Mischief Under The Mistletoe Read online

  Make me take it, she sobbed. Make me take it like a bad girl. I mean good! I mean bad.

  She’d thrash her head on the pillow, holding her own legs for him while he laughed breathlessly and gave her what they both wanted.

  Tons and tons of crazy cake.

  His cock was hot, hard, throbbing to the rhythm of the imaginary thrusts he used to pound an equally imaginary Ailsa into the bed they weren’t in. His balls tightened; he could feel the wet heat of them slapping against her ass as he pumped without moving. Quivering nerves danced all around the head of his cock, down every sensitive vein of his shaft.

  Play with me, she both wailed and wept, clawing the backs of her knees with her own fingernails as her tiny body erupted around him, and damn if he didn’t erupt too. Calder shot in his own pants to no other stimulation than the shivery orgasms of Ailsa’s phantom body milking at him.

  Calder stopped working, hands shaking, startled to find he couldn’t catch his breath. Startled even more to find Ailsa’s doll was finished, a perfectly carved woman in the palm of his hand from the top of her as-yet hairless head to the bottoms of her tiny feet. He didn’t remember carving her tiny toes, complete with detailed toenails. He didn’t remember poking the holes in her scalp so he could leave her to self-dry, and paint her, and eventually give her hair. He didn’t remember the sun going down, or being aware of the fading light. He’d spent all day at this table. Now weak and trembling, exhausted all the way into the very marrows of his bones, he stared in shock around a room lit only by the embers of what had been a roaring fire when last he’d been aware of it. George Michael’s ‘Last Christmas’ was crooning on the radio. An increasingly uncomfortable wetness was gumming up the inside of his drawers.

  What. The. Hell.

  Hunger gnawed his stomach, the hollowness so severe it was as if he hadn’t eaten in days. Setting Ailsa aside, he gathered his tools, built the fire up again before he started shivering and nuked himself a frozen dinner before he collapsed. He felt odd, wobbly in the knees and fuzzy in his thinking. His hands were shaking. His untouched cock felt oddly raw.

  Ailsa’s doll lay on the table where he’d left her, the sighs of her imaginary voice calling to him while he ate. Play with me...

  He choked down half of the Hot Pocket he’d warmed before the exhaustion became too much. Staggering back to the table, he wrapped Ailsa in a damp cloth so she wouldn’t crack and put her up on a shelf. He barely made it down the hall to bed after that, falling face-first into it still fully dressed.

  Don’t leave me.

  “Just need a little sleep,” he mumbled, eyes closed from the moment his head hit the pillow. “Finish you tomorrow... promise.”

  His imagination was too tired to respond. Or, if it wasn’t, he was too tired to remember what that response had been. He fell asleep. So deeply asleep that he barely woke at all when he felt a soft weight shift the mattress of his bed, or the little five-foot-nothing body that crawled in warm under the quilts beside him.

  He’d never been so thoroughly exhausted in a dream before, but a dream it surely had to be because he vaguely remembered the touch of tiny fingers caressing the length of his jaw.

  “Play with me,” Ailsa whispered, the soft puff of her sweet breath like a kiss upon his lips.

  “Tomorrow,” he promised, unable to open his burning eyes. “I’ll play... tomorrow.”

  And with that, Calder fell back to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “WHEN YOU’VE GROWN UP, my dears, and are as old as I,” the radio was singing when the splash of the morning sun through his bedroom window finally brought Calder back to wakefulness.

  “You’ll often ponder on the years that roll so swiftly by,” a woman cheerfully joined in, but it wasn’t until the rapid whapping-scrap of a whisk beating against his grandmother’s ceramic mixing bowl cut through the lingering fog of sleep that he suddenly realized that voice was separate from the one on the radio. For one thing, it didn’t sound as tinny or as broken and staticy. For another, it was singing off-key. Then he heard the clatter of a pan hitting the top of his lime-green 1950s stovetop, and Calder bolted fully upright in bed, with every nerve firing ‘intruder alert’ and every muscle taut.

  “Toyland! Toyland!” the off-key singing exuberantly cried as he fell out of bed. He hit the floor shoulder first, but that minute pain didn’t stop him from fumbling under the bed frame for the baseball bat that one midnight-burglary in his formative college days had taught him always to keep within reach. Until now, it seemed a silly precaution in a town this small and this remote.

  “Little girl and boy land!” the female voice exclaimed, then burst into giggles, completely unaware that Calder had armed himself and was now creeping his way down the hallway in nothing but his undershorts. What the hell? Where were his clothes? When had he taken them off? He distinctly remembered... Calder glanced back at the bedroom and the scattering of jeans and shirt on the floor where he’d fallen. A sudden cloud of poofing flour rained out through the open kitchen doorway, instantly redirecting his attention.

  “What...” He didn’t mean to say it out loud. It just popped out of him, much as another and then another thicker cloud of flour came puffing out of the kitchen, staining the grey stones white. Then he got mad. Not so mad that he didn’t still sneak up to that open doorway, stealing deeper and deeper glimpses inside until he spotted her, a slender nymph of a woman throwing handfuls of flour up into the air, dancing and laughing as it came raining down again on top of her. “What the hell!” he demanded, forgetting all about sneaking or quiet. Forgetting all about his bat too, particularly when his messy intruder whipped around, blue eyes and pink lips rounding wide in a flour-speckled face. She was even less dressed than he was. Apart from his grandmother’s apron, she was, in fact, completely naked.

  Her shock didn’t last half a second, then she grinned. “You’re awake! Play with me!”

  “Who—” Calder caught himself, the shock of all anger—at the mess and at the intrusion—vanishing in an instant. He knew exactly who this was. “No,” he breathed, because it couldn’t be. Crazy cake notwithstanding, he knew it couldn’t. Things like this didn’t happen to real people in real life. He looked to the shelf where he had put yesterday’s doll and where no doll currently resided, and then he looked at her again.

  Uncertainty had diminished her smile and tainted the blue of her eyes. She was chewing on her bottom lip and tapping her flour-coated fingertips.

  “Who are you?” he made himself ask, but he already knew the answer. He knew it the same way he knew he wasn’t going to like hearing the affirmation of that answer coming out of her perfectly kissable mouth.

  She brightened. “I’m Ailsa. I...” She stole a few hesitant steps closer, tapping her fingers again. “I-I’m a good girl?”

  Calder stared at her, covered in flour. He stared at his kitchen, layered in more except where her few timid footsteps kind of cleaned the floor. His eyes were lying to him. So was his brain. There was simply no way that she could be who he honest-to-God thought she was. Who she said she was. “What,” he asked as evenly as he could, his voice trembling, “are you doing here?”

  How had it happened? And could it unhappen?

  “Making pancakes.” Tucking her hands behind her, she dragged a toe through the flour on the floor. “A-and making it snow.” She worried her hands even more. “Don’t you like snow?”

  He’d lost his mind. There was no other rational explanation. This might be cabin fever, but did one actually hallucinate this realistically from something as pathetic as being cooped up too long? Because she looked real. The flour looked real, too, and made the bottoms of his feet slick as he backed out of the kitchen. He stopped retreating when he bumped into the hallway wall.

  “Don’t.” He pointed at her when she tried to follow. Shoulders sagging, she stopped where she was. Apart from chewing at her bottom lip, she didn’t move. “Don’t touch anything.”

  He went back to his b
edroom, shutting the door firmly behind him. He meant to get dressed, maybe dawdle at it long enough to give himself time to think. But the more he let time tick past, the more he became convinced that he was not hallucinating. His own floured footprints followed him through the bedroom, growing fainter with each step, but never once wavered or vanished on their own. Neither did the mess in the hall, though he only opened the door twice to check. He stopped after that, because both times Ailsa was standing in the kitchen threshold and both times she perked hopefully when she saw him, and both times he couldn’t help but see how she deflated when he quickly shut the door again.

  He stayed in his bedroom for three ungodly-wasteful hours, doing nothing but stewing and thinking and peeing out the bedroom window because he wasn’t ready to trek down the hall right past the girl on his way to the privy. Somewhere in that length of time, however, she must have given up waiting for him to get his shit together. Because when he finally braced himself to deal with the situation, she was gone. The mess was still there, in the hallway, in the kitchen, a blanket of white flour that covered every surface and especially the unfinished doll lying facedown in the threshold. He debated for a long time before he picked her up. His whole hand tingled when he did so, and when he turned her over he found the only clean spots on her were two thin streaks that cut through the flour on her face, from her unpainted eyes to the tips of her chin.

  Dolls couldn’t cry, he told himself, so there was no way those could be tear tracks.

  Right?

  AILSA LIVED SCRUNCHED inside a coffee can on his shelf for a week after that, which was coincidentally, about how long it took him to get all the flour cleaned up out of his house. For such a small cabin, he’d never before noticed how many nooks and crannies there were. Each time he thought he’d swept enough, mopped enough, or wiped enough, he’d pick up and move something and find a spot he’d missed. Also, he had to go down into the wine cellar and bring up more flour. By the end of that week, when there were no more speckles of white on the floor or the counters or the faint dustings of it as far away as the top of his bedroom door and the mantel in the living room for God’s sake, he’d about convinced himself once more that it was all in his head.

  Except he knew it wasn’t. Calder was trying to deal with it, but each time he sat down at his table to work, his gaze was pulled to the coffee can where his imagination kept playing faint sobbing sounds and there he’d be, completely unnerved all over again. He got zero work done, and he couldn’t afford that. Three dolls a week was his self-imposed minimum if he didn’t want to have to break into what little savings he had left. Whether he may or may not be going crazy, that didn’t matter. He didn’t have the luxury of not making dolls.

  So, he pulled himself together. He shook it off and tried twice to sit at his table and create something new. Each time he got no further than forming a blank head before the wrongness of it stopped him. He couldn’t go any further than that. Not with Ailsa still stuffed inside that coffee can, unfinished.

  He had to finish what he’d started. As unnerving as it was, he couldn’t get Ailsa out of his head. Somehow he knew he wouldn’t, not without completing her. Phantom need kept driving at him, pricking him with invisible pins until he couldn’t take it anymore. And yet, when he reached up to take hold of the can that caged her, a near electric shock jumped through his fingers, jolting up through his forearm and into his shoulder joint. He almost dropped the can, but managed to fumble it back into a firmer hold and set it gently on the table.

  He set up his tools and the whole time he did it, he kept trying to convince himself that he’d been high on clay fumes the entire time he thought he’d seen Ailsa. Except clay didn’t have fumes and being high didn’t make huge messes in his house. Neither did 10-inch dolls come magically to life as full-sized human females. So, yeah. There was that.

  It was a relentless Catch-22 of impossibilities and they kept looping in his mind right up until he was ready to begin. As ready as he’d ever be.

  Rubbing his damp palms against his thighs, he took a deep breath and then he opened the coffee can. The doll was still inside. He waited, not knowing what to expect. Would she come to life immediately? For days whenever he looked at the can or walked through the kitchen, he could have sworn he heard the ghostly echoes of her plaintive weeping. He couldn’t hear anything from her now and the doll never moved.

  His hand tingled all the way up to his elbow as he gently picked her up. She was still covered in flour because he’d been too unsettled to want to clean her. Frankly, he was still unsettled, and he wasn’t sure he ought to clean her. She might be a clay doll now, but she was a naked woman in her other form. The form he had carved in X-rated explicit detail. The form he had so imagined himself dominating and, yes, okay, he’d admit it, fucking. Compared to that, wiping the flour from her crevices under the kitchen tap didn’t seem like such a grand sin.

  “Are you in there?” he asked the unmoving doll. It stared back at him, complete silence in his mind. “I’m going to clean you up a little, all right?”

  The doll did not protest. It didn’t agree, either, but at least it didn’t protest.

  The kitchen sink still held his dishes from breakfast—a coffee mug, a plate with two bites of toast still on it, and the pan that he’d cooked his eggs in. It seemed kind of heartless to scrub her there as if she were nothing more than a dirty fork.

  He took her down the hall to the bathroom instead. He looked at the sink, then the tub. Women bathed in tubs. It was an excellent way for sculptors of porous self-drying clay dolls to forever ruin their work, and yet he felt drawn to the tub. He ran a bath, including a little dish soap because it was the only thing he had that would make bubbles and to be honest, this was starting to feel like an apology. If a guy was going to run an apology bath for a girl, bubbles ought to be involved.

  Fetching a clean washcloth and a handful of Q-tips, Calder knelt down. He leaned over the water, bracing his elbows on the edge. This wasn’t the kind of clay one fired and she was absolutely not made to get wet. Knowing he could well be ruining her, Calder dipped the end of one Q-tip into the water and very, very carefully, dabbed the flour from her face.

  The silence felt awkward.

  “Do you want to say anything to me?” he asked the doll.

  Nothing came to him.

  He worked cautiously, every few strokes switching to a clean end of the Q-tip and then discarding it for another. He wiped down her entire head, again and then again, but there were only so many times he could do that while avoiding the rest of her. Sooner or later, he was going to have to wash her naughty bits.

  I don’t mind.

  Calder froze, not at all sure if he’d actually heard that or if it had been wishful thinking. He needed more than three little words to be certain, and he’d feel better about it if she used something other than the faint and sad voice he wasn’t entirely sure he’d heard.

  “Ailsa?” He strained to pick up the slightest sound, but all he thought he heard was a sniffle. And that could have been anything from his own imagination to the soft lapping of the Loch waters against the shore not twenty feet from his front porch.

  He picked up a fresh Q-tip, dipped it in the bathwater and adjusted her in his grip. His hand trembled as he braced himself to wipe down her neck, moving closer to those awkwardly perfect breasts. What had he been thinking?

  You don’t want to touch me.

  He remembered too well everything that had happened the last time he’d touched her. “Trust me, love. That’s not the problem.”

  He’d been in the cabin alone too long, that was the problem.

  Calder gently dabbed the tip of her breast with the damp Q-tip. That tingling shot up his arms again. Up his arms, zinged through his chest, buzzing around his heart before zipping straight down through the center of him to set his cock a-humming. His whole body came tingling to life. He almost closed his eyes, savoring both the eroticism and the strangeness of the sensation. “Ailsa
, is... is that you?”

  You don’t want me, Ailsa repeated, mournfully. Why did you make me if you didn’t want me?

  “I didn’t know I was making you.” Hands trembling now for a different reason than before, he washed her breasts—around, between, underneath. He tried not to feel like the colossal pervert he suspected he might be as he dabbed her shoulders and back, and then the shapely roundness of her bottom. “I’ve never had anyone come to life on me before. I’m very sorry, but it gives a man a start to have that happen the way it did.”

  I didn’t mean to be bad, she whispered.

  “I know.” That made two of them. He was a little surprised at the depth of regret he felt when he thought of her stuffed all this time in that coffee can. “I didn’t mean to... to be bad, either. Here.” He set her down on the edge of the tub. “I’ll be right back.” He started to stand, hesitated, and then patted the air as he added, “Don’t go anywhere.”

  He stepped out of the bathroom long enough to fetch another handful of clean Q-tips and throw the used ones in the kitchen trash. When he returned, however, gone was Ailsa the 10-inch doll. Sitting amongst the suds, with clumps of flour now sticky like paste in her long damp hair, was Ailsa the woman. She looked at him sadly, poking listlessly at bubbles and making no move to hide her nakedness from view. Why would she, when he’d already touched just about all of her? Swallowing hard, he approached the tub and as he did so, she drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them. Any other woman might have done it because she was naked. Ailsa did it because she was sad, and burying her face in her arms amplified that fact rather than hid it.

  He looked at the Q-tips, and then the dish towel he would have dried her with. Although perfect for the doll, he needed something else for Ailsa. He took the towel back to the kitchen and fetched a human-sized one from the hall linen closet. Putting the Q-tips back, he selected instead a bar of clean soap. His whole body tingled wildly as he returned to the tub and, after only the slightest hesitation, knelt down beside her. Picking up the washcloth and soap, he lathered his hands.