she said.

The incubus smiled. "Not in so many words. But you did fall asleep thinking of how unsatisfied you are with Mike. Of his inadequacy. Of how you deserve better. Of how desperately hungry you are."

How did he know of Mike? Was this some kind of joke? A test? Was Mike perhaps behind this?

A surge of anger sobered her a little.

The incubus lifted himself slightly, allowing Britt to completely fill her lungs. Now if she had to scream, she'd be able to make a real go of it. When he lowered himself again, something fell with a fleshy slap in the cleft between her breasts. It was his penis. Britt could feel its weight and an odd prickling coolness where it lay.

Mike had to be behind this. Perhaps he was upset at her. If he thought he was going to frighten her, have a laugh at her expense, he had another thing coming.

Without thinking, she traced the length of his penis with her fingernail. "That's it? You must be a starter-demon, then."

She smiled to herself. Finally, something witty, if several hours too late and wholly inappropriate, given what her company purported to be.

The incubus laughed, a deep-throated and unearthly rumble. "You're something else."

The statement appeared to trigger something, for the incubus fell silent and immobile for several moments. Abruptly, he bent over and smelled her. Her hair, her neck, her breath. He sat up again and an orange flame bloomed from the palm of his hand. It flickered coldly in unseen air currents.

The apparition that greeted Britt took her breath away. The incubus had dark, wavy hair with the first flecks of grey at the temples. A pair of short horns glinting like polished ebony from his skull, almost lost amid his locks. His face consisted of hard planes and firm angles, but was nonetheless handsome in a weathered, rugged way. Piercing blue eyes studied her. If the flame burned his hand, his eyes betrayed nothing.

Her gaze lowered to the broad shoulders and chest, the corded muscles of the arms, and horizontal bands of his lean abdomen. Peering lower, her eyes finally lit on the area between her breasts where his manhood nestled, large, blue-veined, and emanating an unearthly cold. Britt shivered.

At the same time, the incubus studied her. Whereas Britt's eyes roved shamelessly over his body, his gaze never left her eyes. He studied her intently. When their eyes finally locked, she felt both exposed penetrated, a violation surely more personal than any rape.

"You are something else," he said again. This time, no humor tempered the statement. He was clearly perplexed.

The flame extinguished as quickly as it had appeared. They were plunged once again into semi-darkness.

"What does that mean? 'Something else'?" asked Britt, her voice quavering. This was obviously no joke, no test.

"I won't do what you summoned me for. But perhaps..."

Britt felt disappointed despite her lack of understanding.

In a fluid motion, the incubus rose and repositioned himself between her legs. Deft fingers traced a line down from her creamy breasts to the well of her abdomen, periodically looping off as though performing some erotic calligraphy.

The electricity of the sensation stilled Britt's tongue and calmed her agitated mind.

The touch divided at the rise of her pubic bone and continued down the outside of her long and toned legs. At the ankles, his fingers crossed to the insides of her legs, ascending deliberately past the calves to the tender flesh of her inner thighs. Britt squirmed.

The incubus adjusted himself once more. Britt could feel his hair of his head brushing the insides of her thighs. With the tip of his tongue, feather-light but hot, he explored the folds of her labia. She gasped.

He gently pressed the flesh of her labia between his lips, pulling gently, running his tongue back and forth across the tender surface. Placing his hands beneath her thighs, he lifted her legs slightly and thrust his tongue deeply into her, more deeply than she would have thought possible, exploring and tasting, unleashing sensations previously only dreamed about. He slowly extracted his tongue and drew it up to tease the clitoris out of its nest.

With his tongue pressing the pink pearl of her clitoris, he buried a finger within her folds, gently hooking it and pressing upward. He then moved his tongue in a languorous circle, and the finger within mirrored its path.

Britt's breathing quickened and a warm, electric glow emanated from the area, quickly suffusing her entire being and banishing any notion of protest.

He inserted a second finger, collecting the natural lubrication that now flowed. Finger anointed, he removed it and pressed it against her anus. Britt's breath caught. Surprise, perhaps. He stopped, listened, but Britt's breathing resumed its previous ragged rhythm.

While his tongue toyed with the clitoris, one finger explored the inner geography of her glistening cunt and another slipped shallowly in and out of her ass. Britt's hands swept over incubus's head. Trembling fingers grasped the two nubs of horn. She used them to pull him savagely into her.

His rhythm quickened by patient degrees, matched by the rate of her breathing.

His tongue and fingers teased and cajoled the flesh, denying it when it would surrender too soon, enflaming it when the heat ebbed.

Unable to resist any longer, Britt erupted, back arching, bearing down hard on his hand, forcing his fingers deep into her cunt and ass. She gave a strangled cry and spread her legs wide, affording him a better taste of that which he had worked hard to release.

She was not quickly spent. Her release intensified and crashed anew under his attention. The subtlest flick of the tongue or pressure of his fingers would launch a new, previously uncharted crescendo.

"Please stop," she whimpered.

When it appeared that Britt was spent, he violently pushed her legs to her chest, exposing the glistening folds of her cunt, engorged with blood and electric with sensation. He hungrily thrust his tongue into her slick warmth, savoring Britt's flavor. Her core thrilled.

They lay like that until Britt's tremors ceased.

"That was unbelievable," she whispered huskily. "You are unbelievable." She reached for his cock.

He gently pushed her hand away. "As much as I would love to, I won't."

Not having him was not an option. Britt hungered.

"Not tonight," he continued. "But you will allow me something."

"What," she whispered.

Without a word, he lowered his head to her right breast and drew her nipple into his mouth. Britt moaned. She felt a slight pressure and then indescribable pain.

Then she remembered no more.

Britt opened her eyes again and gazed at the ring. It hadn't been a dream. Her heart fluttered in her chest, ensnared by both fear and longing. An incubus, it seemed, had claimed her.