“Would you really have stabbed me if I’d not tried to fight you off?” Cherrill asked.“Well,” Michael replied, his fingers languidly tracing ...he curve of her stomach up to the bottom of her ribs, “my dear aunt did command it...“However,” he continued, gently reprimanding her, “you should not have panicked. A Phoenix can’t be killed with a knife. Some Phoenix girls actually find knife-play erotic. Even the queen participates in swordplay, and nobody seconds for her, either.”“So many stupid. The complication of interracial breeding gave it an extra taboo thrill, especially in a Southern small town. If nothing else, I reasoned to myself, I was helping this community work toward the day when no one would give a damn about interracial intercourse or marriage, not to mention breaking society free of the chains of monogamy and the gender binary. Every sexually subversive act was a revolution in itself against the Victorian ethos that we inherited from the 19th century's experiment in. "He laughed. It wasn't a pleasant sound. It was the kind of laugh that you hear from someone who isn't used to finding anything funny. A kind of cross between a rusty gate and a flatulent donkey."You must think I'm mad," he said. I didn't contradict him.He put his liver-spotted hands on his scrawny hips and thrust his wattled chin towards me. He looked like nothing so much as an oven-ready vulture. He was wearing one of those khaki safari shirts on top of a pair of ancient, faded blue shorts. Eventually the crying stopped, until all he heard was the occasional sniff. Wiping her nose with the sleeve of the towelling robe, she started to wriggle off his lap, pulling the sides of the robe together to hide her body, but Josh tightened his arms, telling her softly, ‘Stay still, I’m not going to hurt you. Stay there.’ Staying still, her breath tickling his neck where her head lay, he asked her, ‘How did you get the bruises and the marks on your body?’ She didn’t answer, just lay there,.