Icarus
Bleeds
By Annabeth
Leong
Icarus, a man on the run, dreams of wings, and of taking flight like the surgically
modified rich and famous of Central City. The hacker who harbors him will do
anything to keep him, including paying for the dangerous operation in a back
alley chop shop. Neither can imagine how much the wings will truly cost.
(M/M)
********* EXCERPT **********
I will call him
Icarus, because he worked so hard to erase his birth name that I will not commit
the sin of returning it to him now. The things I said and did when I knew him
will only make sense if you understand how beautiful he was, so I will try to
force the words of mortals to describe a man who never seemed to belong to earth
at all.
Icarus first came to
me in the dark, in the rain, passing out of the shadows falling over the street,
slipping smoothly into the shadows I made for myself. His eyes glowed from the
corner where he took a seat, huddled under shelves loaded with discarded
computer equipment. Even then I wondered how a shadow could be so luminous
within a shadow, how black could shimmer from within black.
I wasn’t in the habit
of looking at my clients. They came because they wanted to be forgotten, and
they generally did not want to be seen either. I could not help myself with
Icarus. He reminded me of flesh I liked to pretend I didn’t have. Eyes, lips,
fingertips, inner thighs, the sides of my stomach, the soles of my feet. And,
yes. Tongue. Cock. Thoughts both crude and poetic competed to distract me from
the mechanical process of obscuring someone from all the files and IP addresses
that affirmed that person’s existence.
I avoided looking at
his skin, a lighter shade of what is called black than my own purple-tinged
pigment. Icarus’s brand of black flowed with honey, shone with sunlight,
glittered with the gold that may once have belonged to Pharaoh. Long, thin
fingers, delicate as a girl’s. Red-gold palms, and the beginnings of a scar, a
telltale revelation of a story that started in the hands and parted the flesh of
the forearm nearly to the elbow.
He saw me looking, and
pulled the sleeves of his sweater down low, clutching bunches of the material in
clenched fists. “Can you really make me disappear?”
I snorted. “Of course
not. Not these days, not with the backups they keep and the triple cross checks
they have to avoid failure conditions. Best I can do is make them forget to look
for you.”
He nodded, the gesture
emphasizing the length of his neck, the quality of his silence. “How
much?”
“How much you
got?”
He shrank back from
me, receding into the forest of parts and cords. “I’m not looking for
favors.”
“I don’t do favors. I
do a sliding scale. You pay what you can afford to pay. What you think is fair.
I trust you.”
“Why?”
I sighed. No one ever
understood this when I bothered to explain. “Because I’m not one of them. I
don’t want to act like one.”
He swallowed, his
Adam’s apple moving gracefully up and down in that impossibly lean neck. “I was
going to see what you would take.” He bit his lip and didn’t explicate, but I
got an idea of what he’d had in mind by the way his hands crept toward his fly,
the gesture so subtle that I wasn’t sure it had been a conscious
invitation.
On any other night,
with any other man, I wouldn’t have. I would have kissed that smooth, wide
forehead, done my work for free, and sent him back into the street uttering the
vague promise that someday, when he could, he would take care of me. With
Icarus, I could not resist the offer. I had to keep him a little longer. Though
I hated myself for it, the sentence passed my lips as if it made up part of my
daily stock in trade. “After I finish, you’ll come upstairs with
me.”
His bowed head
telegraphed his acquiescence well before his soft words. “Thank
you.”
When I got him to my
bed, I knew I should be the one thanking him. He stripped with a benevolent
dignity that shamed me. I felt as if I’d brought the Virgin Mary to my room to
make a whore of her. Again, I considered releasing him, leaving my work to be my
offering to his present and future beauty.
Then his undershirt
peeled away from smooth, hard abs, and his boxers fell away from his hips and
the thick, dark cock that hung soft between his legs. The shy and lovely young
man before me, with his incandescent eyes and visible ribs, brought my own cock
surging to life. I could not let him go. My desire made me
cruel.
“Get on your knees and
crawl to me,” I whispered, loosening my own clothing, casting it aside. Hurt
flashed through his eyes, and I loved it for the confirmation that it offered.
He was open to me. I could touch him. I could make him remember me
forever.
Bio:
Annabeth Leong has written erotica of many flavors. She loves
shoes, stockings, cooking and excellent bass lines. Icarus Bleeds joins many other dark erotica titles published
by Forbidden Fiction, including The Snake and the Lyre, a story of Orpheus and the erotic underworld,
and In the Death of
Winter, about a dead god
and the sacrifices his followers still make. She blogs at annabethleong.blogspot.com, and tweets
@AnnabethLeong
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