Lips Touch: Three Times by Lips Touch; Three Times Read Free Book Online

of the
cheese. Knife, she thought. Her fingers twitched, wanting to reach for
it, as some kind of knowing skimmed the glassy surface of her mind. All the
omens of the day, the swirl of swan feathers, the grave of dead grass, her
grandmother's blade still rimed with the frost of the underworld, all her
memories of warnings, they coalesced into a simple understanding: Deep in her veins
ran the admonition never to eat fruit out of season. It was late autumn; all
orchards were bare, and no peach trafficked in from a far hemisphere could
smell so sweet. Surely only one orchard could have ripened it.
    With that, Kizzy knew. A goblin had her soul on the end of his
fishing line, ready to reel it in. She knew. But now, in the fugue of wanting, of almost having, filled with the musk and the spice of that wine
and that chocolate, her hip still warm from Jack Husk's head, the knowing was
as insubstantial as words written on water. Every trace of it vanished as soon
as it was written, leaving only the
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    reflection of Jack Husk's too-perfect beauty. It was an imaginary
beauty dreamed up just to please her, and it did. It did. It pleased and drugged
her. Her eyelids were heavy but her soul was light as gossamer, a spiders web
in a wind, anchored only by a single thread.
    Kizzy knew, but she willfully unknew it, and the
plangent voices of the dead were lost to the drum of her hot blood and the
tingle of her ready lips. She wanted to taste and be tasted.
    She didn't reach for the knife. Heavily and hypnotically, with her
soul flattening itself back like the ears of a hissing cat, Kizzy leaned in and
drank of Jack Husk's full, moist mouth, and his red, red lips were hungry
against hers, drinking her in return. Their eyes closed. Fingers clutched at
collars and hair, at the picnic blanket, at the grass. And as they sank down,
pinning their shadows beneath them, the horizon tipped on its side, and slowly,
thickly, hour by hour, the day spilled out and ebbed away.
    It was Kizzy's first kiss, and maybe it was her last, and it was
delicious.
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    [ILLUSTRATION: The knife in the woman's hands.]
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    [ILLUSTRATION: A woman and a man.]
    SPICY LITTLE CURSES SUCH AS THESE
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    [ILLUSTRATION: Three men walking.]
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    [ILLUSTRATION: A woman and a man walking.]
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    [ILLUSTRATION: Birds flying.]
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    [ILLUSTRATION: A woman in a cemetery.]
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    [ILLUSTRATION: A tree and a woman going down stairs.
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    [ILLUSTRATION: The woman holding a bottle.]
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    [ILLUSTRATION: The woman holding a baby and other kids walking.]
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    [ILLUSTRATION: A old woman holding a baby.]
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    [ILLUSTRATION: A teapot and cups.]
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    SPICY LITTLE CURSES SUCH AS THESE
    Kissing can ruin lives. Lips touch, sometimes teeth clash.
    New hunger is born with a throb and caution falls away. A cursed
girl with lips still moist from her first kiss might feel suddenly wild, like a
little monsoon. She might forget her curse just long enough to get careless and
let it come true. She might kill everyone she loves.
    She might, and she might not.
    A particular demon in India rather hoped that she would.
    This is the story of the curse and the kiss, the demon and the
girl. It's a love story with dancing and death in it, and singing and souls and
shadows reeled out on kite strings. It begins underneath India, on the cusp of
the last century when the British were still riding elephants with maharajas
and skirmishing on the arid frontiers of the empire.
    The story begins in Hell.
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    ONE The Demon & the Old Bitch
    Down in Hell, the Englishwoman known around Jaipur as "the
old bitch" was taking tea with a demon. She was silver-haired,
straight-backed, and thin-lipped, with a stare that could shoot laughter from the
air like game birds. She was not at all liked by her countrymen, but even they
would have been shocked to see her here.
    "Come to the point," she told the demon impatiently.
    If he looked faintly human, it was because once upon a time he had
been. He was little and ancient, with a