I SAT IN ONE of the motel room’s two cheap armchairs wondering why the Millennium Revelation was turning me into some million-dollar silver-metal woman.

Well, maybe I was just a thousand-dollar one, given the current price of silver on the stock market.

Dr. Torres hadn’t had much explanation, except to say that the new “intertwining” with the bone wouldn’t have caused menstrual pain, but that she couldn’t recommend I ever have children, given the pressure that puts on the pelvis. Otherwise, I was fine.

The familiar had completely disappeared, unseen and unfelt. I figured it was hiding out among the plaits of my hair the kindly nurses had made.

Quicksilver sat on the floor beside me, my palm on his thick-furred wolfish head.

Ric and Quick had been waiting in Dolly for me and Helena to leave that last doctor’s office.

“Delilah, your hair,” Ric had said anxiously. “The braids. What about—?”

“Home, James,” Helena had cut him off. “A new hairdo can be a healthy distraction for a young woman.”

Ric got the idea fast.

“Love the look,” he said, and then drove us back to the Thunderbird Inn without comment, Quicksilver riding in what had become his doggy rumble seat. Leonard Tallgrass finally had found an occasion to get my dog back to me. Just in time.

I’d gotten out and, trailed by Quicksilver, unlocked the motel room door. When I turned back, I saw that the others had remained in the car.

“You relax here on your own for a while, Delilah,” Helena suggested. “I’m taking Ric for a drink.”

“Banished to the bar again?” he objected, his hopeful expression turning anxious.

I wanted to joke that I was the one who could stand being taken out for a drink, but Helena shut up her foster son with one tough-as-a-nail-gun look and the command “Not a word.”

Off they drove while she enlightened him about the bizarre state of my insides.

No one could stop Quicksilver from looking anxious, though. I ran my hand over his head, saying, “I know, I know. Just be patient.”

At least dogs didn’t need to have the messy facts of female anatomy explained to them.

Helena supposedly knew what stressed people required. I wasn’t so sure she did now. Was there anything worse than being stuck alone in a Wichita motel room feeling that alien spawn had set up shop in your very guts for some unholy reason? The past I’d been struggling, successfully, to put to rest had punched a literal hole in my very being.

Though this was summer, the room felt cold. I ran my hands down my chilled upper arms and over my clenched, denim-clad thighs. I rocked myself back and forth, recognizing the motion as a childish self-comforting ritual from the group homes.

Quicksilver’s warm furred side pressed against my legs, but my teeth began to chatter anyway. It wasn’t the temperature in the motel room, because the summer day was ideal, offering the rare but perfect Midwestern moments between winter heat and full summer air-conditioning, between mayflies and mosquitoes.

A faint purring drew my hands to a pair of dangling silver cat earrings suspended from a wire curved like spectacle frames over my ears.

At least the silver familiar had the smarts not to pierce anything on me at the moment. I tried to count my other “at least” blessings. At least my “rape” had been medical and institutional. At least what had been done to me without consent had been done to hundreds of thousands of other women by their own request. So I was not as alone as I felt. It’d probably hurt them too, but they’d known what to expect.

Quicksilver whimpered and rested his jaw on the chair arm, producing that “hang dog” look. Gosh, I didn’t want to bring anybody down with me. I was lucky I had people—and a dog—who cared to stand by me during this.

I thought about all the things I’d survived here in Wichita, and in spades in Las Vegas lately. Feeling sorry for myself had never worked. It was time to think, not feel.

What if, over the years … my body had turned the intrusive bit of plastic into something more useful? Something I really needed. Maybe it was a pre–Millennium Revelation “gift.” Maybe it was the source of my current silver talents: my ability to see things in mirrors and walk through them and reflective surfaces. Maybe it had even “grabbed” and created the silver familiar from Snow’s lock of hair as an external extension of itself. Maybe it had become my inner armor, my protector.

I had no idea how long I sat there in the demi-dark with the window curtains drawn, but eventually a knock came on the door.

I looked around. The perky patterned comforter was installed on the bed, so the maid had come and gone. Still shivering, I went to the door peephole.

I spotted a baseball cap with embroidered script and a rose on it, seen through enough gaudy coleus leaves and tiger lilies for a New Orleans funeral. Undoing the chain lock, I confronted a gawky delivery boy obscured by baskets of tissue and greenery.

I could now read the fancy script on the cap: Flowers ’n’ Bowers.

“Kin I put some of this stuff down, ma’am?” he asked. “It’s the whole Spa for a Day Super Package.”

I swept the door wide and stepped back.

He quickstepped to the table by the window and relieved his forearms of basket handles and his hands of the ambushing greenery and a tall bottle of champagne.

While he was setting everything upright so it wouldn’t fall over, he played eyeball-tennis with the occupants of the room. Since that consisted of the usual motel furnishings and Quicksilver and me, it didn’t take long.

“You just need to sign that you got this stuff, uh, ma’am. The charge is taken care of.”

He produced a receipt pad and a pen. An overbearing odor of roses was rising like swamp miasma. I hesitated to take custody of the lot.

“You, ah, alone here, ma’am?” he asked nervously.

“I’m not scared, if that’s what you mean,” I said, surprised.

“The champagne can be tough to pop. I kin jest get that, ah, started for you, if you want.”

I realized his roaming gypsy eyes were now concentrating on my figure.

“I can handle a champagne cork by myself,” I said. “Also, the dog is great at extracting things that are in my way.”

He nodded and gulped simultaneously, backing toward the door.

“Jest our friendly Flowers ’n’ Bowers super-service, ma’am. You take care now.”

I intended to, turning the dead bolt and restoring the chain lock as soon as his skinny ass was out of the way.

Meanwhile, Quicksilver was using his supersensitive nose on the array of baskets and audibly sniffing. I joined him in exploring our bounty.

The champagne was a no-name brand. I twisted the bottle’s wire basket open and managed to maneuver the cork out with a pop that made Quicksilver jump and growl.

Two stemmed plastic glasses hid among some potted bachelor’s buttons.

Everything was beyond cheesy, but whoever had sent this knew that any kind of bubbly right now would unravel the knots in my neck and shoulders as if they were made of satin instead of steel.

I gulped the first chintzy glassful of slightly sour champagne and poured another.

The showy flowers surrounding the potent posy of tea roses weren’t scented, so I set them on the dresser in front of the mirror. I didn’t linger to probe any images in it, including mine.

There was another bottle of bubbly, this one full of pink powder.

I imported it into the bathroom and took a long, foamy, pink bath.

By the time I got out, wrapped in a towel with my braids clipped atop my head, the safety chain was off its slide. I didn’t want to know who and how, but Quicksilver was obviously out on patrol and Ric was waiting on one of the plastic chairs. He’d taken off the visiting-social-services tie, and I liked the view through his top three open shirt buttons. Also his smile.

“Sometimes,” he said, “Mom-shrink gets way too lost in her head … and yours and mine. I owe her respect, but I don’t buy that my absence will make you feel better than my presence tonight.”

I was speechless. “She thought I needed to be alone here all night?”

“She thought you needed to be left alone,” he said. “Dios, Del. I came back to say you’re safe with me. We’re camping partners tonight, no more. I just want to be with you, mi virgen.”

“Virtual Virgin,” I corrected. “That’s … really noble, Ric.” I went to sit on his lap, my thick plaits tumbling to my shoulders as the savvy familiar slithered down into position as a slender ankle bracelet. “You responsible for the homey spa package, hombre?”

“Cheesy,” he admitted, “but—”

“Sweet,” I said, giving him a peck on the lips.

“And I do like the braids. Muy exótico.” He diplomatically neglected to mention that they evoked an ancient Egyptian wig and our second most dangerous, latest adventure.

“Mmm.” He nuzzled my neck. “You’re so warm and soft and scented.”

“You’re so warm and hard and drenched with virtuous lust.”

“I just want to comfort you, Del. Nothing more. I swear.”

“It’s not like you to fall short in the romance department, Montoya,” I drawled.

He seemed surprised, but my mood had peaked the moment he entered the room. All the nightmares of the last two days had shot into the distance like a fey maze. Mama Helena had been wrong and Ric right. I’d needed some pampering to ease my stress and now I was buzzed on cheap champagne and a fierce willfulness to be taken extreme advantage of.

“Look, Ric. What I was put through years ago was inexcusable, painful, and traumatic, but now I know the truth. I’d imagined a lot worse than an insensitive bureaucracy resorting to the sexual double standard.”

“Delilah, are you sure you’re all right with it?”

“Not … yet, but it has nothing to do with us. I’m supposed to be unfairly punished again? No sack time with you? I’m feeling like a new woman. Have you got the moxie to get me over on my back for the first time and crush me into the mattress with your manly needs?” I challenged before his lips hushed mine.

I could say he groaned, he growled, he rasped, he husked, but what he did was say nothing, just moved his lips to the sweet spot on my nape he’d made his signature start and stop of our erotic journeys. The moment they touched my damp skin I folded like a bad poker hand onto the trinket-laden bed. He was already there, and rolled me over on top of him.

“You taste so sugary, so salty, so sharp,” he murmured into my neck, “just sleeping partners for now, I swear.”

“With benefits,” I said, laughing softly until we were silent but not still, my lips glued to his neck scar, until he came and I fell asleep from emotional exhaustion and, my current BFF, cheap champagne, satisfied. There was nothing anybody had done to me in the past to stop me from being what I wanted to be in the future.

I AWOKE SLOWLY, still habitually lying on my right side, aware of dim light illuminating the bed. Ric was awake, watching me, his head braced on his elbow and hand, the soft light from the parking lot caressing the sharp lines of his forehead, nose, and cheekbones. He belonged on a twenty-foot-high pillar in my particular temple.

I looked down to see his other hand resting on my hip. My legs had scissored open while I slept and he’d pushed a leg between them. The sight of his face and our entwined bare legs set my pulse throbbing.

“Morning?” I asked.

“The middle of the night. Now shhh. I’m busy.”

He swept my left arm over my head, torquing my torso, lifting my breasts, almost pushing me onto my back on the pillows, but not quite.

The slight frisson of panic I felt at the position was … fleeting.

“Busy?” I asked, looking down as he caressed me.

I’d finally got past considering my white skin as drained, lifeless, helpless vampire bait. Ric loved seeing it on his so-sleazy but right black satin sheets. I loved seeing his darker hands in stark relief on my pale skin, so visible wherever they roamed.

Him not still “only” a man after his near-death experience, as Snow, and now Sansouci, had warned me? Forget it.

“You’re ravishing me again?” I asked.

“What else?” His hand stroked my inner thigh. “Slick.”

“Your fault.”

“Then I should pay for it.”

His hand moved on, disappeared. I gasped with frustration, breathing hard now while his dark eyes watched my every breath. All black pupil, his eyes, with only a wire-thin band of silver around the left one. The irises of his eyes had always been so deeply brown I never could tell when his black pupils swelled with arousal. Now, the silver was a dead giveaway.

I gave away a little mew-purr of satisfaction myself.

But I wasn’t the stage director here. Ric was watching more than my face. I felt a featherweight touch over my chest and breasts, then a circling at their center. Repeated.

Ready. So ready. My hips swayed. “I’m ready.”

“I’m not.”

Was he kidding? My navel flamed as though freshly pierced when the dowsing rod between his hips brushed my belly.

His eyes were downcast, his fingers circling as I arched my back.

“What are you doing, hombre?” I prodded him. “I’m going crazy. Loco.”

His fingers moved to my mouth, tracing my lips, sliding over their sensitive inner slick. I tried to consume his fingertips, but one stiff forefinger pressed down on them, urged silence, stillness.

The room echoed with the sound of a panting trapped wild animal. Me.

He was being so damn slow the wanting had boiled down to a painfully tight, aching ring at the fork of my body.

Ric finally extended his bracing elbow and ran his free hand into the hair at my temple, bringing my face into the light as his finger stroked my lips again. Something deep crimson, thick and shiny coated his forefinger tip. It looked like blood.

“Ric?”

He read my suspicion and let me taste the fingertip.

I licked my lips. “Sweet.”

“Very sweet,” his voice corrected.

“Fruity. Ric, what the hell—?”

“Smooth. Slick. Sweet.”

“What is it?”

“The label’s so tiny it’s hard to read in the semidark, but I’d say it was our old friend Midnight Cherry Shimmer.”

“Midnight. That it is. Cherry. You got mine weeks ago, bloodless as it was. Shimmer? No moonlight here. Lip gloss? You’ve been … into my purse?”

“You don’t want me delving in your purse for interesting things?”

“Uh.”

His hand was back on my inner thigh. So close to that taut, throbbing hot spot … my thoughts sounded like they belonged in a book with half-naked men on the cover. Nothing wrong with that, but I craved a less clichéd vocabulary to express this wild, maddening overdose of desire. All I could get out of my throat was …

“Finish it!” I would not add “for God’s sake.” I didn’t want any deities peeking in on this action.

He laughed. Fondly. “Not even halfway there, Delilah. You do seem to be addicted to that naughty Lip Venom.”

“Lip Venom? That tingle? There? You put Lip Venom on—?”

“I put it on your lips, amor. And on your lips.” His hand caressed my thigh, the thumb stroking deliciously near the source of my budding agony (the wait) and ecstasy (the forthcoming climax), but not nearly close enough.

“And my navel,” I guessed.

“Always so fast with a deduction, but a little slow tonight.”

“I am not slow tonight. I don’t need more foreplay. I want … closure.”

The answer to my demands was his lips sliding over mine, inside, outside, but nothing yet in my lady’s chamber. I was so glad I gagged Irma during these sessions. Just my own voice in my head was aggravation enough.

He kissed me from here to eternity. His face and mouth focused every erotic thought and feeling on my candy-tipped breasts as Midnight Cherry Shimmer passed from my flesh to his mouth and back to me again in fascinating rhythms that had me in their spell.

Enough body paint and tease. I needed the main act … now. So …

I let my sensually torqued torso roll me flat on my back for the first time in my remembered life, for the first time during our erotic encounters.

Instead of clenching with the usual panic, I was amazed to feel the fearless confidence of a big cat luxuriating in a belly-exposing stretch. I angled my head back, exposing my throat, then arched my spine from my hips to my shoulders, offering Ric a full frontal self he’d never seen from me before. This should snap his so-called control like a twig.

Ric’s hands slipped under my back, supporting me. He leaned away to study my body as if it was an Old Master painting. He ran one hand up my arms and fixed my wrists in position.

“You’re my bow,” he finally said, lowering his torso over mine, his voice thick. “I’m your arrow. Always.”

Then the Spanish words came tumbling out between kisses he pressed on my flesh from my wrists to my forehead and lips, pausing for a long passionate minute to burn a bruise into a dangerously near-visible spot above one collarbone. His restless mouth suckled my tinted and flavored nipples until they caught fire, too, and then blazed a further trail down from navel to tilted pubic bone.

Yes. Home at last. Finally. He slid deep inside me, his weight flattening me into the mushy motel mattress. I now had the luxury of seeing his eyes, his mouth, his expression both dreamy and excited. The mere act of our breathing hard with his pelvis so compressed on mine brought me the shuddering, screaming-into-his-mouth tsunami I’d sensed surging up from my tropical zone.

My banshee howl threatened to raise the dead and lasted long enough to send a bunch of them straight to Hell for evil thoughts, but Ric laughed into my neck after his own echoing orgasm ebbed away and tapped my thigh with a “we’re done” pat as he rolled away.

Whoo.

“You can fool around with my purse any time,” I said when able to manage a whole sentence.

We were sweat-slick, streaked with tracks of shimmering black cherry gloss, and satisfied as hell.

“Better shower,” he said. “I’ll come along in a minute.”

“You came along for a minute just now. Uhh. Do I have to get up, I’m so …”

“Sticky,” he finished. “Shower. Motel sheets. We don’t want to leave a trail of Midnight Cherry Shimmer for the maids to giggle at.”

I rolled out of the bed and went, gingerly, to the bathroom, shutting the door and turning on the lights.

Okay. Karaoke queen at a nude rock rave, thoroughly had, agreed with me. This is what Ric had finally seen with me on my back. My cherry-shiny nipples matched my passion-swollen lip-glossed mouth.

Some of the glinting lip gloss had even slicked the new bruise already darkening my white skin. I touched the spot, only sexual excitement tingling in the deepest depths where I’d once been most pain-violated. Keep the creative pelvic examinations coming, mi hombre, I thought without Irma’s help. My body is your bow and you are my arrow.

I rubbed my fingertips to disperse the dark crimson shimmer, but … the color was bright red. Bloodred. Ric’s suction kiss had broken the skin. Ouch. A bit alarming in this day and age, but that could happen when the love was deep and the sex was hot. I knew that now.

My fingers returned to my throat, feeling a salty sting. The skin there was thinner, more sensitive. It was just a small break, not like he’d … bitten me. And if he had, that wasn’t anything unheard of. I’d bitten him accidentally first.

I smiled, exploring the fact of feeling both satisfied and freed.

Our previous back-avoiding positions deserved reruns but—so call me unliberated—I’d loved being finally able to lie under Ric, watching him love me, being his bow and welcoming his arrow. Taking his weight and making it work for us. For the first time, I felt that Ric had been able to do with me what he was born to do … dowse the depths of my heart, body, and soul.

HOT WATER was sluicing like tears down my body.

Now that the romantic interlude was over, Irma joined me in the shower.

Whoo-ee. Guy on top rocks. And all that juicy red lip gloss our boy was laying on your touch-me-not zones. Sexy new wrinkle. I wish someone would rouge my nipples with, say, Chambord raspberry liqueur from an Albino Vampire. I bet that would drive Sansouci and ole Shez wild.

TMI. No improper names, please, I told her. Glad you approve, but why wouldn’t you? You’re my self-appointed inner slut, Irma.

Recognition at last. Listen. Don’t overthink the wild thing. There are guys who like women in spike heels to walk all over them. The S and M parlors are full of mock and real blood and thunder. This was a little harmless purse-diving with benefits. Like you didn’t go ballistic? You love the guy, bottom line.

That’s why I worry. Bottom line: neck sucking still troubles me. A last, lingering hang-up.

What do you know? You had a bizarre, isolated upbringing and the sexual experience of a cantaloupe before you met Ric … at age twenty-four. I take that back. Who knows what cantaloupes can get up to?

I laughed.

See. You should be more realistic and worldly by now. It’s like if it feels too good, it’s gotta be a problem for you. That is so twentieth century.

I sighed. I just don’t want Ric to see I’m worried, I thought at last.

Simple. You gotta be a little less Deliverer and a lot more Delilah with him. Relax and enjoy. I do so need the girl talk afterward. Take it from me. Celibacy sucks. And so does great sex.

I rinsed well to ensure no Midnight Cherry Shimmer would stain my clothes and shivered with good memories. Irma was right. Midnight Cherry Shimmer and Lip Venom could work both ways and maybe even better in reverse … on Señor La Vida Loca.

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