by Maren Smith
Hopping onto the scooter, Jim got comfortable behind the handlebars, then flashed Ommin a beguiling smile and seductively patted the seat extension behind him. “Right here, big guy,” he cooed.
God help him.
The interior of the helmet was slightly squishy, but Ommin put it on anyway. Very much aware of what the pictures in next week’s gossip mags were going to be, he slung a long leg over the scooter and carefully lowered himself to sit behind Jim.
The moped sank under him, but not too alarmingly.
“Big baby,” Jim told him fondly. “Where are we going?”
Ommin gave him the address.
“Oo, the swanky side of town.” He started the moped. “Hang on.”
Ommin cupped the smaller man’s waist and off they went, putt-putt-putting into traffic almost faster than someone could walk, with the flash of paparazzi cameras fading as they gently merged into traffic.
Never in his life had he been on the back of one of these things. As a kid, he’d ridden a bicycle once. It had been a hand-me-down from a friend of his mother and had probably been given to him, the weird kid of the crazy woman in apartment 2C, out of pity. As far as he’d been able to tell throughout his entire childhood, people had only ever avoided him or pitied him. Those who gave gifts usually gave either clothes or food, because he’d never really had enough of either. But that time, someone gave him a bike. He’d gotten to ride it one time, but his mother wouldn’t let him bring it into their apartment, so it got stolen off the landing that first night.
It was San Francisco. Of course it was.
But now, as Ommin sat tensely holding on to Jim’s waist with as few fingers as standoffish masculinity required and yet with as many as it took not to be sent flying with every pothole they bounced in and out of, something about the way the wind brushed his face brought back all those feelings he barely remembered while riding up and down the sidewalk in front of his childhood apartment. City air on his face, caressing his skin as if with gentle fingertips. In his imagination, he could just as easily have been flying.
Now that was a super power he wouldn’t mind having.
Putt-putting down the road with Jim paying meticulous attention to traffic safety, Ommin grudgingly relaxed. In spite of himself, he even closed his eyes, reliving that carefree moment that swept over him with every block they traveled. To his grownup mind, it didn’t feel so much like flying anymore. Rather, it felt more like falling. It was like those few exhilarating, weightless seconds after diving off the Golden Gate Bridge right before he hit the water.
Whatever it was, it was still freedom in its purest form.
And it was shattered with the sudden screech of braking tires, followed by someone screaming.
Ommin jerked, but he barely caught sight of the car that jumped the corner curb, crashing right through a newspaper stand, scattering pedestrians and eliciting the barest high-pitched, girlish scream from Jim just before it hit them square on. Jim splattered like a water balloon, which abruptly silenced him and scattered drops of him everywhere.
It scattered the moped, too.
Caught completely off guard, Ommin had no chance to leap clear, but he tried, and rather than hitting the grill of the car and going under, he tumbled over the hood instead. He smashed into the windshield, breaking his arm, his hip and more ribs than he cared to count, before rolling up over the top of the car and landing flat on his face on the sidewalk.
It hurt.
It also pissed him off.
“Oh my God!” a woman cried as the car crashed head-on into a traffic light pole. Every airbag in the vehicle deployed, knocking both men in the front seat senseless. Steam spewed from under the buckled hood.
Crawling to his feet, Ommin shook his head, but the ringing in his ears only morphed, becoming the deafening blare of their car horn.
“Oh my God,” someone else said and, hissing in pain, Ommin irritably shook off the hands that caught at his broken arm.
“Y-you’re the Sharkman, aren’t you?” someone asked.
Ommin ignored them. His first step toward that car, he almost went down from the pain of it. Then his hip popped back into socket; the burning intensifying everywhere as his broken bones began to snap back into place and knit. He staggered, off balance—concussion, experience told him; he’d be fine—and kept going until he got his hand on the door of that steaming car. He yanked it open.
The reek of hot coolant tainted every breath as he bent, glaring at both unconscious occupants. Then he noticed the semi-automatics on the floor around the feet of the passenger and the blue duffel bag partially filled with neatly wrapped stacks of money, all separated out by denomination and marked with the stamp of the bank they’d stolen it from.
The police showed up, sirens blaring and from every direction, closing in the street to prevent the ruined car’s escape and much faster than they ever would have if they’d only just been called. Which meant, they’d already been in hot pursuit of this particular vehicle before it ever involved them in their accident.
The police jumped out of their vehicles, guns drawn.
“Pursuit of suspected bank robbers is ended,” one cop reported into the radio hooked to his shoulder.
The rest of the officers converged on Ommin. Limping back a step, he started to raise his hands and would have declared his non-involvement but the police pushed right past him to train their guns on the real suspects.
“Did you see that?” someone on the sidewalk behind him said. “Sharkman stopped the bank robbers!”
Staggering, Ommin turned around. “What?” he protested, but stopped, frozen in the sights of all those cell phone cameras recording everything he was doing in video and in snapshots.
Bystanders broke into claps and cheers, and he couldn’t even bellow back, “But I didn’t do anything!” He couldn’t bellow anything at all. Every breath he took was a white-hot burning agony, accompanied by the muted snap, crackle, Rice Krispies cereal sound of his ribs coming back together. In a few minutes, he’d be fine, but until then…
“Aaaggggghhhhh,” gurgled a familiar voice.
Jim.
Ommin staggered in a full circle, sweeping the crowd, the ringing in his ears and the grinding, popping, snapping of his knitting bones making it hard to zero in on the source of that burbling cry. Not until he noticed the way the moped pieces were scattered across the road, a trail of destruction that outlined the path the out-of-control car had taken right before it crashed.
Oh God.
He looked down at his feet and at the shadowy wetness that was more than just spilled coolant pooling out from under the vehicle. Slowly, agonizingly, Ommin got down on one knee and bent until he could see the watery form of Jim the Liquidman quite literally pulling himself back together again.
He flailed, a weird watery blob with two ‘tentacles’ instead of arms and a transparent lump where his head should be. The lump rippled, letting out another burbling cry, “Aaaggggghhhhh!”
That was when Ommin felt it—the tickle of many tiny drops moving over his skin. They pulled themselves out of the fibers of his wet clothes, dripped out of his hair, and rolled down off his fingers. Ommin choked, catching his neck as globules rolled back up from his stomach to his mouth. They sucked together, little globs becoming bigger ones that tripped his gag reflex when they oozed slug-like between his tonsils and onto his tongue. That he spat instead of throwing up was nothing short of sheer willpower.
The gob splattered when it hit the pavement, but all the scattered drops of it trickled forward, pools of living water that rushed in from all over the intersection, to rejoin themselves to a rapidly solidifying and naked Jim, still trapped underneath that car. He was almost back to normal when a cop dropped to his knees next to Ommin to identify the source of the warbling screams.
“Oh shit,” he said, and then sprang up again, radioing in for another ambulance.
“My toe,” Jim warbled weakly. “Someone ate my toe.”
“
I think that was me,” Ommin said, feeling sick.
“Oh. Oh, thank goodness.” Jim closed his eyes in relief. “At least it’s someone I know… this time.”
Chapter 6
“So, they hauled him off to the hospital,” Ommin grumbled as he scrubbed the battery connections free of corrosion, “and I had to run some poor homeless guy down before he could steal Jim’s coat.”
Sitting on the middle stair of the steps leading up from the garage into the laundry room, Britney blinked wide-eyed. “H-he just… burst?”
Pop, Ommin mouthed, pausing what he was doing to mime the balloon-like burst of impact.
“All blood and guts and…” she began but broke off queasily.
“No. More like all clothes and water. He just looks like water when he does it.”
“He’s done it more than once?”
“Yeah,” he said dryly, and decided against offering any details about the toe. “They were going to cite him for streaking, except there were half a dozen witnesses ready to testify to how the bank robbers had hit him so hard they knocked him clean out of his clothes. Not one person remembered him bursting into water, but everyone remembered seeing his clothes go flying.”
“Human memory is a funny thing,” she said. “To be honest, if I’d been there, I’d probably convince myself I’d been witness to a hit-and-run declothing over having watched a person burst into water.”
Grunting, he connected her battery cables and then, wiping his hands on his jeans, got in behind the steering wheel to crank it up.
The car started like a dream and on popped the radio.
“…and in other news,” the broadcaster announced, “two men were apprehended this morning after robbing the Bank of San Francisco by none other than resident superhero, Sharkman. Witnesses say…”
Ommin shut off the car and sighed. After a moment, he got back out.
“Fixed,” he said, handing her back her keys.
She stood up to take them, her eyebrows buckling. “Are you okay?”
“I am all done talking about it.”
Blinking twice, she backed up the steps when he moved toward her, following her up the stairs and into the laundry room. She only stopped when she bumped up against the washing machine. When she did, she laughed, a little high-pitched. He couldn’t tell if she was more nervous or excited, but she was definitely a little of both. She leaned backwards, as if she didn’t want to touch him. The prominent tips of her nipples thrusting against her shirt said otherwise. So did the fine wave of goosebumps that appeared up the side of her neck and across her chest above the lacy neckline of her blouse.
“You look very nice.” He lay his hands on the washing machine to either side of her, holding her loosely imprisoned between his arms.
Her pulse at the base of her throat fluttered. He could see it, the barely visible movement beneath her delicate skin.
“Why did you call me instead of a mechanic?” he asked, already feeling the settling byproduct just by being this close to her. He loved the smell of her, fresh and clean and slightly fruity from whatever soap she’d used that morning. It evoked all sorts of memories from the night before—all of them wonderful, all of them inspiring the heady thrum now moving through his body to converge in all the places that she was now closest to.
Her breasts rose and fell slightly faster than normal. The sea-mist of her eyes had turned stormy. He wondered if she was remembering now too.
“Well…” she answered shyly, trying to hold his gaze but not quite able to. Her eyes kept darting away, only to steal back again because it seemed she couldn’t not look at him too. “Y-you’re my Daddy now, aren’t you?”
He knew the exact second when that ceased to be a teasing question and became a frightening one. The smoke in her eyes died hard and a tension zipped into all the previously relaxed lines of her, furrowing her brow as she bit her bottom lip.
Letting go of the washing machine, he grabbed her ass instead, startling that tension right back out of her when he lifted her up and dropped her on top of her appliance. “Yes, I’m your Daddy,” he confirmed. “Don’t you ever worry about that again.”
When he sidled closer, she opened her legs so he could come between them. She even hooked her ankles behind his thighs, which had the added bonus of bringing her hips right up to the edge of the washing machine. It put her at the perfect height for him.
“My first real Daddy,” she said softly, looking at his mouth.
Her last, too, if he had anything to say about it.
Her fingers wandered up his chest to his shoulders. “My very own Daddy Shark.”
She laughed, scrunching the bridge of her nose in the most beguiling way.
“I am the Daddy Shark.” His hands found her hips. She was so tiny compared to him. His hands almost wrapped around her. He squeezed, molding her hips, then her ass in his palms. His fingers slipped up under the hem of her shirt before he realized that was what he was feeling his way along. The waistband of her thin, black yoga pants was just as easy to get into. “No panties,” he noted.
“I was kind of hoping it would be no pants too, eventually, once you got here,” she admitted. A touch of color splashed her cheeks. “For both of us this time.”
His cock twitched hard, that low thrum sweeping through his veins now eagerly relocating below his belt.
He pulled her to him, right up to the very lip of the washing machine. The heat between her legs burned straight through the fly of his jeans. If he wasn’t hard before, he was a damn rock now, and only getting harder. She was teasing him, and he had no idea if she knew she was doing it or not. Her legs hugged his waist, but they weren’t motionless. She was caressing him with one, stroking the side of his hip with her inner thigh in the most beguiling, come hither way.
Her fingertips tapped along his shoulders, half rubbing, half stroking. It was doing crazy things to his heart rate. His hands couldn’t help but rub back the same way, squeezing at the globes of her ass, blocked from getting into the heat he so craved because of how she was sitting.
Okay, these pants had to come off now. He withdrew his hands only long enough to hook the soft elastic at her waist and peel them down.
Giggling, she put her hands on the washing machine to help lift her up high enough for him to get them down. He pulled them off her legs and dropped them on the floor. God, she was beautiful when she leaned back like this, her legs still spread, the bare folds of her pussy already glistening wet for him.
Ready for him.
His mouth watered.
He should have backed her all the way into the bedroom, because then at least he could lay her back far enough to lift her ass and get his mouth on her. Washing machines were objects of cleanliness, and it was cock blocking him from getting as dirty with her as he wanted.
“No,” she protested, when he tried to go down. She caught at his shoulders, pulling him to come back up so they were eye to eye and mouth to mouth, and so her hands could find the fastenings of his jeans so they could come off now too.
Who was the Daddy in this relationship?
As if he’d even been a Daddy before this. As if he’d been one for more than a day, at most.
Not that it mattered. He was more than willing to give her what she wanted, but in his time and only after he’d drunk his fill of her gasps and sighs, heat and the salty-sweet nectar that made her pussy shine so gorgeously.
Grabbing her wrists, he pinned them behind her back.
“Don’t tell me no,” he growled, only to have her giggle again. Breathlessly, she caught him in the circle of her naked legs and pulled him that much closer again. The minute he let go of her hands, fully intending to force them open wide enough for him to get his shoulders down between them and his mouth locked on her sweet core, she defied him.
“No,” she pouted, and grabbed his pants again.
Ommin ripped her shirt straight down the front. Only belatedly did he think to wonder if it was a shirt she might be fond of.
She gasped, radiating shock at how quickly and effortlessly he’d done it. By then, however, he had her lifted down off the washing machine, spun around, and immediately bent back over it. He swatted her ass, then used her ruined shirt to tie her hands behind her.
She wanted his pants off? Fine, but that meant his belt came off first. Slithering out of his pants loops in two sharp yanks, and before he put more than a wary thought to it, he had it doubled in his hand and was laying the first of three solid snaps across her wriggling bottom.
She gasped again, sharper this time. On the second crack of leather to skin, she arched her back, bucking and grinding her hips in an expression of pain every bit as instinctive as the decisions moving him now.
“Daddy!” she cried, but he gave her the third whipping stroke even harder than before.
“Do not,” he repeated, “tell me no. Not when we’re in bed and especially not when you don’t mean it.”
Her knees banged the washing machine, but her only response was another shrill gasp, followed by a low, near guttural moan as he bent and bit, sinking his teeth into one of the fast-flushing marks his belt had made. Spreading her legs wide, he went in. That first taste was heaven. She opened to him like a flower, the folds of her parting to the lash of his tongue. Her knees and forehead both clanged against the metal of the machine as she rolled her hips and curled her toes.
“Oh!” she panted, pushing back against the sucking, licking, and punishing nips of his mouth.
He was gentle, but he was hungry. He liked the sense of power her wanton cries gave him. She danced for him as if she just couldn’t bring herself to hold still. Her thighs shook; her whole body shook—for him. The more he feasted on her, the more pronounced that shaking became and the more fervent his desire grew.
He broke away from her succulent flesh. Yanking her up off the battered washing machine, he dropped her to the floor, head down, hands behind her back, lovely ass striped with belt weals propped up in the air as she scrambled to get her knees under her.
He held on to her bound wrists so she couldn’t squirm away. It was the tether by which he pulled her back into position and sank his fingers into her. Two fingers had been a nice fit last night, but Little girls who tell Daddy no get three fingers and no mercy tonight.