A Centaur for Libby Read online

  An Ellora’s Cave Romantica Publication

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  A Centaur for Libby

  ISBN # 1-4199-0538-4

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  A Centaur for Libby Copyright© 2006 Reese Gabriel

  Edited by Pamela Campbell.

  Cover art by Lissa Waitley & Syneca.

  Electronic book Publication: December 2006

  This book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.

  A Centaur for Libby

  Reese Gabriel

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Formica: The Diller Corporation

  Good Humor: Good Humor Corporation

  Jell-O: Kraft Foods Holdings, Inc.

  Chapter One

  Dark-haired Libby Daniels, public defender extraordinaire, champion of the hopeless and overall queen of lost causes, squirmed uncomfortably in the deep leather chair.

  This was the moment she had been dreading for the past thirty minutes of therapy—having to come clean with the irrepressible Dr. Agatha Myles about her latest recurrent sex dream. Libby usually had a new one for each session and this one was a doozy.

  It involved a centaur and a dark beach. Oh god, she could imagine it even now, as if she were there on the mysterious sands of crystal, beneath that silvery-purple moon, alien and yet so familiar. His face, cast ever in shadow, yet revealing itself nonetheless, handsomer than any movie star. His chest sculpted like a god, his legs shaped like those of the finest racehorse. And that cock, large and beautiful, as if shaped by sculptor’s hands, full of life, the perfect mix of beast and man and god. Such a cock to touch, to taste…to feel inside her.

  Libby shuddered. How could she even begin talking about it?

  Up until now her dreams had been tame, even amusing. Like the one where she was screwing Randall Mason, the young district attorney, in front of an entire jury that had been charged with judging the quality of her moves. Or the one where she went down on Tony, the buff bailiff, unzipping his uniform trousers and pulling out his long snake of a cock, sucking it greedily into her mouth, hard and pulsing as Judge Cartwright banged her gavel screaming, “Out of order.”

  In comparison, her new dream was perverted. She probably should have asked for medication a while ago and maybe then she could have avoided the place she was at now, dreading sleep for fear of once again meeting and being seduced by the wondrous creature with deep as the sea eyes and long, dark hair that blew in the perpetual breeze.

  It made her wet, just thinking about it.

  “But I didn’t get to tell you everything about work yet.” She attempted a final, desperate diversion. “There’s this new judge in Part B, right? Well, he’s totally got it in for all us public defenders and last week he—”

  Agatha cut her off, holding up a well-tanned, wrinkled hand. She did so with great dramatic flare, the warm glow of turquoise rings and mauve nail polish stopping Libby dead in her tracks. “Libra Daniels,” said the sixty-three-year-old diva of psychoanalysis who could pass for forty-five on a good day. “Are we displaying avoidance behavior?”

  Libby frowned. “You know you are harder on me than any district attorney, don’t you?”

  “That, my dear,” she said, wrinkling her nose and pushing her herringbone glasses up, “is because I love you like a daughter. Also you happen to pay me a good deal of money.”

  “My insurance pays. I just sit here and suffer,” Libby groused.

  “And suffer you shall.” Agatha waved an arm, bare feet tucked up underneath her Indian style as she held court on her pride-and-joy red leather couch, fifty-minute session clock beside her on a matching table, inoperable, no batteries in it for years.

  A crocheted sign above it in a mahogany frame said “Waste not…and you’re not really living”. Everywhere on her walls were little pictures and signs. She had pillows, too—wild and loud—from her travels throughout the world.

  Libby had always admired women like Aggy. So thoroughly professional and respected by males yet able to project as much femininity as they liked. For Libby it was a comical balancing act. One in which she was forever falling flat on her face. Her final answer had been repression, repression, repression. Severe hairstyle, pantsuits, minimal perfume, low heels and no dating. The price for all this according to Aggy—who insisted everyone call her by her first name—was the dreams.

  Libby sighed. “I’ll tell you my latest dream but only if you promise you won’t freak.”

  “My dear girl,” she chortled. “I’ve been in this business since you were in diapers. Do you really think there is anything I haven’t heard by now?”

  “You may have to eat your words, Aggy, this one is pretty kinky.”

  “Don’t tell me, Brad Pitt and George Clooney fighting over you in the nude, Jell-O wrestling outside a café on the French Riviera while you sip champagne from a priceless flute?”

  “No, though that would be normal in comparison to mine.”

  “Oh, thank the stars,” she exuded. “Do give me all the gory details. I haven’t heard anything juicy all day.”

  “It has a centaur in it,” said Libby, giving her a last chance to beg off hearing it.

  Her eyes lit. “Mythology, eh? Yummy. Herr Freud would have a field day. Does your centaur smoke a cigar by any chance?”

  “No, he gallops up on me in the dark. I am standing on this beach and he rides up, the wind in his hair, beautiful dark hair.” Libby could picture it so easily, she could slip away, she could touch herself, right here and now. “He has the most beautiful face, I can tell by the shadows, but I can’t ever make out the details. Just the eyes, reflecting purple moonlight. The eyes are blue. His chest is bare, his skin is so healthy and rugged, he is very muscular and he wants me, Aggy, with a passion and desire I can’t begin to absorb.”

  “I assume he makes it past the proverbial first base?” Aggy inquired. “Though I do have a question or two about logistics. Four-legged man, two-legged woman…”

  “That’s the amazing thing. I always ask him that right off and he answers, telling me not to worry. ‘Let things be,’ he says. ‘Let it all fall into place.’ Then he says more, speaking to me, with this magnificent deep voice, telling me I am the most beautiful creature he has ever seen and he will die if he does not make love to me.

  “‘Have you seen what your sex does to me?’ he asks. And that’s when he shows me his erection. He rears up on two legs on this amazing sand—clear and pure as diamonds—and reveals his cock and balls. The most wonderful shaft I have ever seen, long and tapered, completely human, reddish-purple from the veins crisscrossing the surface, surging with blood. His balls are so full and tight and high. He is uncircumcised, his cock points at me proudly, tapering like a carved Greek statue, cool and powerful. But I know there is so much heat in it. I want to touch it, I want to be touched. I’m still afraid. The centaur tells me not to fight it. We are going to make love and it would be wrong for me to resist. ‘Where there is this much lust, nature will find a way,’ he says.”

  “Some pretty impressive pickup lines,” quipped Agatha, shaking her head, dangling turquoise earrings from the reservation she visited twice a year and where she was a certified shaman. “I half expected you to tell me the creature asks you your zodiac si
gn.”

  “Nothing nearly so corny. That’s the strange part, Agatha. It doesn’t feel like something I am making up. I mean I am not into astrology and I am not into bizarre sex.”

  “You’re not into sex, period, dear. That’s the problem with your whole generation—you totally overlook the value of a completely meaningless fuck.”

  Libby chuckled. “Just what I need to hear. Are you sure the state board knows what it is you tell your clients?”

  “No, dear, but I am protected by confidentiality.”

  “I thought that was for me, not you?”

  “Only on alternate months. Tell me more about the horny Sagittarian. How does he get his arrow into you?”

  “Well, I am not wearing any clothes, which is convenient. My nipples always get erect when he approaches, and as soon as I see that cock my pussy starts up like a fountain. Things get a little blurry—we always end up with a fire and a bottle of wine, wrapped in leather. The shape is curved. He has these goblets. We toast and I drink. The wine heats my belly and goes straight to my head. He tells me it’s magic.”

  “Don’t they always?”

  “I’m lightheaded. We dance around the fire. He bends down so I can hop on his back. My pussy is tingling and throbbing. We don’t start moving just yet. He wants to prepare me. He reaches behind him with his hands, over his head and runs them through my hair, encouraging me to put my lips to his strong neck. I kiss him, I touch his hair, so incredibly wild—like a lion’s mane, though I’ve never touched one.

  “I moan a little, which encourages him to turn his head and give me a kiss. My mouth opens to him, I am breathless. He steals my very heartbeat. I am in some other dimension.

  “I hear him whispering to me, encouraging me to touch him, to wrap my hands around his waist. He’s all muscle, like a man is supposed to be. I let my palms push up his stomach, up to his pectorals. I cover his nipples, feel them harden in my hand.

  “‘Hold on, my beloved,’ he says and off we go, galloping up and down the beach. I keep a tight grip. He is so strong and so powerful. I have this overwhelming feeling of trust.

  “He angles toward the water as he runs. The waves splash up over his back, they are like a sauna, they exhilarate me and make my skin tingle all over. All I can think about is coming, all over his back. I’m embarrassed. Every time, I’m embarrassed and he always says the same thing.

  “‘You mustn’t fight,’ he tells me. ‘Let it happen.’

  “I revel in his mastery, in the wickedness of the situation. He is controlling me. I have my legs spread on a centaur’s back, my pussy lips rubbing against his smooth horse hide. I am dripping-wet, I am throbbing with need. I cry out and I climax, loud and hard. This is what wakes me up. Usually I have my hand between my legs, or sometimes I’ll be humping my pillow. Once I had my behind sticking up in the air. I was facedown, practically whimpering. Every night for the last week, this is how it’s been.

  “So…what do you think? Am I a sex pervert?”

  “I don’t know, are you?”

  “Aggy, please. I don’t need the self-help stuff. Just tell me what this means. I’m a little freaked-out. I mean I haven’t told anyone so far and I wasn’t going to, but now that I have, it sounds just way too weird.”

  “You’re not the first person in history to dream metaphorically about sex. Generally it indicates you are trying to work something out.”

  “Whew. I was afraid you were going to say I needed to get laid.”

  “I don’t have to. You just did.”

  “Damn it. You always get me like that.”

  “It’s my job. I will say one thing that is interesting, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “From what you tell me, you never do get hold of that cock, do you?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it, but no. He always tells me it’s going to happen but I come first on his back and then I wake up.”

  “Why do you suppose you cheat him like that?”

  “Cheat who? The centaur!? But he’s not even real.”

  “He is to you. He comes to you every night, giving all he has and you take from him and don’t give back. No wonder that sand and moon is blue—as much of a case of blue balls as you are giving him.”

  “You’re crazy. I’m just standing there on the beach.”

  “You’re naked.”

  “A woman can be naked without it being sexual, you always tell me that.”

  “Can being the operative word. You aren’t out there to fly a kite. You want to get laid. You just don’t want to have to ask.”

  Libby looked miserably at the clock. “I really wish you would fix that thing. You have a four o’clock, I know you do.”

  “My four o’clock will wait. I had the waiting room stocked with all new magazines this week. Stop the denial. Face up to this. You are so timid about sex you won’t have it in real life or even in your dreams. Not only that, you won’t allow your imagination to entertain the idea of a human lover, so you create a mythical one. One whose sexual parts are directly connected to the beast.”

  “So how do I stop them?”

  “The dreams? You satisfy your new friend, that’s how. You let him put that monster cock deep in your dream pussy. You swallow him down your dream throat and taste that equine saltiness. I would tell you to go anal but that might be a bit much in this case.”

  “I’ve had fantasies,” Libby admitted, getting to yet another thing she had been afraid to admit to a living soul. “When I least want them, naturally. In court, while I’m trying to prepare a case. I’ll just start wondering. How would a centaur do it? Copulate with a human woman, I mean. Could he take me from behind, with me on all fours, my sex pointed up for penetration? What if I lie on my back, propped up and he could lower himself down, somehow?”

  “You’re thinking too much,” concluded Agatha. “That’s why it’s not happened yet. You thought too much with Brad and with Allen before him and look where that got you.”

  “Things would never have worked with Brad. He was hell-bent on making partner at his firm. I would always have been number two. And his ethics sucked. As for Allen, he was irresponsible. Where was he going to end up, playing a silly guitar at small-time bars the rest of his life?”

  “I don’t know,” Aggy mused. “Happy, maybe?”

  “Happy doesn’t build 401Ks,” Libby retorted. “Or pay for smart-aleck therapists.”

  “Lucky for me you have enough insurance money…and neuroses to keep me in seaweed wraps and turquoise the rest of my life.”

  Libby groaned, just wanting it out of her mind. The images crowding her thoughts, her naked self on that beach in her hands and knees, moaning as the beast that was also a man pushed his red-hot erection deep into her wet and ready opening, filling her and opening her and driving her utterly mad with passion, making her cry out, begging to know his name, his identity, begging for him to come inside her, to make her his creature, his glorious being of love and lust.

  “I have to do something, Aggy,” she despaired. “I cannot go on like this.”

  “I hate to tell you, dear, but at twenty-seven, you are going to have to go on like this for quite a while. If I were you, I would make the best of it. Enjoy your centaur, be flattered in his interest. Try and relax enough to be available for him.”

  “But he isn’t real,” Libby exclaimed, feeling herself rise to that inevitable climax of aggravation which ended every session with Agatha.

  Agatha waxed philosophical. “Lao-Tze once said, ‘A man goes to sleep and dreams he is a butterfly. When he awakens, he asks, am I man who dreamed of being a butterfly or am I butterfly who dreamed of being a man?’”

  “So you’re saying I could be that woman on the beach who dreams of being a lawyer?”

  “Yes. She is probably sitting at her therapist’s right now trying to figure out how to get her pathetic dream-self laid so she can have some fun at night.”

  “Ha-ha, very funny.”

  “Ti
me’s up.”

  “Prove it. You don’t even have a clock.”

  “Yes, but you’re mad, that’s how I know.”

  “Do you have any clue how totally backwards you do everything? I came in here nice and calm and now I’m ready to tear my hair out.”

  “That way I know you’ll come back. Think how bored we would both be if you didn’t.” Aggy stood, in anticipation of their make-up hug.

  “Perish the thought.” Libby folded herself into the older woman’s arms. This might not be by the book but it always felt right.

  “Now scoot,” said Aggy. “And you better land that centaur fast before I get my claws into him. And don’t think I won’t. I know where you dream.”

  Libby couldn’t help but smile.

  Aggy was right, she needed to chill out, enjoy life a little more.

  Of course she wouldn’t, which was one of the reasons Libby kept coming back.

  Sure would be nice to land that centaur, though. A plain old man would do, too, in a pinch.

  And if he was even half as exciting and half as good-looking she would be eating out of his hand…for life.

  * * * * *

  Human beings were not a myth, nor was their fantasy world known as Earth. This was the conclusion reached by Markos the Centaur shortly after appearing from thin air in the middle of a strange forest of high, steel towers, points sharp as arrows.

  His first clue came when he looked down and saw that his four legs had been replaced by two. Gone were his hooves and tail as well. The second clue came in the form of an angry blaring sound. A kind of roaring metal creature was in front of him, quite large, with a head popping out a window on the side.

  “Get out of the street, jackass!”

  Markos was all set to point out that he was not a jackass but a centaur, but more of the horn noises started in. The metal things were in a line, some like carriages, and others breathing smoke, loud as dragons. Inside each he saw the unhappy faces, calling out to him.