Talulla Rising Read Online Free PDF Page B

with fear of what excessive screwing might do to my baby all this meant I ended up masturbating. A lot. Enough for a black comedy, if it hadn’t made me so lonely and miserable. At least, I told myself, when I could dredge up wryness, I wasn’t in any danger of falling in love.
    Jake never slept with Harley, as I knew now I wouldn’t with Cloquet. I’d found out the hard way, caught by Curse lust one evening only a couple of weeks after Jake’s death. Cloquet was taking a shower and the bathroom door was ajar. I was passing. I stopped. I looked. He stood in profile with his palms against the cubicle wall, head bowed, eyes closed, water pounding his back. Tall, pale, thinly muscled body, a tattoo I couldn’t decipher on his left hip. His cock (circumcised) wasn’t erect, but it wasn’t fully flaccid either. Wulf grinned and licked her lips. I pictured myself walking in, opening the cubicle door, his face, surprised, the moment of mutual visibility, my hand reaching through the steam and him rising, rising for me—
    No.
    Verboten .
    I knew it intuitively, and, since these were the days before Delilah Snow, I took it as evidence of a werewolf scheme of things, an unspoken catechism. A werewolf shall not enjoy carnal relations with her familiar . The bond had to be unequal, maybe specifically required unrequited—
    Just at that moment Cloquet looked up and saw me.
    We didn’t speak. He didn’t turn or try to conceal himself, but I knew from his look – part sadness for what was dead in himself, part relief to be free of it – that werewolf Commandments or not, he wasn’t going to be my lover. Someone had killed or broken the sexual man in him, though not, I knew, the need to submit to something he believed bigger than himself. (I knew who ‘someone’ was, too: Jacqueline Delon, gamine billionaire occultist femme fatale who’d stopped at nothing to get what she wanted. What she wanted was immortality. The non-figurative kind. She wanted to live forever and never look a day older. To which end she snared (and bedded) Jake Marlowe with a view to turning him and his prized sunlight-resistant blood over to the vampires, in exchange for their brand of eternal life. Cloquet had been her unhinged lover. He knew if she got what she wanted he’d lose her. So he’d tried to kill Jake. Twice, with farcical results. He needn’t have bothered. Jacqueline’s deal with the vamps never went down. Mid-transaction at her Biarritz retreat, WOCOP, who’d been tracking proceedings, launched an assault. Madame’s corpse was last seen playing human shield to one of her Undead business partners. From then on Cloquet stopped trying to kill Jake and started trying to kill the man responsible for Jacqueline’s death, WOCOP werewolf hunter, Eric Grainer. Life’s generally artless , Jake wrote, but it does get these occasional hard-ons for plot. It connects things, nefariously, behind your back, and before you know it you’re in the final act of a lousy movie. A lousy horror movie, usually ... Cloquet did kill Grainer – but not before Grainer killed Jake. On a night of full moon, five months ago, in a Welsh forest, where, when the carnage and death and vengeance and loss had done their thing to us, I offered him my hand . . .)
    I turned from the bathroom doorway and walked away, embarrassed. Phoned an escort agency and selected a guy who received in-call clients and took a cab to his apartment (we were in San Francisco at the time) and had two hours of depressing muscularly efficient professional sex, sans conversation. The next morning I went to Cloquet’s room. He was up and dressed, standing by the window, apparently doing nothing, apparently waiting for me. I said: I’m sorry. He looked at the floor and said: I’m your friend. It’s a great thing in my life, to have a friend. Then he looked up at me and suddenly he seemed the saddest, gentlest man I’d ever seen. There was a suspended moment in which we both knew this was