Tengu Read Online Free PDF Page B

hair.
    She uncrossed
her legs and knelt beside him. She kissed him again, on the forehead. She
smelled slightly of sweat, but mostly of some musky, deep-noted perfume.
    “We have no
sake,” she said. “But we have something that will please you even more.”
    With one small
hand, she stroked his penis up and down, so slowly and leisurely that he felt
like gripping his hand over hers and forcing her to rub him faster. But this
was one of those times when she was completely in control. He had to wait. He
had to obey. If he didn’t, the spell, and the experience she had in store for
him, would be forfeit at once.
    He said
hoarsely, “Nancy...”
    She raised one
immaculately lacquered fingertip to her lips. Then, still slowly stroking him,
she reached across to the tea tray and picked up one of the small white towels
that were laid beside a dish of salted plums.
    Ernest felt his
heart slow up, then quicken, like a man struggling to keep himself afloat in a
heavy sea.
    Nancy took the
lid off the teapot and lowered the towel into the boiling-hot tea. She swirled
it around for a moment, and then lifted it out. Hot tea ran onto the tray and
across the table.
    Ernest said,
“You’re not...”
    She smiled. She
said nothing. With a deft flick of her wrist, she wound the scalding towel
around the hard shaft and swollen head of Ernest’s penis, and gave him a brief,
vicious squeeze.
    He burst out
with a short, sharp shout of pain. He felt as if his whole erection was
exploding.
    But then the
pain seemed to detonate into something else altogether. More
than pain. More than pleasure. A brief dark instant of that terrible feeling which he craved and
feared like a drug. It seemed as if his insides were boiling, as If his
brain were going to burst into thousands of pieces.
    But then he
ejaculated, and his semen fell across the back of Nancy’s wrist.
    The world and
the room gradually refocused, as if he were adjusting a pair of binoculars.
    Everything
returned, almost absurdly, to normal. Nancy wiped her hands and arms with the
towel, and pulled her robe around herself with stylized modesty. Ernest,
feeling stunned and sore, reached down and slowly gathered up his towel.
    “Now you know
the meaning of Ukiyo’’ said Nancy. “ The floating world of
pleasure.”
    “I also know
the meaning of burned balls,” Ernest told her in a coarse whisper. “You’re a
devil, you know that? Much more of a devil than any of those damned Tengus.’’
    ‘‘Perhaps,’’
said Nancy. “But even devils are sometimes obliged to live a symbiotic life. I
need you, and you need me, and perhaps we should offer a prayer that we found
each other in the prime of life.”
    Ernest,
wincing, bent forward and took a salted plum from the tray. He chewed it
thoughtfully.
    “My prime,” he
said, “was when I was standing on the fantail of the USS FernJale, watching the
whole Japanese fleet blazing like the Fourth of July.’’
    Nancy touched
his hand consolingly. “I’m sorry I can’t give you an action replay here in my
living room. But it won’t be long, will it, before I can offer you something
very much like it?”
    Ernest didn’t
answer. Kemo came in with the Japanese omelets.

CHAPTER FOUR
    S ergeant Skrolnik of the Hollywood police department watched with
deep moroseness as two medics from the coroner’s office lifted the
white-sheeted stretcher from the living room floor and took it unsteadily
outside through the broken French doors.
    The yellow
drapes were stirred by the morning breeze as the medics made their way down the
path between the fan palms and the poinsettia, and out to the waiting car. The
sloping sidewalk was crowded with blank-faced, shuffling spectators.
    The day was
glaring and hot, and getting hotter. Skrolnik took off his crumpled linen coat
and laid it over the back of a chair. Detective Pullet came through from the
bathroom with a pair of small blue satin panties in a self-sealing plastic bag.
He stood beside Skrolnik