Feeling that her attention was demanded again, she turned away from the window where she had been gazing at the the luxuriant foliage and compelling autumnal garb of the parklands that stretched out to the forests in the distance below the grey flinty stone of the castle - the chateau of MiLord.
Further off, narrowing her eyes against the brilliance of the spring sun, she could see the bustling town below the castle. Beyond the harbour, the sails of ships flapped as they lost the wind when they entered the bay. Idly, she wondered where they came from and what they were carrying into the busy harbour port.
The noise swelled in her mind, as she felt herself enticed into the rushing world out there. The piercing cries of seagulls would have interrupted her thoughts if she could have heard them, but even given this handicap their raucous cries seemed to connect to her very thoughts. Gradually, she caught onto the music of movement and the rhythm of the pace of life flowing beneath the castle walls.
After a moment's hesitation, she left her window-seat perch determinedlyand walked across the room. Allowing her hand to rest on the cool brass of the door handle for a bare moment, she trod lightly into the darkness of the corridor. Her eyes blinked rapidly to accustom themselves to the blackness, exchanging light and refreshing breezes from the gardens for the exotic darkness of a short journey to satiate that demand. Reinforced by her memory of the light, she tripped lightly down the darkened corridor on tiptoe. She wanted to surprise him at his slumbers. Needing to pamper and satisfy his expectations, she allowed her features to indulge in a smile. The flickering glimmer of happiness wavered in the torch light.
Silence was of the essence, yet to her irritation, each varnished wooden board seemed to have a special squeak reserved just for this morning. At every step, the old floorboards groaned out. Just the creak of an old floor or more? Could it have been a response to her waxing desire or a warning call to alert him to her presence? She certainly expected him to emerge from one of the rooms along the corridor. Shaking her head, she reminded herself that she was not living in a disney world. No living petulant furniture and fittings here.
There were phantoms though. She was sure of it. Ghosts who watched developments from times past. Ethereal creatures that allowed one of the thick mahogany doors swing slowly open. It took a certain strength of character to resist their unspoken blandishments and to she shake her long tresses denying their summons within. Holding steady though listening to the key words in the mantra that he had chanted to her at their last exchange. She was glad that he remained secluded and hidden from her for now, giving her the opportunity to come to him. Letting a flood of anticipation wash over her, she wondered out loud: "Will he think less of me, since I've been so self absorbed for so long?"
The answers dripped slowly down the walls. She nodded and knew that the reply given was intimately linked to the often distant man who, by his presence and, paradoxically, in his absence, coaxed desire from her. Taking hold of him had been dreamlike, the realisation of a fantasy. There had been an unseen hand wrapped around her wrist. She would have been powerless to resist no matter what her reaction. Her lack of resistance still left her numb. Yet, she giggled to herself, she had taken all that had been offered eagerly. She had encountered something that she could only compare to hunger, but it was an appetite that had never asserted itself before. It ground into her essence with real force now.
The door to his chambers loomed ahead in the dim hall. She paused on the threshold. A dusty skylight illuminated both the cobwebs and her presence. It left her form bathed in a pool of sunlight, a light that eclipsed the torches that stretched back over her shoulder into the distant shadows. She had walked those shadows.
Barefoot and fearless and now, startled by the sudden light, she nearly ran the last ten steps to the heavy door in front of her. She reached down to open it quietly and stepped inside, letting her hand linger uncertainly on the handle for an instant. This distinct moment would enable him to perceive that she retained her independence, had he cared to observe.
He was slumped in the same chair that she had left him in the previous night, reading a dusty manuscript - a concerto perhaps dotted with conflicting notes. He saw her enter and he put the music back on the stand close to his chair, without a word. Motes of dust rose thickly and then settled. She felt a tremor in the air, a trembling within the fabric of the chateau. His sinews seemed to stiffen as he settled back into the cushions to anticipate her feline approach. He was surprised to find himself rewarded as she padded across the room, most unexpectedly and perhaps too eagerly. He kept his feelings to himself though. there had been too many false dawns.
She found herself at the side of his chair, wanting to reach out to him, touch him, run her hands over his face, his chest, his body and his persona. She wanted to feel him beneath her fingers, wanted to stroke his velvet surfaces, those totems of his presence around which her scattered desires could coalesce. She hesitated, uncertain just how to proceed. It had been so long. It was almost as though her sensuality had taken a life of its own, one she could have shared once but which she had lost control of now. She needed to allow him a certain prerogative - both as a licentious guardian and a purveyor of her needs. Those needs drove her on now, commanded her, generated her every move. All her thoughts were focused on the unspoken requirement to luxuriate with him in remembered pleasures.
She sat down there on the little footstool in the middle of the wooden floor, looking at him. Her curly hair hung unbraided and slightly dishevelled, but still her eyes bored into him, burning a hole into the darkest recesses of his mind. He could hardly bear to look at her now and stared down at grain of the wood. Even this seemed to draw him inexorably along the grain of the wood towards her sultry form. Her foot peeked fetchingly from under the hem of the long embroidered red skirt. Despite her obvious ennuie, she smiled up at him, clinging to the lute in her hand as if it were the last of a very few possessions. It was in fact the most precious musical instrument in the fine collection of tambours, harps and pipes that he had gathered there over time.
The music room of the chateau had been a source of pride to them both. He loved the beauty of each instrument in itself, while she loved the sounds that each could generate. When she was fully composed she often designed such intricate tunes that he felt she wanted to strum a thousand heartbeats to set the feet skipping in a dance to end all sorrows. He was ready, and, from all outward appearances, willing to allow her to let her emotions hold sway. She knelt on a silk cushion in front of him and looked up towards his features, taking in all the evidence that she required of his arousal and willingness to play.
"I don't know what or where I am," she complained. "I've wanted to get my hands on those feelings again for so long."
He could recollect her complaining once before, straying among the musicians at the last feast. he had observed her watching the strumming of each mandolin excitedly, swaying to the rhythmic beating of the drums and shaking her hips to the rattle of tambourines. There she had been in the very centre of things, an eye of calm at the centre of a storm of limbs swirling furiously around the dance floor. A whole new side to her character had been revealed as the music rose to a crescendo before dying away, leaving breathless dancers in its wake.
"Do we perhaps have an inkling of what that feeling was or where it might have actually wandered?" he teased.
He let the words hang in the air remembering how, as the smattering of applause died away to sighs of murmured appreciation, she had fallen to the floor clutching at her ears. The blood had drained from her already pale features. She knelt there sobbing in the silence as the once happy dancing crowd parted around her. Trying to mitigate the obvious distress that she was suffering, he had taken her clutching hands in his. Brushing the damp hair back caressingly, he had looked at the side of her head, . He was forced to suppress a cry of anxiety, when he saw the trickle of blood flowing from her ears. Hurriedly, he had summoned attendants to bath her wounds, fearing for her crouching in the middle of the floor, looking wretched, withdrawn and frightened.
"I haven't been able to think properly for so long. This lack of orientation has been completely unbearable," she admitted. Her hearing had recovered gradually, over the long days following that night of over-excitement, but she seemed to have lost the love of movement, feeling dizzy most of the time. The passion for music that had practically been her sole reason for living had fled, who knows where. She had adored everything about dancing, but now deprived of the sensory enticement of music, she seemed to chaff and fret endlessly, seeking out quiet corners, whenever the fiddles tuned on a feast day.
"You are hardly forthright or outspoken in your quest until this morning," he chided her gently. Her silent staring into the distance and more worryingly into the darkest corners of her psyche, gnawed at his heart. He knew so well that she would find no respite there. She would turn away from him when he joined her at her favourite point in this music room, just beneath the crenellated towers.
She blushed. At the same time, she sensed the excitement. A slow mounting flicker burned in the pit of her stomach. She pictured the torches that had flamed in the corridor to illuminate her smile. She smiled again, letting her head fall back and her hair slide over her shoulder. She brushed a stray strand back from her forehead nervously . His hand reached across to touch the pale skin of her arched neck, realising that something had changed at last.
She felt slippery with perspiration under the bodice that she had carefully selected that morning. Tactile fingers had descended to that same bodice many times before to play with the lace. She tried to envision exactly how he used to lean forward and unbutton her. Each time his hands had moved from one button to the next and the material there fell open, he had let his fingers dart feather-like over the newly exposed flesh.
Her imagination had always been captured before the straps of her bodice slipped down, leaving the tops of her breasts exposed. The dark material that she preferred contrasted to the pale flesh slipping from the confining garment only to be restrained again within his cupping hands. The garment usually slipped to the floor unheeded as she stared into the magnetic green eyes that hovered just above her, their brilliance whirling in her face. The firm palms had pressed the soft mounds so often, it made her shiver. This moulding of the gentle curves to the shape of his desires. Then, narrowing his fingertips to the point, he liked to massage gently, rubbing the flesh between his fingers, pressing and pinching them to a deep crimson. And she had burnt, all through her body, she had burnt until, eventually, the heat became so fierce that she could not take it any longer.
"You know what I want. Please!"
"Do I really? What's that? What do you want?" he had mocked her desires then. would he do so now?
"What do you think I want?" She used to whisper with an angry urgency that left the implicit meaning of her words quite evident and she murmured the same words again now. He could hardly hear her, but he took her hand and asked her to repeat herself - begged her even.
"A question with a question, how deliciously ambiguous," he laughed soto-voce once again and the warmth in his slightly sardonic approach was once again apparent to her even before he recommenced his teasing play. She looked up at him now and felt the room slowly begin to fall back into place. The impressionist's rendering of dysfunctional colours and shapes was back.
Objects had been brought into focus again from a distant perspective. It was astonishing the way each item fell into its exact place in the continuum of her pleasure. Her mind assembled random constructs and deposited their restructured forms in the mosaic that was now her world. His influence filtered out the constraints of daily life. It allowed her to admit far more entrenched instinctive urges and primal drives to return to him once more and to give him the attention demanded.
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