Blossom felt like a ton in her long, red, crystal beaded gown. The day I met her, one hundred and fifty years ago, she had been wearing a traditional kimono with the obi tied in front. By then it was a costume she affected because it was good for business. She was the one who told me how you could tell a geisha from an oiran and it had shamed Blossom terribly in her youth. She hated having to tie the obi in front. Yes, it meant the kimono could be taken off quickly and with much needed frequency, but she felt it was disrespectful to her as a woman.

Her donna, or patron, had been a man she loved very much and when he'd unexpectedly died, her lavish lifestyle was gone in a second. She somehow managed to salvage the many splendid gifts he gave her, despite being locked out of his house by his family who flew in from Osaka. She had also managed to save most of her money. She .

opened an opium den on Merchant Street in Chinatown, because by then the drug was available on the islands and she preferred selling drugs to selling herself, but she soon found the two complemented one another. She never in her life allowed another man to control her after her donna died.

As a brothel madam, she was fair and kept nothing but clean, beautiful girls on her payroll. But she was finding, like a lot of things in life, good help was hard to find and she had an invisible revolving door in all her businesses.

Tem and I flew to her penthouse suite and knocked at her sliding gla.s.s door, after negotiating the endless jade plants positioned on her balcony. Her two faithful kagema, gay male prost.i.tutes who doubled as her bodyguards, were shocked to see us thirty stories high, but came rushing to unlock the heavy gla.s.s doors and let us in. The Janu, the j.a.panese version of twinks, were, like Blossom, vampires. She had converted them. I didn't quite understand their s.e.xual arrangement but Tem told me they were rezu, versatile. Both men f.u.c.ked each other and other men, upon Blossom's request. They f.u.c.ked Blossom upon her demands, too.

"How do you fly?" one of the Janu asked.

"What happened?" the second one interjected. "Why is she pa.s.sed out?" They were cute in a .

j.a.panese cartoon-boyish way. They wore matching blood red kimonos, and I knew by the shimmer of lilacs and deep purple in the fabric that Tem had designed and made them.

"She just dropped on the ground in the middle of an alleyway." Tem led her gently to the sofa, placing her on the big seat cushions, easing her legs together, resting her head back against a small embroidered pillow. She seemed to be having trouble breathing, but now that she was sitting up, she seemed okay again. Oops, she was snoring softly now.

"In the middle of Chinatown?" one of the Januasked, horrified.

"Don't tell her. Maybe she won't remember." I looked at them as they both nodded. "I think she needs blood."

They glanced at each other as sweet, beautiful Tem rubbed Blossom's slender, pale hands in his. The slightly bigger Janu shrugged.

"She fed from me a few hours ago. It's the opium. She's become quite addicted. She has bad hallucinations, she's forgetting things..." He shuffled away and the smaller man offered to make us tea.

Tem and I accepted and, as he too shuffled away, my husband grabbed my hand. "We need to check on the baby." From out of his leather coat pocket, he extracted his cell phone, paging down .

with his small black stylus. "The girls sent us a text. He's sleeping." Tem looked so happy. "Div, don't you love the idea of having a baby in the house?" He looked so dreamy eyed I just had to smile. Then, "What do you think of the apartment? You haven't been up here since I finished decorating it."

I walked around, wishing we were home in bed, but I had to admit, he'd done a splendid job. He'd toned down Blossom's pa.s.sion for big, gaudy red fixtures with pale pink and black touches, a black lacquer box here, a pink tray there...it was, oddly, very relaxing, and yet you wanted to take your clothes off and ball like a madman, too.

"Well?" Tem was anxious.

"It's like a yoshiwara. A good, old fashioned j.a.panese brothel."

He beamed. "That's just what she wanted. We have ylang ylang oil burning in secret scent pots."

"Ah. That explains my desire to get naked and do the funky chicken with you."

Tem grinned. "I could do the same thing to our bedroom."

"You can do whatever you want with our bedroom. Just please let me keep sleeping in it with you."

Tem laughed, delighted. He came over to where I was standing and gave me a wonderful .

kiss. "I don't know how I ever lived without you."

"Oh, Tem..." Our mouths met, our bodies melting into one another.

The two men were back and I noticed a flash of jealousy sparking in their eyes. I knew then that Blossom fully controlled these two. They were probably never allowed to touch or kiss one another unless she allowed it.

"Jin and Yi, I don't think you've met my husband, Jimmy Thunder."

The two men smiled. "We've...seen your movies." They giggled conspiratorially. For the first time, Tem seemed uncomfortable. Any reminder of the past was anathema to him.

I slipped my arm around Tem and smiled at Jin and Yi. "Thank you." I didn't know what else to say and that was my best stand-by. It did the trick.

"I made you Tieguanyin tea." Jin waited for my impressed reaction.

"You don't say?" Tem was all excited. I looked at him and he explained. "It's the most expensive tea in the world. It costs $1, 365 a pound. It's green tea from..." he screwed up his face trying to remember.

"The Fujian province," Jin prompted, as he placed the tray on a low-lying coffee table.

Tem and I squeezed into a wing chair together as Yi prepared an opium pipe for Blossom, snapped something under her nose and she came .

to, her eyes focusing on nothing but the pipe. Her raspy breath as she took in the drug seemed to bring her out of her trance and she glanced at us, a wild look in her brown eyes as she saw us watching her.

"What...how?" She closed her eyes as the drug started to work in her system. "Oh..." her head drooped and Yi stuck the pipe back in her mouth.

"Normally she eats it," Jin sighed. "But we try to stop her now, since it's easy to overdose that way, and she's been nodding off a lot lately."

Geez, if I were these guys, I'd be using her incapacitated state to buy me some c.o.c.k sucking time. She was a vampire. She could not die from an overdose.

"Quit talking about me as if I'm not here." She was back in her body. "How did I get here?"

"Aren't you funny?" Tem slapped his knee. "Isn't she funny, Div?"

"They flew in with you," Jin said, then cringed, realizing Blossom would be embarra.s.sed.

"Flew?" She narrowed her eyes. "I've never flown in my life. You have to be in love to be able to fly." She turned an accusatory gaze on her flunkies and they bustled out of the room.

Blossom rapped on the table, signaling her desire for tea, an irritating custom of hers I'd forgotten about, but Tem sprang forward and poured out three cups. She sipped and rapped, .

sipped and rapped, Tem's gaze on two red lacquered doors with bra.s.s tigers' heads for door handles.

"Please Blossom, please may I just have one quick look at your tiaras?"

"Of course." The color was coming back to her cheeks and she picked up a small black box, flicked through its contents and removed what looked like a flat black piece of lava. I knew that it was opium and she ate it, chewing in a slow, deliberate way as Tem ran through her closets.

"My favorite one is missing! The one Napoleon commissioned for the Empress Eugenie..." He came back to the door. "Oh, how can it be missing? You don't think somebody stole it, do you? And the scepter that goes with it..." Back he went on the hunt and Blossom and I exchanged evil grins. Little did my man know I had bought them from Blossom in an exhausting negotiation that had taken two months, some legal mumbo jumbo and a ma.s.sive transfer from my bank account to hers. At this very moment, they were waiting for him under our Christmas tree, wrapped in magnificent, tissue thin rice paper inside the most wonderful old Chinese silk-screened box I had found in an antique store in Waikiki.

"It has to be there somewhere, Tem," Blossom was enjoying our little subterfuge. "Oh, come and .

see the wonderful ruby ring I bought."

"Ruby? You bought a ruby?" Tem rushed out of the bedroom again to inspect the ring she was removing from yet another box on her coffee table.

"That's a beauty. It's truly something..." Tem inspected it with a practiced eye. The long, feminine fingers modeling it shook a little in his big, manly hand. He was immediately concerned. "You are okay...aren't you, Blossom?"

She smiled. "Of course I am okay." She glanced at her Janu, as if a.s.suring herself they were still there.

"Blossom." I tried to keep my voice low and calm. "We need to talk to you about something very important."

She frowned. "Pertaining to what?"

"Lamia."

She laughed, but it was a harsh, barking sound. Totally phony. "Lamia? That is a fairytale for children." Her eyes glittered dangerously and she withdrew a second, larger piece of opium and chewed it, her gaze shifting from me to her Janu.

I knew she was outright lying, but I also knew I could not push the issue in front of her little playmates. Something was very wrong with Blossom, but now she was tucking her feet under her on the big sofa.

"Jin, Yi...make an old lady happy. I want to watch you together."

The two men exchanged chatty glances. I knew they were wondering if their little show would involve menage, but they would have no such luck. I was ready to leave when neither man moved.

Then Blossom purred, "Jin. I want you to ketsuman. I want you to bottom."

The two men's faces fell. Tem was back in the wing chair with me and we sat, riveted as the two men seemed to be struggling with their lady boss's demands. Blossom threw back her head and laughed.

"Yi is always the ketsuman. It's time he gets to tachi, to top." Blossom reached for another piece of opium. Man, she'd consumed enough to kill a horse. It was not bringing out a very nice side of her. She was enjoying their discomfort. Me, I was ready to roll. Tem's body was rigid against mine, and not in a good way.

"Move to the floor so Jimmy Thunder and his man get a good view." She chewed another, bigger piece of opium. The two men moved to the floor and undressed each other. They forgot everything then as two men are wont to do when f.u.c.king is involved. Jin had some serious hardware on his not too small p.e.n.i.s. I'd never seen so many piercings on a c.o.c.k.

"You ever f.u.c.ked a guy with all that jewelry on his p.e.c.k.e.r?" I asked Tem, who gave me a sullen .

look.

"Only the c.o.c.k rings I put on you...and the little restraints."

Oh, G.o.d. He was making my d.i.c.k hard now and his stroking hand liked what it felt through my tight leather pants.

"Not so fast. I do believe I owe you one, Mr. Thunder."

Tem rubbed his face into my neck. "We pleasured each other," he whispered, but his eyes were alive with excitement.

"Yeah...but you thought of the blueberries and I do believe I'm hungry again."

Jin was on his back now, squeezing his pierced nipples in his fingers, watching us as Tem and I watched him. Yi spread Jin's a.s.s and the look on his face was priceless as the other man's mouth connected with his a.s.s hole. There is nothing like a tongue in your a.s.s, as I have learned. The slurping sounds Yi made seemed to be turning my man on and I unzipped his fly. His lovely, luscious c.o.c.k sprang out, needing its man to relieve it.

"Oh...look how big that is," moaned Jin, and Yi stopped what he was doing to take a look at Tem's rigid c.o.c.k. I always said Tem could have been a fantastic top in movies, except for his overwhelming desire to be f.u.c.ked. Yi turned back to the hot body in front of him as my mouth went to Tem's goody bags. His b.a.l.l.s were the biggest, .

juiciest ones I'd ever had, in my limited experience of men. My tongue licked away at them because I knew Tem liked it so much.

He slouched further down in the wing chair and I had to have possession of him now. I pulled the leather pants down his thighs and all the way to his ankles. They got stuck on his boots so he lifted his legs and I positioned myself between them.

"Yeah..." Jin groaned, and I glanced up to see a couple of Yi's fingers ma.s.saging their way into Jin's bottom, the thumb rubbing against his perineum.

I mirrored his actions, Blossom's mouth slack as her gaze moved from us to them and back again. Tem went crazy when two of my fingers worked into him, stroking his prostate, my thumb on the other side keeping up a maddening pressure on his perineum. I took his c.o.c.k all the way in my mouth, my left hand gently nursing his b.a.l.l.s.

Tem's legs flailed about as I slipped a third finger into him. The sounds of slurping man joy were loud in that big red room as dawn broke and a soft, very soft apricot glow shimmered through the windows. My husband came in my mouth, bucking hard against my hand, his legs shaking as he flooded my throat. I didn't think he was going to stop coming. Little Jin writhed about on the floor too and Blossom was in a state of womanly .

arousal.

"Very nice...very nice. Jin...Yi...you come to my room...mama needs you now. It's time for your special Christmas presents...and then you can have the ones you open."

She chuckled as the two men scrambled to their feet, her hands stroking their a.s.ses in a possessive way. A shaky Tem slumped in my arms as Blossom swept past us, a huge smile on her face as her gaze met ours.

"Merry Christmas." She turned to see her two Janu exchanging heated kisses. "Save some turkey for me. I might be a little late." The two men fell on her big round, red velvet encased bed. "Very late," she whispered, revealing a mouth of very dark teeth, an indication of her advancing addiction. She shut the bedroom door on us.

Chapter Seven.

em and I headed home and his hand felt warmTin mine. We flew over the old neighborhood I'd grown up in...and something was off. Something was bothering me, I just didn't know what.

"Let's go down!" I yelled.

"But we need to get home..." He saw the urgency on my face and he stayed with me, right in my rhythm like the pa.s.senger on the back of a motorbike. We landed further up Nu'uanu Pali, and as I looked at the cl.u.s.tered houses lining both sides of the highway, I was remembering the old days. I was remembering back to the time just before it all changed. Tem came and put his arms around me, his head touching mine, and the lines of the song You're My World filled my head as ugly thoughts were pushed to the side.

With your hand resting in mine, I feel a power so divine...

"What are you remembering?" Tem asked, his voice husky. Sometimes, when our emotions got .

so deep, our thoughts clouded and I could feel him searching my mental rooms, hunting for the images in my mind. Now I saw him standing in the doorway, looking along with me. And I knew he could see it.

"Whose house is it, Div?"

My voice cracked. "My grandfather's house."

"What are the sticks outside it? I see four of them."

His arms tightened around me, his breath came in little cold puffs against my chin.

"They're kapu sticks."

Tem was quiet as he absorbed the image in his own mind. "Why do I see fire? Men with sticks on fire?"

I rushed to fill in details for him. "Over here was my grandfather's house." I pointed to a site where five very big houses now stood. "The night my aunt and cousins all died of Smallpox fever-"