Shadow Meets Bonfire

A Dance of Enticement

Shadow Meets Bonfire

The violin hums. Its low vibration creeps out across the rug-laden space around the bonfire and sets the dark silhouettes into motion. Serpentine figures undulate and ripple. Voluptuous bodies sway and draw curvaceous hip-shapes against the light. Eyes close. Hearts soar. The violin’s wail arcs out across the licking flames as the drummers set an intoxicating pace.

The night captures me, wrapping me up inside the music and the veil that enshrouds me from head to heart—all except my eyes. That veil makes a mirror of the starry sky: dark fabric pierced with tiny hints of light. The campfire invades the soft cloth with heat and smoke, searing into my throat and lungs with every breath. I love that scent. That raw sensation. Beneath my bare feet, the ground resonates with every deep thrum of the drum, while the breeze teases my veil, pushing it against my face and toying with its edges.

Nothing exists except these elemental impulses, the musical urging, and the way it all binds together to move me. I don’t think, don’t plan, don’t decide. For however long they play together, I will give myself up to their whispers, and fall. My head tips back. My hips and spine roll like slow seas of lava. My arms open to let the darkened heavens stream into my heart.

My mouth spreads wide in a smile. I can feel the rapture painted across my face—most of it is veiled and hidden. This is all for me and the moment. I am more spirit than flesh-and-blood right now, and when I finally open my eyes, I discover that I am alone on the rugs.

All the other dancers have moved to the sides to watch me. Everyone is watching. His gaze is the most intent of all. We’ve been spiraling around each other for days, caught in each other’s gravity, ensnared upon each other’s gazes. His smile is a thing made of shadow, honey and imminent combustion. I dearly love the blending of darkness and sweet, and I am a being of fire, so tonight there is no more hesitation. No more fighting it.

There is only him and me, the firelight, and the night.

Even sound disappears, although the music’s puppetting strings remain affixed to my body. At the edge of the circle where the fire’s glow gives way to the dark, he watches me with large, unblinking eyes. He tells me in that look—he is as enchanted by me as I am by him.

I reach out a hand to him, offer him a beckoning gesture with my fingertips. His gaze melts further. My hand draws back to my heart and joins its mate. My fingers trace spirals in the air—an echo of the trajectory we’ve been on since we collided on the dusty road.

Him—heat, coursing sweat, steel, leather, snarl.

Me—cotton, loose hair, exhaustion, bruises and bite.

But I disarmed him with a sentence. That’s all right. He’s a warrior to his core, and he carries more than one blade. His bristling wall of weapons descended and suddenly, with his decided half-step into my space, it surrounded me, stabbing outward at anything that might think to encroach upon this grave conversation between us. Anything that might encroach upon me.

And that disarmed me.

But only long enough for us to take two matched steps backwards, bow to each other, and about-face, retreating to our respective camps.

Our camps are quite at odds, but we really can’t be bothered to give a shit about that as we watch each other across that boundary between my firelight and the shadow in which he stands.

As my fingers spiral before my heart, I wind up everything that has bloomed there at his coaxing. I bind it all into a glowing, pulsating ball. Lifting only my eyes, I send it all to him—the passion, the excitement. The intrigue, sweetness, longing.

His chest expands with his breath and catches, then falls with the more controlled exhalation that exits his suddenly open mouth. The corners of his lips nudge up toward a grin that speaks of bewitchment and the urge to cross distances. To cross this rug. To cross a line.

I want him to cross the line. I halted him the first time he tried it. He ran face first into my wall. “Not too aggressive,” I replied to his apology. My face was mostly hidden then, too, by my helmet with its Greek cat-eyes and black face-mantle. I winked and grinned up at him. “Just too soon.” My steel gauntlet grazed his breastplate and gave two little metallic thumps before I headed down the grassy hillside, off the battlefield.

Now tonight, as we speak to each other across this expanse of carpet, I yearn to crumble my wall to dust and re-erect it around both our backs, the way he did with his. I long to shed everything that shields my smile.

But not yet. Not here.

Turning to face him fully, I open my arms to him. All those embers in his gaze ignite. With my face veiled like this, all he’s got to work with are my eyes and my arm movements. It’s enough.

But not nearly.

He can’t see my Cheshire Cat smirk as I ripple my hands in a downward motion. My eyes follow them as they halt in a frame around the creamy, fringed belt that outlines the shape of my hips in stark contrast to the black-and-red of my coat. It’s my flame coat, the one that paints a bonfire up my front with more flames licking at my ass.

My hips take over. He has dutifully followed the unspoken commands that my hands and eyes lured him into. It’s like magic, that move. Not just rippling the fingers downward, but following them with the eyes. His gaze instinctually followed suit and now he’s staring at the way my hips swivel.

I smirk harder. He must have felt it, because his eyes spring back up to meet mine.

The only thing he can hear of my “YES” comes from my squint. Encouragement, smolder, snarl, challenge. It’s always challenge between the two of us. Doy, we’re both fighters, and we only slammed our armored bodies and our weapons into other armored bodies in a perfectly synchronized dance that laid waste to our foes all afternoon.

We fit together really well out there on the field.

Now I want to know how well we’d fit together off it. I shove my urgency into my feet, which forces all that fringe and my belt tassels to fly. The drummers note the shift. They surge to catch me, match me. Even the bonfire feels hotter, echoing everything that is passing from my eyes into his and back again.

My hands curl and pulse alongside my hips like stoking the furnace that rages where my thighs meet. Dancer thighs. Fighter thighs. The heat rises up through those flames on my coat. When they crest at my heart, they singe up into my gaze and down my arms, out through my palms. My feet dig into the ground, adding power to my slingshotting hips.

I know what that movement can do to a man. The raw power behind my hip-twist sometimes slams images into their minds, just like all those jujcy hip circles and the weighty downward drop of my pelvis. I’ve used those moves with my knees dug in alongside enough men’s hips to know exactly what he’s imagining.

“YES,” I tell him with my eyes when he meets my gaze again.

“YES. You’re seeing that correctly. And YES. It would be. And YES. I can. And YES. This time…oh, this time, I will.”

And I do.

But not yet. Because I’m a performer. An entertainer and a storyteller, and sometimes I know exactly when to draw it out, when to draw him in, when to draw all those delicious circles and infinite knots with hips and hands full of promise and—

Leave.

I about-face and flounce off around the circle where some of my friends are clumped. I give them the look like, “Come on, I’m not here to perform,” even though that’s a bunch of bullshit. But the best performances are dredged up from the depths of truth and I really do want to dance with my friends, so I call them back out to join me.

At the last second, I flash one glance back at him, just so he knows. No. That wasn’t a cruel, meaningless tease. That wasn’t part of the show. I mean, sure, I allowed everybody to witness the opening shot I fired across his bow.

I don’t take shots like that very often, and I’ve never taken aim like this at a man who doesn’t already know what it feels like to have these moves executed on him while he’s on his back beneath me, my nails dug into his chest, my sweat and my love dripping down upon him.

This man has no clue.

Yet.

I flash him that look to inform him that I am not remotely done with this dance. Because I suspect that I’d like to give him that knowledge, but I have a few more questions that need answering. Questions that will have to be posed in a far more intimate setting than this one. Questions that shouldn’t be fired off like shotgun hips and flame-whipping hair.

Those types of things need to be asked like the touch of one fingertip upon a sleeve or like my hair’s soft ends grazing his wrist as I turn my face toward his. Other questions can only be answered in the space between his breath and mine.

So I carouse with my friends and work myself into a spinning frenzy, arms wide open, head flung back, skirts and veils and fire coat a-flare.

I halt. All the layers keep swirling until they can swirl no more. They twine around my legs, then softly unwind. With the way my gaze pierces into him, his friends do that elbow-gouging-ribs thing, and I enjoy giving him that pleasure.

When I finally come off the carpets, a-drip in a layer of sweat as thick as that black veil covering me, he answers one of my questions by bringing me a cup of water. He asks one of his own with his sensuous lips pressed tight against the full-blown grin that he can’t hide in his eyes.

I slide my hand under my face-veil, lift it, lift my own eyes, lift the cup to my mouth.

The grin cracks across his whole face. Apparently he likes my answer.

I like the way he likes it. As direct as his sword-thrust. As unhesitant as the descending slice of his six-foot glaive. And so very, very sweet.

---

There was more water that night in a cook tent under the stars. There was more sweat, too. Mine. His. Ours, right there in the golden glow of a yurt-shaped tent with more carpets and less light than the place where we started asking those quieter questions. The drums kept pounding, but from a distance. This time, I ignored them. The rhythm of my hips was solely my own, except when it was the one he set. Or when we wove the pace from everything that passed through the space between our eyes, our breath, our laughter. Eventually our hearts.

But that is mine and it’s his.

Sometimes I totally kiss and tell. Sometimes I’ll tell you everything in great detail because there’s something I learned or something I need you to know from a moment that passed between my body and someone else’s. But other times, I need to draw you in, draw it out, draw you right up in here with us and—

Leave.

Leave you to your own imagining.

We’re not done with this dance. Not by half.

But to tell you the rest of what passed between me and him requires another setting. Another time. Allow me to leave you with the knowledge that YES. The thrust behind his big weapon on the field pretty much said it all. And YES. Being slammed down on his bed was as good as being slammed by him in armor, and YES. I did fuck him straight off the battlefield that one day before either of us could get our armor off and it was absolutely, resolutely as hot as you can imagine.

Or maybe hotter. If you’ve never fucked your lover while still in armor, you can’t actually have a clue. I highly recommend doing some field experiments, if you’re into that sort of thing.

But those are all tales for another day when I'm in a very different mood.

My mood tonight is…

---

© 2022 Hartebeast

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