You don’t even know what you want. Not yet.He chuckled, and took his hand away.
Please, please, she was groaning as she woke up, her orgasm denied just at the last minute. In desperation, she had ground her hips against a pillow while touching herself, moaning into her bedcovers as her orgasm had come, finally. Yet, again, she had felt denied of the real ecstasy that was Finn: the smell of his skin, like sea salt and honey. The touch of him, and his voice in her ear.
There had been other dreams, one every night, in which their bodies had entwined, in which she had felt that same delight in submitting to him, in which he had held her, positioned her, licked her, kissed her, touched her and fucked her, and each time, her orgasm had been denied, inside the dream. Each time, she had had to wake up and pleasure herself, which was a poorsubstitute. It had left Faye yearning for Finn. Craving him. And she knew that it was totally unhinged and unreasonable to do so.
For Faye, the prospect of seeing Finn Beatha again was intoxicating.
Every one of her nerves tingled to be in the same room as him, even though he wouldn’t know she was there. As far as Finn knew, he was just playing a gig with his band. He had no idea that Faye had developed some kind of strange, obsessively sexual crush on him. Yet, Faye wondered…the dreams had been so intense, so real…it was as if she had managed to connect with Finn in the astral realm – the world of dreams, magic and imagination.
She knew it was possible to connect with others in the dream world; she had been raised a witch, by witches, after all.
But it had never happened to her before.
Was that what had been happening? She didn’t know.
‘Nobody knows much about any of them,’ Aisha shouted as she swayed to the background music that was coming from the speakers. ‘Just that they do these amazing gigs. The one I went to before was like an out-of-body experience. I’m not even kidding, Faye. It was like a religious thing.’
Faye had not told Aisha about Finn coming into the shop. Something in her had been compelled to jealously guard that information. It was her secret, though she didn’t know why she felt that way. It was almost as if something outside of her was compelling her not to say anything: to keep silent. Plus, the strange dreams that had starred him had shaken her. It was an oddly intense connection, and she almost felt embarrassed to be in the same room as him now. Even though he had no idea: her dreams were hers, and hers alone.Weren’t they?
Faye had noticed that some of the guys in the bar were staring at her; one or two smiled. She looked away. She wasn’t used to the attention – not because she wasn’t abeautiful woman, but because she lived such a hermit-like life in Abercolme. Tending her garden. Working in the shop. Meditating alone on the beach.
Perhaps the dreams had somehow opened her up to a new energy that she was embodying, because the men at the bar didn’t seem to be able to keep their eyes off her. But though she was uneasy with the attention, at the same time it awoke a similar sensation in her body as her dreams of Finn had: her lips felt fuller, her body tingled with pleasure as if she could feel the men touching her, adoring her. She had a sudden flash of an image in her mind’s eye of the four men who had been looking at her, two on their knees, taking turns to lick and adore her, the others kissing, sucking and caressing her breasts.
She blinked and looked away.Goddess, she thought, shocked at her own lustful thoughts. She had never thought anything like that before.What is happening to me?
The lights in the bar dimmed and the band walked onto the small stage. There was a deafening roar from the crowd as the stage lights came up and bathed all four in a shifting green, gold and white light. Faye stared up at Finn Beatha, her heart quickening.
There he was, in all his glory, taller and more muscular than she remembered. She gulped, looking up at him, her whole body aflame with the denied desire that had built up in those dreams where she and Finn Beatha had explored every part of each other’s bodies, where he had possessed her so totally that it left her breathless.
She couldn’t believe he was real. Part of her had assigned him to a dream. Even the day that he had come into the shop seemed tinged with a dreamy unreality.
But he was definitely real.
On stage, Finn was stripped to the waist, and Faye could now see the whole of the tattoo she’d only glimpsed at his neck, thatday in the shop. The tattoo was of a horse, appearing to ride up his body from the right side of his waist, up under his arm and with its head resting on his shoulder. She couldn’t quite make it out from where she stood, but the part she had seen was the eye of the horse, which was designed as a well of spiralling water. Faye was reminded of the legend of the kelpie: Scottish water spirits, usually appearing as horses, that could shapeshift into humans. Grandmother had taught her all the faerie lore, while Moddie had taught Faye what she considered more practical witchcraft: spellcraft, herbs, astrology, divination.
Faye took in the defined lines of Finn’s stomach and chest. A kilt sat on his hips, and he was barefoot under that. His eyes were closed as he played; the music swirled into the audience like a spell itself, weaving the people together.
Lust overtook her, and a sense of intense and illogical jealousy. Faye had spent all of twenty minutes in the company of this man, but there was something in her that saidmine,and she couldn’t help but feel deeply connected to Finn Beatha. She looked around her, at the rapt faces of the men and women in the crowd, watching him, and a part of her raged against them.
Mine. He is mine, my…my…She shook her head. It was as if she was enchanted, obsessed by a force beyond herself.
He is not my anything, she rationalised.
The drummer, in a kilt and wearing what looked like a wolf pelt around his shoulders, started pounding out a fast rhythm with his hands on two large drums.
Finn cried out, a kind of animal whoop, a silver flute in his hand, and put it to his mouth. He started playing a fast jig, following the quick drumbeat; Faye felt herself going into a kind of trance as the other instruments joined in and the singer began singing over the top; Faye thought the words were Scots Gaelic, but she couldn’t be sure.
As the song picked up momentum, Faye watched as the individual auras of each musician shone bright around their heads. Finn’s was the same glittering gold as before – in fact, all of the band members’ auras were gold. It was odd. Faye had never seen that before.
The singer was tall, with long black hair in convoluted braids arranged on her head and cascading down her back. The plaits were ornamented with silver clasps in the way the Celts had worn their hair, and tattoos wove their way down her arms; it looked like they had been done in blue woad. All of them had spirals and other symbols painted on their faces in the same style.
Then, the band’s auras started to merge.
Faye had never seen the merging of auras before, and she watched with a sense of wonder as a field of gold light intensified around the band. And, now, as the drum beat in the core of her, Faye watched as the light started to form a spiral, reaching into the crowd.
Faye closed her eyes and let the music and the gold spiral energy come towards her, let the rhythm reverberate into the deepest caverns of her body. She had no fear of swaying and falling over, because she was so tightly packed in there was nowhere else to go. The music entranced her. It made patterns in her mind, whispered secrets into her in words she did not consciously understand, yet her body understood them all too well. Dal Riada were weaving a song of lust, and pulling every single person in the audience into it, like a sticky web of throbbing, wet and aching desire.
As soon as Faye closed her eyes, everything changed. She was immediately somewhere else, with the same feeling as when she was doing magic: it had the same vividness, the same sense of almost-reality. Her eyes fluttered open in surprise; no, she was still in the pub, with the band on stage. Yet, when she closedher eyes, she was on Black Sands Beach, and Finn Beatha was playing the flute.
