I did what he asked because why not? I wanted him, naked and hard and on top of me. My breath caught as the scratchy fabric slid over my body and away, landing in a heap on the floor beside the tub.
Reece stared down at me, his face a wild mask of gold and black, and then he stepped away, heeling the door shut and pressing his fingertips to the wall. Sigils, runes, whatever they were, flared to life all across the faded, splintered wood walls, a match to the ones burning to life on the floor beneath the biker's feet.
I watched him carefully, shivering as I sat naked and bruised inside a tub in a strange shack in the middle of the bayou. Have I really never been here before? I wondered as Reece approached me again, shrugging out of his leather vest and setting it aside with a sort of reverence that intrigued me.
All that care … for a piece of clothing?
Surely there was more to it than that.
“Let's put that glamour back in place, girl,” he told me as I blinked heavy lids and touched my hands to my breasts. Whatever Reece had done to me with his magic, they now felt heavy and sore, desperate to be touched.
I wet my lips again, but I couldn't make myself talk. I wanted to, but my battered throat just wouldn't obey my commands.
Instead, I watched as Reece turned on the rusted old tap and grinned as I shrunk back from the cold water. As it swirled down the drain, I drew my knees up and lifted my face to the small square window across from me, out at a night as dark as pitch and trees dripping with Spanish moss and secrets.
Where am I? I wondered because although I remembered that this was a bayou, a swamp, I couldn't remember what state or province I was in, what country even … what world. Because I knew instinctively that things were not always what they seemed …
“There ya go,” Reece said as the water began to steam and he leaned in to plug up the tub. “We'll get ya all warmed up dere.” He sat back on his haunches and watched me with eyes like the turning leaves of autumn, a warm brown color that said they'd just recently bid their goodbyes to the trees. “You smell somethin' awful, you know dat, you?”
Reece stood up once again and moved to a large cabinet in the corner, opening up the doors and selecting several glass bottles. When he made his way back over and started popping the corked tops, the air was perfumed with the sweet scent of flowers and growing things.
Petals drifted into the bathwater and turned it a cheery pink color. It felt good, that heated water swirling against my damaged skin, but it wasn't enough. It didn't satisfy these new needs that Reece had heaped on me.
“You're one of da gentry that's for sure, yeah?” he asked me, mixing several more ingredients in the water—dried leaves, bits of dirt, ground spices that smelled like cloves, and sweet-scented liquids. “But what exactly you are, I can't even begin ta guess.”
Reece reached out toward me, running a single finger along a ridge that bordered my spine, teasing rough, ragged flesh that I hadn't even known was there. Glancing over my shoulder, I couldn't even see the awful scar he traced.
“Plucking da wings off a butterfly,” he murmured, his eyes going sad and dark for a moment before he flicked them back to me and grinned, slow and sharp, like a gator. A gator. See, I knew what a gator was. “You ready, girl?” he asked, and then, with the last bottle set aside, Reece knelt next to the tub on his denim-clad knees, using one hand to grip my hair and tug my head back. The other, he slipped beneath the colored waters and between my thighs.
My breath escaped in a sharp gasp as he played along that aching, desperate part of me with two careful fingers, teasing the swollen flesh with sure strokes. His right hand kept me anchored as he leaned in and took my mouth, igniting all of that lust inside of me, like fireworks freshly lit. The matches burned, the fuses smoldered, and I was nothing but an explosion of feeling.
A moan creaked past my lips, brushed against Reece's as he chuckled and teased me some more, running a pair of fingertips from my clit down to my ass and back again.
“Whatever you are,” he whispered as I bit his lower lip on impulse, “you taste like magic.”
Reece thrust his fingers into my opening and oh, it was … it was exquisite, like coming home after a long trip. I was tight, almost painfully so, but the lust he'd fired up in me needed to be slaked, satisfied.
Our tongues slid along one another's as the runes flared on the floor, the ceiling, the walls, across the glass panes of the single window. Reece hooked his fingers inside of me, teased my inner walls while his thumb brushed the painfully hard nub of my clit.
Cracking my lids just a bit, I lifted a hand up to Reece's face and touched wet fingers to his skin. The pale blue color of my flesh shifted, warming into a peachy-pink, like sunshine over rose petals. And as my own appearance morphed and changed, so did his.
The gold of his skin faded away, the redness of his hair dimmed.
Glamour.
The old faerie word for a magic skin, one that sealed the wearer's true form away from the world.
I remembered that now.
Rubbing my cheek along Reece's stubbled one, I dug the fingers of my left hand into the fabric of his t-shirt and scraped my nails down the side of his throat with the other. The gruff stranger worked me into a frenzy with his hand, fanning the flames in my lower belly until they took over everything, igniting me in a sudden blaze that wracked my body and brought a small scream from my throat.
“Oh,” I whispered as I shivered in the wake of the orgasm, trembling and blinking through the haze. “Oh.”
“Oh?” Reece asked, giving me one last flick of his fingers before pulling away. “Not bad for a first word, eh, girl?”
I stared at him, glancing down at my naked body, fresh and pink, all of my scars and bruises gone from sight. I could feel them, but I couldn't see them—not anymore.
Hmm.
Reece was right—not bad for a first word, not bad at all.
Loud male voices made me tense and jump as I cautiously padded my way back down from the bathroom.
After Reece had resorted my glamour, and reawakened my body, he'd left me to get cleaned up on my own. At first I'd been a bit offended that he hadn't wanted to stay, but the lust quickly melted from me in his absence and I was able to enjoy the warm water in peace.
Reece was right: I did smell awful.
He'd left me with several bottles of floral scented products on the side of the tub so I took my time testing them all out and ended up washing my hair three times. Wherever I had been, shampoo must not have been available … I needed to use almost half the bottle of conditioner and let it sit for a few minutes so I could comb through the tangles, too. Despite the glamour giving my hair the appearance of being healthy and soft, I could feel its true condition.