Chapter 138: Midnight Feast
The bourbon was a slow fire in his throat, the cigarette a smoldering beacon in the dark. Bruce sat on the weathered chaise, the faded floral cushions sighing under his weight. The magnolia leaves above whispered secrets to a moon that hung low and heavy, bathing the secluded nook in liquid silver. His mind still traversed the lattice, feeling the steady, repaired thrum of the Beams, the quiet joy of a gunslinger’s reclaimed peace. It was a good quiet, but it was vast, and it left a hollow echo in the center of him, a protector’s loneliness that not even the bond could fully touch.
The french doors whispered open behind him. He didn’t turn. He knew the cadence of their bare feet on the flagstones, the unique frequency of their presence in the wire.
Lena appeared first, a silhouette carved from shadow and desire. The moon caught the curve of her hip, the swell of her breast barely contained by a scrap of black lace that served as a top. Below, a G-string of the same material disappeared between the lush rounds of her ass. Her dark hair was sleep-tousled, her eyes bright with intent.
Briana followed, a step behind and to the left, as always. Sombra’s Sombra. Her olive skin drank the moonlight, turning it into something ancient and cool. Her own sheer top was silver, her bottoms a mere string bisecting a perfect, sinful curve. Her black hair fell like a waterfall down her back, and her green-blue eyes held a stillness that contrasted with Lena’s spark.
They were a vision of contradictory truths—innocence and debauchery, devotion and pure, unadulterated lust.
Bruce took a drag of his cigarette, the ember flaring, painting their approaching forms in brief, hellish red. “Well,” he said, his voice a low rasp in the cricket-filled night. “Aren’t you two a vision of beauty and sin for these tired eyes.”
Lena stopped before him, hands on her hips. The mischievous smile that played on her full lips was all challenge. “How dare you,” she said, the words a feigned scold dripping with affection. “How dare you not awake us on your return, my love? We felt the shift in the bond. We felt you… settle. And you come out here to brood alone?”
Briana said nothing. She simply moved to the side of the chaise and knelt, her head resting against his thigh, a silent rebuke of his solitude.
Bruce stubbed the cigarette out in a heavy glass ashtray. He set the bourbon down. “Wasn’t brooding,” he said, his hand coming to rest on Briana’s head, fingers threading through her ink-black hair. “Was digesting. Fixed a big fucking thing today.”
“We know,” Lena breathed, her bravado softening. She stepped closer, standing between his spread knees. Her scent, jasmine and warm skin, washed over him. “We felt the… the rightness you poured into the worlds. It was beautiful. And then we felt the hunger it left in you.” Her fingers traced the line of his jaw, rough with stubble. “You should have come to us. Let us fill it.”
“I’m here now,” he said, his hazel eyes capturing hers.
“You are,” she agreed. Her fingers drifted down his chest, over the plain cotton of his shirt, to the waistband of his sleep pants. She didn’t ask. She hooked her thumbs and pulled them down, freeing his cock. It was semi-hard, thick and heavy even at rest. The moonlight glazed it in pale light.
Lena let out a soft, reverent sigh. “Look at that, Bri. Even tired, he’s a monument.”
Briana lifted her head, her clear eyes taking him in. She leaned forward and, without preamble, licked a slow, flat stripe from his balls to the tip. Bruce’s breath hitched. Her tongue was cool, her mouth a promise of stillness. She took him in, just the head, sucking gently, her hand wrapping around the base.
Lena watched, her own breath coming faster. She shed the pointless lace top, her full breasts swaying, nipples tight and dark. She then shimmied out of the G-string, kicking it aside. Completely naked, she was a goddess of potential made flesh—every curve a possibility, every breath an invitation. She climbed onto the chaise, straddling his legs, not touching his cock where Briana worshipped it, but leaning forward to claim his mouth.
Her kiss was not gentle. It was a claiming. Her tongue plunged into his mouth, tasting of sleep and mint and her own unique fire. Bruce growled, his hands gripping her ass, pulling her tight against him. He could feel her heat, the wetness already soaking his stomach.
Briana worked him steadily, her mouth a perfect, cool vise, her hand pumping what she couldn’t yet take. He was fully hard now, a thick, veined pillar of flesh that Briana’s slender hand could barely circle.
“Fuck, look at you,” Lena broke the kiss, panting. She looked down at Briana’s head bobbing in her lap. “Suck his cock, mi sombra. Get him nice and wet for me.”
Bruce’s hands slid up Lena’s back, feeling the muscles dance under her skin. “You’re in a hungry mood,” he murmured.
“I’m always in a hungry mood for you,” she countered, her eyes blazing. “And you’ve been across creation playing god. I need you to be a man. Right here. Right now.”
She shifted, rising up on her knees. She reached between them, her hand brushing Briana’s cheek, then taking hold of Bruce’s slick, spit-soaked cock. She guided it to her entrance, the broad head nudging against her soaked folds.
“Watch her, Briana,” Lena commanded, her voice trembling with anticipation. “Watch me take your king.”
Briana pulled off, her lips swollen and wet. She knelt back, her enigmatic eyes fixed on the point of joining.
Lena sank down.
It was a slow, devastating descent. She took him inch by agonizing inch, her head falling back, a choked sob escaping her throat. She was tight, wildly so, her channel a gripping, velvety fist around his invading girth. The fairy lights above twinkled in her dilated eyes.
“Dios mio… Bruce… you’re splitting me…” she gasped, finally seated fully, his pelvis grinding against her.
“You wanted it,” he grunted, his own control fraying at the sensation of her incredible heat. “Now fucking ride it.”
She began to move. It wasn’t a graceful motion. It was a frantic, bouncing, desperate piston of her hips, driving him up into her again and again. The chaise groaned in protest. Her breasts bounced wildly, and she cried out with each impalement, a string of filth and prayer in Spanish and English. “Yes! Ah, fuck me! Tan grande! Don’t stop, don’t ever stop!”
Bruce gripped her hips, helping her, meeting her upward surges with brutal drives of his own. The sound of their joining was obscenely loud in the quiet garden—a wet, slapping rhythm punctuated by Lena’s sharp cries.
Briana watched, unblinking. One of her hands crept between her own legs, her fingers circling her clit in fast, tight circles. Her breathing was silent, but her arousal was a sharp, clean scent on the air, mixing with jasmine.
“Briana,” Bruce growled, his eyes locking on hers. “Come here. Taste her. Taste us.”
Briana moved with preternatural grace. She rose and leaned over Lena’s back, her mouth finding Bruce’s and Lena’s joining. She licked where Lena was stretched wide around Bruce’s shaft, tasting the mix of her nectar and his pre-come. Lena shuddered violently.
“Oh fuck, Bri… yes!” Lena screamed.
The dual sensation—Briana’s clever tongue flicking at her clit and the stretched rim of her cunt, combined with Bruce’s relentless pounding—sent Lena over the edge. Her orgasm was a silent, breathless scream for a second before the sound tore loose. Her inner muscles clamped down on Bruce in a rapid, fluttering series of contractions, milking him. She gushed, her release soaking his cock and balls.
Bruce roared, the pressure unbearable. He pulled Lena down hard onto him and erupted. His come flooded her in hot, pulsing ropes, filling her to overflowing. The feeling of his release triggered another, smaller climax in Lena, and she collapsed forward onto his chest, trembling and gasping.
Briana finally made a sound—a soft, shuddering sigh. She came silently against her own fingers, her body tensing like a drawn bow before going limp.
For long moments, the only sounds were their ragged breaths and the crickets. Bruce held Lena to him, his cock still buried inside her, both of them slick and spent. Briana curled beside them on the narrow chaise, her head on Bruce’s shoulder, her hand resting on Lena’s hip.
The moon had climbed higher, bleaching the world of color.
“You’re not tired anymore,” Lena mumbled into his chest, a satisfied smile in her voice.
“No,” Bruce admitted, his hand stroking her back. “I’m not.”
Briana spoke, her voice the first cool breeze after a fire. “The echo from the other one… the gunslinger’s woman. It’s still there. On the edge of the bond. It’s… a longing.”
Bruce nodded, feeling it too—a faint, persistent harmonic of Susan’s hunger, a door left ajar. “It is.”
Lena lifted her head, her eyes serious now. “She’s a part of the story now. Whether she’s here or there.”
“She is,” Bruce said.
He looked from Lena’s fiercely devoted face to Briana’s serene, watchful one. The hollow feeling was gone, filled with their heat, their weight, their love. The universe outside this garden was vast and full of echoes, but here, under the magnolia, with his Sombra and her shadow, he was anchored. The protector could rest. The man was home.
But as he closed his eyes, the faint, yearning ping from across the worlds persisted—a whisper of unfinished business, a potential yet to be fully explored. It wasn’t a demand. It was an invitation. And Bruce knew, with a certainty that was both thrilling and wearying, that he would, eventually, have to answer it.
Sleep took him there on the chaise, with Lena’s weight a comforting press on his chest and Briana’s cool skin against his side. The garden faded, not into darkness, but into a field of tall, dry grass under a star-smeared sky that felt both endless and intimate. He knew it was a dream because the air hummed with a silent, resonant frequency that was distinctly Susan.
She stood a few feet away, wearing a simple white dress, her hands clasped before her. The moonlight here was kinder, softening the edges of her, but her blue eyes held a luminous intensity they hadn’t possessed before.
“You have power, Susan,” Bruce said, his dream-voice calm. He felt no surprise, only a deep, pulling curiosity. “Did you always?”
She shook her head, a curl of wheat-colored hair brushing her cheek. “No. At least, if I did, I didn’t know it.” She looked down at her own hands, then back at him. “It’s burgeoning. Since I came back.”
Bruce stepped closer. The grass whispered against his legs. “What was it like?” he asked, the question leaving him with a gravity he hadn’t expected. “The time in between.”
A small, sad smile touched her lips. “I guess it makes sense you’d want to know. Because it’s something you’ll never experience, is it?”
He shook his head slowly. “No, I won’t. Nor my wives. Or my children.”
She nodded, accepting this cosmic truth. “It was not something I can really explain.” She reached out, her fingers pale in the starlight. “I think I can show you, though.”
She took his hand. Her touch was not quite solid; it was a vibration, a memory of texture. Before the dream could shift, Bruce held firm. “Wait,” he said. “Before you show me, tell me, Susan. Why are you here? In my dream?”
Her gaze was unwavering, guileless. “Because I love you,” she said simply.
The words, delivered without artifice or agenda, landed in the center of his being with the force of a physical blow. “But Roland, Susan? He’s your long-lost love, back to life and reunited. I won’t interfere in that. He’s my friend. He’s spent thousands of years hating himself for what happened to you. He’s never loved another woman.”
“I know that, Bruce,” she said, her voice thick. “And that’s why he loves you. I can’t explain what I feel when I look at you. It’s like… a completion of a circle I didn’t know was open. But if it’s only in my sleep, at least I can be with you here. I love Roland, and I would never hurt him.”
Bruce studied her face, the truth shining in her like the stars above. “I believe you, Susan. But it’s dangerous for our hearts to continue this.”
“I told him I loved you, Bruce. He knows. He’s not upset with us.” She gave a faint, bewildered shrug. “It’s like he expected it.”
Bruce nodded slowly, the image of Roland’s understanding laugh in the Gilead square returning to him. The gunslinger’s weary wisdom encompassed more than any of them could fathom. “Then show me,” he said.
Her hand tightened in his, and the dreamscape dissolved.
There was no light, no sound, no touch. It was not darkness, but the absence of all sensory input. It was not stillness, but the utter negation of time. He was not Bruce, nor was he a consciousness; he was a faint point of awareness adrift in a cosmic vacuum where memory and identity bled away like smoke. There was no pain, no fear—only a profound, echoing loneliness that predated the universe. It was the silence between the notes of creation, and it went on forever.
Then, a vibration. A single, dissonant chord thrumming through the nothing. It was the Cry of the Banshee, the lament of All-World as the Beams failed. It was a hook, ragged and sharp, catching the frayed edge of her awareness, and it hurt. It was the first feeling in an eternity of none, and it was agony. The vibration became a pull, a terrible, gravitational drag toward a specific, crumbling point of reality.
The showing ceased.
They were back in the field, on their knees, foreheads nearly touching. Bruce was gasping, his dream-body shaking with the aftershock of that absolute null followed by that horrific, painful yank back into being. Susan’s eyes were wide, wet with shared trauma.
“You were called back,” Bruce breathed, the understanding dawning. “The repair of the Beams… it didn’t just fix the structure. It called all lost things home. You were a lost thing.”
“I was nothing,” she whispered, a tear tracing a path through the starlight on her cheek. “And then I was something, and it was because of you. Your will. Your… fixing.”
The emotional raw-ness of it, the brutal vulnerability of her showing, stripped away the last of his reserve. The protector in him, the man who had wrought this miracle, wanted to soothe the awful echo he’d felt. The man who loved his wives and understood want saw the same desperate need in her eyes that he’d felt in the garden.
He cupped her face, his thumb brushing away the tear. Her skin was warm now, real. “Susan,” he said, her name a surrender.
She kissed him. It was not the hungry, experienced kiss of his lovers. It was the trembling, urgent kiss of someone relearning life, pouring all the confusion and gratitude and yearning of her impossible second chance into the connection. It was innocent and profound, and it shattered him.
His hands slid from her face, down the coarse linen of her dress, finding the hem. He broke the kiss, his own breath ragged. “I need to feel you,” he said, the words a gravelly confession. “Not a dream of you. You.”
She nodded, her fingers fumbling with the simple ties at the front of her dress. It fell open, then pooled around her waist as she knelt in the grass. Her body was pale and slender in the starlight, her breasts small and tipped with pink, her waist nipping in before flaring to the hips that had gripped Jake so fiercely. The reality of her, here in this between-place, was more potent than any memory.
Bruce didn’t undress. The dream logic focused only on essential truth. He pushed his own clothing aside, freeing his erection, which was already fully, achingly hard. The sight of it, thick and rampant, made her swallow hard, a flicker of that familiar, hungry awe replacing the sorrow in her eyes.
“Like before?” she asked, her voice husky.
“No,” he said, lying back in the dry, sweet-smelling grass and pulling her atop him. “Like this. You take me. You control it.”
She straddled his hips, her hands braced on his chest. She looked down at where their bodies met, guiding him with one hand. The broad, spongy head of his cock pressed against her entrance, already slick with her arousal. She sank down slowly, a low, continuous moan escaping her as she impaled herself. It was a tight, burning, glorious fit. Her head fell back, the tendons in her neck standing out as she took every last, devastating inch until she was fully seated, her ass resting on his thighs.
“Oh, God… Bruce…” she whimpered, her inner walls fluttering wildly around the massive invasion.
“Move,” he commanded, his hands gripping her hips. “Show me you’re alive.”
She began to ride him. It was clumsy at first, a frantic, bouncing rhythm that soon found a deep, rolling grind. Each downward plunge forced a gasp from her lips. Her small breasts quivered with the motion. He could feel everything—the clutch of her cunt, the way her body struggled to accommodate him, the hot rush of her juices coating his shaft.
“Fuck, yes,” he groaned, his hips arching up to meet her. “That’s it. Take all of it, you beautiful, resurrected girl.”
Her moans turned into broken sentences. “It’s so… full… I can feel you… in my belly….” Her pace increased, becoming more desperate. “It’s different… without Jake… just you… just you filling me…”
He sat up suddenly, wrapping his arms around her, crushing her to his chest without breaking their union. He took one of her nipples into his mouth, sucking hard, biting gently. She cried out, her fingers tangling in his short hair. He switched to the other, lavishing it with the same rough attention.
“Come for me, Susan,” he growled against her skin, his own climax coiling tight at the base of his spine. “Come all over my cock. Let me feel that second life.”
The command, the sensation, the overwhelming reality of him tipped her over. Her orgasm wasn’t the continuous, squirting frenzy of before. It was a deep, internal detonation that shook her frame. She stiffened, her mouth open in a soundless scream, her channel gripping him in rhythmic, vise-like pulses that milked him irresistibly.
It dragged his own release from him. With a final, driving thrust up into her clenching heat, he came. His orgasm was a torrent, a flooding eruption that filled her, spurt after hot spurt, marking her rebirth with his essence. She collapsed against him, sobbing, as he emptied himself inside her.
They stayed locked together, in the grass, under the false stars. He could feel the warm, sticky proof of their joining leaking between them.
“It’s not enough,” she murmured into his neck, her voice thick with sleep and satisfaction and despair. “Dreams aren’t enough. But it’s what we have.”
He held her, the echo of the null still chilling his soul, now mixed with the warm weight of her in his arms. The protector had saved her. The man had just claimed her. And the universe, with its repaired Beams and its reopened doors, hummed with a new and complicated potential.
The dream began to fray at the edges, the stars dimming. Her form grew less distinct in his arms.
He would have to answer the call. Not just a visit. A reckoning. The thrilling, wearying certainty solidified into a plan.