He ceased his assault.
Panting, she retrieved her mind from the gutter, licked lips, felt the cool of saliva evaporating, and the wetness between her legs, soaking her.
Exquisite, he’d said.
Bedraggled hair, clothes retrieved from long-lost rubble-dusted drawers and storage boxes, and she was exquisite? Fern fluttered open her eyes and met the dark ones opposite.
His palm left her mouth and she could speak.
“Only a sewer rat,” she said with her slow-to-move tongue, “…would call me exquisite.”
“I am not a sewer rat.” JI hadn’t changed expression at her insult, and he kept studying her. His white-and-gray-streaked hair was as thick as a mane and as rippled as the sea. “I don’t intend to hurt you.”
“Uh –”
This time he laid a forefinger over her mouth. “Shhh. Let me think. I need to think…”
She’d lost her sanity down the proverbial couch and she lay against the wall, recovering breath, holding the chain at her throat while he thought. Somehow, against all logic, all everything of what she had experienced of this world, she believed him.
It made a difference.
Then …
Gods.
He reached for her shirt front and began to open it, popping each clip and exposing more and more of her, until he’d bared her, and only her bandeau top remained to conceal her breasts.
“Wait,” she whispered, holding the chain as if it could save her. “Wait.” Small protests that stood up to his actions so little she may as well have given him the keys to her body.
“You like this. Being held in place.”
He hadn’t even bothered to make that a question.
Stunned, she left her mouth open. Fuck.
It was as if the secret stashes in her mind had been spilled into the sunlight for all to see…or for this JI to see.
“I would never hurt you more than you want.”
She stiffened. Those were close to the words Nick always used, just before he spanked her, or cropped her ass, or screwed tight the pretty nipple clamps, and always with a grin on his devilish face. He was her sadist, she was his little willing masochist.
Had been.
They’d aimed to get married – the date the day after she’d been lured from her hotel room on Earth to here, the alternate, nastier, weirder, Aerthe.
Walk a few steps, fall in, wake up blind and stay that way for days while they force-feed their language. They’d legally made humans their slaves. Because humans weren’t people, of course. Of course we aren’t. The height of irony.
She searched JI’s eyes, looking for something. Truth, mercy, answers, or just someone she could connect with?
JI had said those words straight-faced, straight-mouthed, whereas with Nick it’d been about the joy. It’d been about love.
Never here. Never.
Matter-of-factly he rolled her top down, and she thought about batting away his hands, but didn’t. Her nipples instantly hardened – so sensitive, she sensed the brush of the air stirred by this man’s every move. He undid the clasp on her belt and shorts, and slowly pushed his hand beneath her panties, traveling lower.
The bare touch made her inhale sharply.
A man had her where he wanted her. That’d been one of her fetishes since forever.
Over her mound he slid his hand, cupping her there for several moments before one finger explored and arrived over her now very swollen clit.
It stroked her there. Once, twice.
She gasped in a breath and held it, teeth settling on lip, then her tongue tip protruding, spellbound by sensation, and arching the smallest amount toward him.
“You like this too.” His voice was rumbled with unleashed power.
She wanted to see this power, wanted to make him show her what he could do…to her.
This was insane. Despite her lack of reply, he stroked her clit again and again, and though at first she resisted soon she was arching more.
Insane, but oh so good.
Beneath his finger, long-dormant nerve endings awakened. She choked on unsaid sighs and cries, on whimpery begs. On need.
She wanted him so badly. He was hot and hard with muscles, and he smelled good, and this was nothing more complex than her pussy aching for a cock thrusting in, for penetration. Surreal, and she knew she should be slapping herself awake.
Had she just been waiting for someone to say they wouldn’t hurt her?
Fuck me but don’t hurt me.
Her reaction was undeniable and had slain her good judgment. Whatever was in his pants would do her just fine.
Clasp at his throat. Scream. She should tell him…no.
Why?
Chapter 4
Blood was still weeping from the bullet graze she’d given him, and it hurt. Until that injury, pain had been only a mild acquaintance. Even the stab wound in his head, created when he took over Osta, had been painless. While he’d had the skill, he’d dulled the nerves.
Now though. Ouch.
JI found himself watching this human female with more attention than he’d given anything in all the months since he became a person, since he killed Osta…since he became Osta.
Fern wasn’t simply exquisite; she was unique. He could feel it, and he was sure she could too. He wondered if she understood why.
The link humans had with mechlings was bouncing to him in an empathic echo. When he’d changed into Osta by taking over his brain space, he’d lost his ability to direct link with his own kind. Or rather the kind he used to be, because he wasn’t mech anymore. His synthbrain tissue would not migrate and stretch as it had. He couldn’t sneak it across to a mechling. He couldn’t even plug into one’s sockets with his leads and links.
It was a lack he’d mourned, but he still possessed a feel for where a mech or mechling was located, and even what they felt, if they’d gone sun mad.
Plain mechlings had zero feelings.
The sun-mad – those who’d ascended to self-awareness – did.
He could pinpoint Aunt M if she were near. The mechlings Fern associated with, he knew their hiding places, he knew she’d sent some away. No doubt they were to tell of his invasion of this tower, of her space.
Invading her space and chaining her by the neck had definitely turned her on. And him.
He stepped away, one pace, two, watching her still, seeing what happened. Her focus, those pretty pink-irised eyes, stayed on him. The only human he knew of whose shininess extended to eye color. Others had acquired shiny hair and nails. Why was it the eyes on Fern? Sawyer hadn’t mentioned this.
The chain on her neck stood in stark contrast to the rest of her soft flesh. How tightly she held to the metal, as if it were her lifeline.
He’d done that to her. Made her stay there, bound her there.
With a thrill to top what already had grabbed his balls…he realized Fern could be his experiment. His little experiment on sex.
Little being more due to her size compared to his, not to what was possible. Because there was everything. The possibilities seemed endless. He, an ex-mech with control of a girl.
Excitement was what he felt. Desire. Pleasure. He’d not quite hit this feeling dead on before. There were others he knew of, such as sadness. Annoyance, he’d had possess him when Ari deceived him.
He’d tried out making love, fucking, several times, with women in the towns he’d been through. It’d not been the revelation he’d hoped for after observing Mako and Emery, Sawyer and Ari. As they’d left New Hope, he’d even seen some of what Ryke did to Gio – using a telescopic lens he’d salvaged from the wreckage of a sniker.
A device Ryke called a fuckspear had been put to use. He’d seemed enthralled.
JI’s mind spewed visions, piling them on top of the fuckspears. Creaking ropes, the thrust of dildos into wet holes, the dark confinement, bars striping the trapped females, the screams.
He unclenched his fists, disturbed at the avalanche of thoughts. They’d
come from nowhere.
But, the other women. He’d hoped and had been drastically disappointed.
Fern was Sawyer’s sister, which in the past might’ve brought him to a halt. You didn’t tread on someone’s loved ones, didn’t tease them or torture or hurt them.
Not the old JI.
Yet…he could feel what Fern did, her sexuality amplified. Her horniness went straight to his cock. Which, as of this instant, was standing up so hard he almost couldn’t see straight.
Putting it in her or in her mouth, anywhere, called to him as solidly as a hook in his flesh. Reining himself back called to him too, for reasons as yet unexplained.
The dichotomy between good and bad, between seeing her as a person or as a thing. Because having a thing of his own, owning, keeping, playing with a human thing, at this precise instant, she seemed the ultimate sex toy.
That was new.
He leaned his arm to the wall then put his finger to her mouth waiting for her tongue because he knew the lust in her, the draw. When she licked him, just a tiny flick of tongue, he pushed his finger inside her. Both of them were imagining the push of other things into her, and the thought of that went round and round, swelling as thick and high as his dick.
“I should fuck you, shouldn’t I? Suck on me, Fern.”
“Hey.” She squirmed her head away until he brought her back.
When she did, when the molten hole that was her mouth sucked and sucked at him, he swore quietly for several seconds, and had to resist shoving his dick onto her body and grinding.
Or yanking her pants all the way off and…
JI inhaled, exhaled, forcefully. There was a beauty in denial, in making them both wait. For an experiment like this, he wanted to sneak into the possible and admire before he did.
How diabolical he could be to her.
While she sucked on him, noisily, he licked her forehead in one wetly deliberate and possessive swipe.
He pulled his finger from her mouth and listened raptly to her wild and shallow breathing.
Then he kissed her on that mouth, taking from her, pressing her against the wall.
On the chain, he covered her fingers with his, squeezing lightly.
Then he watched the dance of her – her thighs squeezing, her butt swaying on that wall, her eyes unfocused.
Beautiful.
When had he altered? With the moment of the mechling echo? Or had it been long ago when his pure perception of humanoids had been sullied by lies and betrayal? People were not his gods anymore. And he saw the potential in not being on a straight and pure path through life.
Was this why people deceived and did immoral acts? Because it was more fun?
Like a mech, Fern had programs. Press here and she reacted. Not simple programs – there were feedbacks and loops, this affected that. There were so many possibilities to explore on a human. On her especially, because he had her and because of their mechling connection.
Yet was she a thing or a person? Could Fern be both? Was someone’s status merely a product of how you treated them?
The world of sexuality and humanity had exploded.
He wanted more. To understand her and himself, of course.
Much ado about nothing. Shakespeare, he remembered.
Emery – that memory was from her.
He’d liked her. They’d been friends.
His brutal fascination with Fern wound down then flipped.
He stepped back.
She was a person.
But…
That but in his mind didn’t fade, even as he approached her again and touched her chin, pushed beneath to make her raise it. There was softness beneath his fingertip. What he glimpsed lower was the beauty wrought by the circles of her pink-brown nipples against the paler curve of breasts.
This rippled to his mind, to his groin, to his balls and cock. Erections that were hard as metal were new.
He could get to love this.
Her fingers tightened on the chain. Her arousal climbed with his touch and he slid his finger along her jaw and down to her throat, to play along the top of the chain where it drew over her skin.
“Pretty,” he murmured. “Will you be my thing, little human?”
Her swallow was immediate. “Thing?”
JI smiled.
The mechling echo had flared when his finger touched her. He was correct. Touch amplified the effect.
Noted.
Then he kneeled before her, dragged underwear and shorts from her and placed two straight fingers at the slit of her cunt. The narrow triangle of her pink hair made a V toward where he almost entered her.
“Say please, Fern.”
“Fffuck.” Her legs spread a little, and they were shaking, and her hands had stayed clinging to the chain.
Pushing him away was the least-considered thought in her head, and yet she whispered, a no. Then another even feebler one.
He took that as a yes and stuck his fingers upward and inside her. The slipperiness of the slide only verified what his eyes and mind already registered. She was sloppily wet and wanted this. He laid his tongue over her clit and began to lick and suck on her with the same enthusiasm she’d applied to his fingers.
Chapter 5
Her legs were trembling even before his tongue first flicked across her clit, before he’d penetrated her with his long fingers, before his other hand pressed at her stomach and anchored her firmly to the wall. Fern watched with fascination and rising lust as he applied that tongue and those lips to pleasuring her. For all of a few riveting seconds she watched, before she gave up and gave in, and let her head thump back.
That hurt, but nowhere near enough to overcome what had her moaning.
Embarrassing, how easily she found herself floundering into orgasm territory.
She pushed herself onto his mouth and thought about grabbing his head, but somehow decided this was better – to grab the chain and ride his wet tongue and his large fingers where they drove up inside her, the rhythm compelling her.
She grunted and thrust her body at him, jerkily then hard, and she shook as the climax overtook her and wrenched her beyond thought, far beyond the boundary of what was right and proper.
She’d let this stranger bring her to a flustered, sweaty, and ridiculously shaken state.
He’d asked her, though, and she’d said no, then thrust herself at his mouth like a paid whore. Her excuse was thin, but this chain about her neck said she had no choice in what he did. There’d been violence and weapons fired, though groggily it took her a moment to recall what and where as well as why.
JI stood. Slowly, he unwound the chain and freed her, then moved away with it dangling from his fist.
“Why?” She licked her lips, swallowed.
The orgasm had cleared her head. She could think, properly.
“Because you’re my thing, now. I’ve decided. You’re mine.” He narrowly assessed her, a sort-of-smile drifting on his mouth.
“What? A thing? Me?” So ridiculous. Wait. He knew Sawyer. “My brother will –”
“Your brother has left this world and I assume is back on yours. There is no longer anyone here who can create portals. Ryke said he would stop Gio from doing so. The mekker always struck me as getting things done how he wanted them to be done.”
A bombshell fact. Sawyer was gone but alive. That piece of info brought both joy and despair, and a lost sort of loneliness.
This scav had known him. She had to ask him more, but not now, not after that. She was still trembling, and her pants were gone, flung somewhere. Her shirt was open too. Sawyer wasn’t in this world and wouldn’t be ever coming to her rescue again. She blinked away tears. Unless JI lied?
Fern crossed her arms over her chest.
“Gio?” She frowned, unsure, though the woman’s name was familiar.
“Yes. The first human brought here. She had the ability, temporarily, to open a portal.”
“Oh.” She caught up to everything else JI had detailed. “
What you said – I’m not yours. Fuck, no.” Indignation had risen, finally, though she knew she was rather late to be protesting.
“No?” He wandered to where he’d propped his red long gun and picked it up, then found her clothes and walked to her but didn’t hand them over. “Let me set out your choices so you understand them.”
“Go for it, big dude.” She pouted, stared angrily. Damn though he was huge. Even those fingers. That tongue. Gods, that tongue. Sweat was cooling on her body and if the wall hadn’t been supporting her…
His gaze narrowed, as if he spotted her lust resuscitating itself.
Fuck. Figuratively, she shook herself by the scruff. Pay attention. He has a gun and I don’t. And she should be worried far more than this. Far more. Had he drugged her? How could that be? This puzzle she needed to understand before worse happened than a climax that made jelly of her knees.
“First,” he began, in a schoolteacher voice. The man had calm down to a fine art – she’d give him that. “I am bigger than you are. Stronger.” His smile tweaked wider. “That seems to work in the world of people. Second. I want you, and you want me.”
Urrrr, her brain was not happy with that logic even if what was between her legs agreed. She pinched shut her mouth.
“Third. I will grant you your heart’s desire, and I will protect you from harm. Good, yes?”
Wow. JI also had a big fucking ego. “I can do that. Protect myself.” She drummed her fingers on her forearm and wished she had her pants on. “You don’t know my heart’s desire, even if that would convince me.”
What the hell was she doing arguing with him? She should run for the door. And that’d worked so well last time. The weapon he held was not a toy. All his points added up to: I can make you do this anyway.
She could wait. Run. Later. When she had pants.
He’d wandered off now, as if he’d forgotten what he was saying. He was peering at the corpse of the latest mechling on the examination table.
“Hey! Don’t poke it.” Against her inclinations to stay away from JI, Fern walked to him and scowled.
“What were you doing with this?”
“Trying to save him. He named himself Gron before his power cells finally gave up the ghost.” When JI waited, she decided to tell him the story. What did it matter?
Exquisite Possession: A Dark Scifi Romance (The Machinery of Desire Book 4) Page 3