Dreary, desolate nighttime turned into a creaking door and a temptress standing before me.
“Come,” Adagio said, beckoning with a slender finger. Shadows danced on her face, but her piercing eyes shone brightly.
I had many questions; ruby lips pursed into a smirk and they all turned to silence and ash in my mouth. She turned and slipped out into the dark, and all I could do was stumble after her.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked once I’d caught up to her. She was walking away from my apartment, hands stuffed into the pockets of her jacket.
“Misbehaving.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders, tossing her hair as she grinned at me. “Feel like joining me for a little while?”
There was a twinkle in her eyes that was as alluring as it ought to have been dangerous.
I have a smirk on my face; Adagio has freshly-shattered crimson splinters in her hands. She looks so small to me, and not just because she collapses to her knees.
When I approach her, it is with a confident swagger. She is beaten—she looks up at me, lurches back, and I know that she realizes that.
She is so very beautiful. But that doesn’t matter.
My magic floods me. I am strong. Far stronger than she is, now. I loom over her, and she is powerless.
I reach down. She wants to flee, but doesn’t. Can’t.
No. Shouldn’t. She’s beaten, she knows that.
It was not the first time I’d woken up from that—that… on some days I shamefully called it a dream, but on most, it was a nightmare.
It was, however, the first time I’d woken up staring at the ceiling of Adagio’s apartment.
Rubbing at my aching eyes, I sat up, vaguely aware of bedsheets bunching up at my waist. When I looked up, Adagio was there, sitting on a chair with a brush, somehow making a loose shirt—only a shirt—and tousled hair look like the height of elegance.
“I shouldn’t be here.” I sat up, pressing my fingers to my brow, shaking my head to clear it. “I—I shouldn’t have—”
She shot me a look. “Did you enjoy yourself?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I did.” I bit my lip. My nightmare had never seemed so close to reality; the victim in it was right there, in front of me, all alone, no magic in sight…
Adagio just laughed at me. Her giggle was a beautiful sound, lilting and airy. “I think we’re all entitled to a few mistakes here and there,” she said. She stood up, flung open her closet, fluffed her hair in front of a full-body mirror. “You can call me one of yours, if you’d like. I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”
Hidden by the bedsheets, my hand balled into a fist. “What are you going to call me?”
She paused for a moment. “Well…” Another giggle.
Then she turned on me, sauntered closer, flopped down onto the bed and pushed me up against the headboard. “I was hoping you’d say ‘when,’ actually…”
Thirty minutes and a shower later, I was walking out of Adagio’s apartment in a daze.
I sat facing my door, watching it anxiously, almost hoping it wouldn’t open. Adagio had called me twenty minutes ago, a week after I’d last seen her.
A sharp knock made me bolt.
“Hi,” Adagio said, pushing right past me from the evening air outside into my apartment, where she strutted about in a tight miniskirt like she owned the place.
That wasn’t right, I would have said in my dre—nightmare. In my nightmare, I would not have let her get away with that. “H—hi,” I said, pushing the door closed. “How are you… where are you going?”
She came to a pause, faced me, then flicked her head. “Your bed’s this way,” she said as if that was the only thing that mattered. She was so nonchalant about it it was almost eerie.
“Oh. Right.” I cleared my throat, hurrying to catch up to her when she began her march again. “We should… go somewhere next time, maybe. Have lunch, see a movie, something like that, maybe?”
Adagio looked at me as though I’d just asked her to sing with a gag in her mouth. But she didn’t say anything, not until she stood close enough to my bed that she could touch the mattress. “Drag me back here when we’re done and you’ve got a deal.”
“That…” My nightmare said it was right. I said it was wrong.
Adagio looped her arms around my neck, said “It’s right” with only her eyes, like she’d read my mind. Then she licked her lips, and all of a sudden my hands were at her waist and she was dragging me downwards.
“I’m glad we understand each other,” she whispered.
I smirk when Adagio falls to her knees in front of me. She stares down at the shattered fragments in her hand, and delicious horror blooms brightly on her face.
I used to hurt a lot of people. Good people. Kind people.
Adagio isn’t either of those things.
And she is so very beautiful. But that doesn’t matter.
“C’mon,” I say, standing over her, still smirking, holding out my hand to her. She’s fallen backwards and the blazing fire she’s always had in her eyes is nowhere to be found. “Get up.”
When she reaches up with a trembling hand, I seize her wrist and yank her to her feet. She gasps, but doesn’t resist. She knows that this is how things should be.
“I’m not done with you just yet,” I say. “You hurt a lot of people.”
I don’t care, truthfully. Breaking her gem, casting her down to her knees, that was for all her victims. Everything that comes next is for me.
But then she presses herself up against me, whispers into my ear, and I realize that she’s already got something in mind.
And she is so very beautiful.
Adagio apparently didn’t like sushi. She chewed on it like every bite had insulted her. “I can’t believe you actually work here,” she muttered in between violent mouthfuls.
“Friendship magic doesn’t exactly pay the bills,” I said, chuckling. “Also, sushi’s tasty.”
She didn’t quite hide her eye roll, but I thought she didn’t try to—she glanced down at me, and I had a suspicion she wanted me to see that. “Your outfit’s cute, at least.”
“Thanks.” I looked at her halter top and shorts. “Yours… isn’t.”
“It’s not supposed to be cute.”
“What’s it supposed to be?”
She finished another bite, then leaned forward, propped up her arms on the table, and smirked. “It’s supposed to make you question why you bothered dragging me all the way out here.”
In one smooth motion, she’d switched seats so she was sitting right next to me. “It’s supposed to make you be thinking of all the other things you could be doing.”
I didn’t want to admit how well it was doing its job. My eyes might have done that anyway, though. I gulped. “I can hardly believe all this is happening, if I’m being honest,” I said, managing a small smile. “It’s nice to be doing something more… you know, normal.”
“Is what we’ve been doing so abnormal?” She didn’t say “Not for me, it isn’t” but I felt like she meant it.
“You, um… never did tell me why you wanted to misbehave that night.”
She giggled—it made me think of my bed. “Life’s more fun when you can break a few rules, isn’t it? Besides. Everyone makes mistakes.”
I looked down at my food. “I guess.” My nightmare might have said that sitting there with her, just sitting there, was the mistake of the day, and Adagio seemed to want me to feel that way too.
“Tell you what,” she said at last, casually draping an arm over my shoulder and sliding a little closer. “Let’s leave a little early and I’ll let you do this again next time.”
Adagio all but dragged me back into my apartment, but as soon as the door closed she swiveled and pressed herself up against the nearest wall.
“What’re you—”
She pulled me much closer. Her arms snaked around my waist and hips. Her face was unbearably close to mine, flushed and hot; one gorgeous leg hooked around mine…
“The only thing you should want to do to me,” she whispered. Her breathy voice, warm on my cheek, was somehow as angry as it was sultry and that made it irresistible. “Isn’t this so much more fun than having lunch?”
“You’re not—” I pushed against her, but I couldn’t break away and it just made her purr; once she did that, I couldn’t have gotten away if I’d wanted to. “You’re not just a mistake,” I said.
She just laughed at me. “Awfully… chivalrous of you to say that, isn’t it? Wouldn’t be very nice if you were just using me for sex, would it?”
I didn’t realize when my hands had found her naked shoulders, but there they were. My grip tightened, fingers pressing into soft skin. “No. It wouldn’t be.” The huskiness in my own voice surprised me.
The me in my dream would have been fine with that.
Adagio looped her arms around my neck, leaned in to whisper to me. “You can drop the act, if you’d like. There’s nobody here. Just you and me.”
I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.
It all felt so surreal I was sure it had to be another dream. One moment I was standing with her by the wall, paralyzed and frozen, the next I was dragging her by the wrist towards my bed and she was grinning.
She is so very beautiful.
“To the victor…” she whispers, clinging to my side, pleading with her eyes and face. She is weak, and she knows it—I can hurt her, wound her, maim her, scar her. She doesn’t want any of those things, but I do.
But there are things she can give to me, first.
I smirk. Magic courses through me. A snap of my fingers, and the stage we stand on melts away, and suddenly we’re standing in my apartment.
I fling her down onto my bed. She lands sprawled, dazed… ready.
Her body is an intricate tapestry, and every little thread promises a different kind of delight. I want to feel them all, each and every ounce of pleasure I can drag out of her.
What she wants, I do not know. Maybe there are places she likes to be touched, ways she likes to be spoken to. Maybe she finds my treatment of her too rough, too violent. Perhaps she longs for delicate caresses, not the shoves and the pinning and the pushing and the seizing.
I don’t care.
I sometimes tried my best not to think about her in the intervening days. My best wasn’t always very good but I tried. I had to wonder if she knew about my dreams, somehow. Whether intentionally or incidentally, she… didn’t make them come true, not exactly, but all the same…
It had gotten a lot harder when she started texting me more often. Once a day, now, not just a cursory one an hour before we went out. She didn’t say much, usually. We picked out a place for me to take her next time, that was about it. I was relieved in one way, disappointed in another.
An hour before we’d agreed to meet, my phone buzzed.
“What would you like me to wear?” Adagio’s text said.
If my dreams had answered for me, I might have had a dozen answers. I bit my lip. “What did you have in mind?” I sent back.
A few moments, and then another buzz. “Something that would be fun for you to tear off me.”
I could almost see her face, and that just made it all worse. Heat flooded my face. “Whatever you want,” I sent back.
“Boooring,” her next text said. I could almost see her pouting. “But I’ll see you there.” I could almost see her blowing a kiss.
A little over an hour later, I was waiting outside a movie theater when Adagio sauntered up beside me and hooked an arm around my waist. I had a moment of dread, but when I saw her blouse and skirt—racy by anyone else’s standards, modest for her—I smiled and relaxed.
“So…” As soon as I spoke, she looked up at me.
“So what?” she asked.
“Um… how are you?”
She shrugged, then looked ahead at the theater and talked about something else entirely. “Ready when you are.”
I blinked. Stared. She shot me a look, and I stumbled over my words. “It… doesn’t feel nice for me to be alright with that.”
She laughed. “Good. It’s fun to not be nice once in a while.” She pressed herself up against me. “I can take it, you know. There’s nothing to be worried about.”
Other protests came to mind, but Adagio was quicker on the draw. “But come on. You wanted to be here, right? We can talk about that later, if you’d like.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, we will.”
It was a good movie. I spent about half of it with my hand up Adagio’s blouse.
Hours tended to melt away in what felt like minutes at Adagio’s apartment, which looked and felt gloomy at night, tight and confined. The other two, Adagio’s… friends, I think they were, clearly didn’t live there—Adagio said they dropped by from time to time, though.
We laid next to each other, not talking. Adagio had her eyes closed.
Ready when you are.
I shivered. Wondered. Feared. I couldn’t put my finger on why that sentence bothered me as much as it did. Maybe it was too much, I thought. But it bothered me, just the same.
It felt like something out of one my dreams. A lot of things I did with her—no, to her—felt that way.
When I looked over at the vexing girl laying beside me, I gradually drifted into anything but a restful slumber.
Adagio lies in my bed, perfunctorily wrapped in sheets that hardly cover anything at all. Staring down at her with a smirk, I give the sheets a tug—a little more skin peaks out now, and it’s a definite improvement.
There’s a knock at my door. Grinning, I vault down from my loft. My friends are out there, I know. We’re going to celebrate our victory today. Just thinking about that makes my wings flare outwards, excitement quickening my pace.
Wings.
I come to a halt. I don’t even have to think about it; a fifth limb attached to my back flexes. A span of red, leathery wing, tipped with a black spike…
My eyes go wide. I reach out to feel it, only to tense when I see a red, clawed, wicked right hand.
There’s another knock.
The girls who showed me the right way are coming to tell me that I’m wrong again.
My waking was a fearful jerk. My eyes snap open, and I wondered whether or not I screamed.
That was the first time in months a dream about Adagio had frightened me. And Adagio, she made that horrible, vile dream and reality blend together so well…
When I looked to the side and saw Adagio stirring and blinking, I knew I couldn’t stay.
The me in those nightmares was who I used to be; once upon a time, I would’ve known that.
Now, I only hoped.
My flight wasn’t exactly dignified, but Adagio hardly reacted to it at all, or so I thought, but then I didn’t stay to see.
Because she was my vice. A remnant of dark times, the last that I knew of but far and away the most beguiling. There had been other temptations here and there, but none had made the past seem so glamorous, so darkly alluring, as Adagio had.
I had to run.
Late one night, a knock on my door made me open it.
“Hello,” Adagio said.
I just stared at her for a moment. Hearing her voice for the first time in two weeks was a shock. Her clothes looked downright austere on her, though—only a hint of cleavage, pants that touched her ankles.
“C’mon,” she said, flicking her head. “I feel like eating some raw fish.”
It occurred to me that I really ought to have said no. This time, though, I managed to do it out loud.
Adagio gave me a look. Not quite a glare, but close. After a moment of that, all she did was shrug, though. “Fair enough. Any reason you couldn’t say that to my face the last time?”
“I don’t like what usually happens when we talk.”
She cocked an eyebrow, leaned against my doorframe. “Is that so? You’re a wonderful actress, then, because I remember you always being… fervent, let’s say.”
“Yeah, well.” I rubbed at the back of my neck, then sighed. I’d said no already, I reminded myself.
And Adagio did deserve an explanation, didn’t she?
“I’ve… dreamed about that kind of thing.”
She looked at me again. “Let’s go somewhere,” she said. “You’ve clearly got something to say, but I don’t want to talk standing up for long and I imagine you don’t want me going near your bed today.”
Her calmness was baffling. She’d been such a temptress before, why wasn’t she still…
“I… don’t know if that’s the best idea. I’m sorry.”
Another shrug. She held up her hands, stepping backwards. “Don’t be. You gave me what I wanted to see already.”
What?
Before I could say anything, Adagio smirked and chuckled. “And I did have an awfully good time. But, if you really want to put an end to it—”
“W—wait,” I said. “What did you want to…?”
Her tongue flicked out across her lips. She giggled. “I wanted to see if the part of you that smirked when you beat me was still there.”
My blood ran cold.
Then it boiled.
“Get in here,” I half-mumbled, half-growled. Fear and doubt flickered through Adagio’s eyes. She wondered if I was about to hurt her, maybe—with good reason, if that’s really what she was doing.
But she complied. A minute or two later, she was sitting tensely on my couch and I on my chair, staring daggers at her.
I didn’t like having her in my home just then. Part of me called her a prize, another part a blight, and each part loathed the other.
“Sirens bring out the worst in people,” she explained. “Always have. Insults you never say out loud, all the harsh thoughts you know you could never get away with acting on…”
“And that’s what you wanted to do to me?”
She went silent for a long time, staring down at her hands. “I think we can do something for each other. There’s a part of you that still enjoys being selfish and brutal, isn’t there?”
One of my hands balled into a fist. I wished I could say no—dreams shackled me, told me I couldn’t. Memories bound me, told me I had no right.
“I thought there was,” Adagio murmured. One hand crept up towards her bare neck, and for the first time I could remember she looked earnestly tragic. But then she looked at me, with bright, hopeful eyes. “And it’s beautiful to see it coming out.”
“I shouldn’t be letting it,” I muttered. “I’m not like that anymore.”
“No, you’re not. That’s what makes it so satisfying.” Adagio crept forward, knelt by my chair, took my hand in hers; I flinched at her touch. “At night, there’s nothing. Nothing but us, alone in the dark. You can be whoever you want there, and the day will never know unless you tell it.”
Again she made what I knew to be horrible and dangerous seem alluring. I knew at once that she spoke of the pleasures and them alone.
“Come,” she said, gesturing with her head. “Stop worrying about what people who aren’t me will think, because they aren’t here. I am.”
I stared down at her. “What do you want me to do?”
“Whatever you want to.” She stood up, coaxed me to stand, gripped my hand with both of hers. “That’s the whole point.”
Claws and wings, flame and spikes, ran through my mind. “What if I—”
“Then I’ll let you know.” She giggled, and smirked. “But I never thought you’d do anything like that. I’m willing to trust you.”
I nodded slowly. Again I looked at Adagio and saw doubt flash across her face. Her lips were still shaped into that smirk, though, framed perfectly by immaculate golden curls.
I slipped my hand out of hers, gripped both her shoulders, and kissed her. She gasped, melted in my arms, leaned in against me.
From the moment I close my door, darkness gathers both of us, and leaping flames engulf me. Wings unfurl from my back, my tanned hand turns into a red claw.
Adagio lies in front of me, sprawled out on my bed. Ready.
I couldn’t ask for anything more. Looking at her makes dark passions stir and rise. Before her, I vanquish selflessness, find sweet relief in measured cruelty.
Starting the moment I touch my mattress, I only take. The second I leave, I will give once more, but that second has not yet come.
There are threads to unravel. There is a map of sensations laid out before me, and I want to explore the entire thing.
The night is a whirlwind. Is a swelteringly hot frenzy, vigorous, ecstatic and whollely, unabashedly carnal.
There had been some nights where, on some level, I thought I might envy the woman in my nightmares.
That morning, when I woke up and saw Adagio dozing quietly on my chest, I thought that even the me of my dreams didn’t have a thing for me to covet. I ached, and thinking about moving hurt, but it was a good kind of pain.
It took me a little while to work up the nerve to rouse her. Even when I did, she didn’t do much apart from mumbling nonsense and burying her face in the crook of my shoulder.
But I did manage to drag myself out of bed eventually. A little while later, I sat on my couch with a mug of coffee in one hand. Later still, when Adagio finally flopped down next to me, I handed her another and she sipped from it greedily. I continued to be amazed at how she could be so unkempt and still look stunning.
“What did you think of that?” she said after a while, setting her cup down and sliding to lean against my shoulder.
“I’m… still not completely sure.” I looped an arm around Adagio and pulled her a little bit closer. “It felt good. Really good, to… let it out, I guess.” I sighed. “But I never felt like I needed to, you know?”
“I’m sure you didn’t.” Adagio clung to my side, laying a hand on my shoulder. Her touch was a chaste, gentle one compared to the ministrations of the nighttime. “But now you know you can. And you gave me exactly what I wanted to see.”
“What was that, though? That I really am just as bad as I used to be? That I just hide it away for everyone else?”
She chuckled, cupped my cheek to nudge my face until we looked at each other head-on. “That I’ve still got it. That you still know how to have fun under all the brooding and sickening cheer. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a fair trade.”
Adagio looked away, just then, for an instant. “But if you don’t want to make it a habit and you’d rather I leave, then…”
“I—no, I don’t want you to do that.”
A smile formed on her lips, a small, shy little thing that I couldn’t keep myself away from for long.
“We can give it a try,” I said after the kiss ended. “I’d like that, I think.”
“Well.” Adagio licked her lips, let her eyes wander, swiveled to lean into me. “I guess we’ll have to see plenty of each other while you work it all out, won’t we?”
I chuckled. “Do you mean like lunch or like…”
“Well, I was talking about lunch, but now that you mention it…” She touched my other hand, coaxed it towards her waist—I grinned, pushed her back, laid on top of her.
