by Selena Scott
Martine felt the energy shift in his body. He’d been holding himself tightly under control, trying to keep the two of them from drowning in one another. But then his tongue went inside her and a sharp crackle of blue energy pinwheeled out of him, over his skin. He was sparking where he touched her and his hands suddenly gripped her thighs in a tight clasp. He’d gone from deftly pleasuring her, to gorging himself.
Martine felt like she’d just had the door flung wide on her own pleasure. She wanted all of it to get out of the house, to get lost in the great outdoors. She wanted her pleasure to be free and part of the world. She wanted it to live and breathe between her and Arturo. She wanted—she had no idea what she wanted, but his mouth was pretty much doing the trick.
She planted her heels in his back and lifted her hips to his mouth. Martine could feel herself losing control and she did nothing to stop it and nothing to censor herself.
“I—oh, God. I’m not sure—that’s, please never stop that—Arturo! I’m gonna—”
Arturo felt her body tighten, her pussy clamp down around his tongue and then there was just a golden silhouette where his hands had been full of woman. Her shape was still there, but she was golden and trembling light. He could see through her to the bedspread beneath her. She shimmered and pulled tight and gasped and then she was there, back in his arms, sweaty and pink and perfect.
“That was… that felt so good. Oh.” She lunged forward while his mouth was still hanging open, because, you know, she’d just come so hard she’d turned into a creature made of light. But if he was freaked out, it didn’t last for much longer because her mouth was clamped to his and she straddled his lap.
Her tongue in his mouth, he flipped them so that she was on her back underneath him and her legs clamped hard around his waist.
“I need to be inside you,” he told her, point-blank. “Now.”
“Yes,” she nodded her head and spread her legs wide.
He reared back onto his haunches, the base of his dick in his hand, ready to plunge right into her and end this gorgeous torture. But he froze as he let his eyes trail over her. He was stunned at what he saw there.
He couldn’t believe that this woman, this creature, had chosen him. She’d had a crush on him. She was so wet for him he could see it glistening on her thighs. She’d patiently and unselfishly observed his relationship with another woman. She’d given him the gift of his energy, his shifter powers, all to protect him. Even now, she was protecting him, shielding him from the demon.
He pictured her the way she’d been described on the night the demon had tried to possess him. Crouching over him, knives drawn, willing to fight to the death over his soul.
“This can’t all be for me.” He gripped his hair and looked down at her beautiful, panting body, a sheen of sweat and golden energy all over her. Her strawberry hair darkened and clung to the sweat on her neck. She was reaching for him again and something about that just chopped the legs out from under him.
He didn’t dare touch her yet.
“I’ll give you anything,” he told her, his chest expanding and contracting violently. “Anything you ask for, I’ll give you.”
“I want to feel good.”
“Done.”
“I want companionship.”
“I swear to God I won’t leave your side.”
“I want what they have,” she tossed her head to indicate all the other couples occupying the house.
He scoffed arrogantly. “Those mortals? Please, Wings, what you and I will have will be infinitely greater than anything they could even imagine.”
She laughed and reached for him again and this time he came into her arms. He didn’t give her his weight, but he curled himself around her, equal parts protecting her and attempting to burrow inside of her.
“But what should I give you?” she asked him in between those feather-light kisses that scrambled her thoughts.
“Mmm, just let me be near you.” He breathed life into her. “Let me taste you. Let me be next to your light. God. I’m so sick of the dark. Let me have some of your light.”
“All of it,” she told him with the same generosity and resolution that he’d just shown to her. She would have given him the life-spark in her heart if she could have.
Instead, she let some of her energy slowly wrap around them. She was thrilling him, sparking him, driving him mad with need and she loved it.
Arturo’s eyes were closed, so he didn’t observe the cocoon of golden energy that had begun to swirl around the two of them. His face was buried in Martine’s neck as he wrapped her legs around his waist, found her pussy with clumsy, wide fingers and pressed the head of his cock into her, just an inch.
Martine felt utterly pinned, but still her energy raced around the two of them. She did what she’d done before and used her energy to coax his out. She wanted to feel all of him. She had his body, she was pretty sure she had his emotions, but now she wanted his energy. She wanted to press all of her against all of him. Gold and blue. She wanted to mix in every possible way.
She lifted her hips at the same second he pressed forward, quick and thorough, and he was suddenly flush against her, completely buried.
It was in that moment—her lips parted, her eyes glazed, everything in her open for the taking—that Martine called forth his energy.
Suddenly, in an almost violent burst, his blue burst forth and mixed hard with her gold. A swirling tornado of energy surrounded them, obscuring their naked bodies. Blue and gold tangled and swirled.
Arturo was almost hypnotized by the beauty of it. His temple was to her forehead, his head canted to the side to watch as their energy picked up speed and spin. It was as if there was a cord of electricity plugged in and pulling at every single one of his cells. He felt like he was forty feet tall. He could have launched an airplane, sucked a thunderstorm from the sky. This was what it felt like to be a god.
Arturo tipped his head back and held her eyes with his as tucked his hips into hers and went even deeper. She made a little noise and it hit him hard. It was just the cutest little noise. Halfway between a gasp and joy and he cursed himself for forgetting that as powerful as she was, she was still a woman. She was still a beautiful woman in his arms.
He pulled halfway out and pushed in again. She arched against him and immediately picked up the rhythm he’d started. He was pulling out and pushing back in fast, only to grind against her hard and start it all over again.
He ripped his head back and breathed raggedly as he lost himself in her. His hips were taking over, dragging both of them into that stuttering, grinding rhythm that just seemed to make sense with her.
Her ankles locked behind his back and her breath blossomed between them; she was fogging his skin like the glass of a car window. He jammed their faces together as his hands white-knuckled the sheets.
Their energy swirled as Arturo’s rhythm stumbled and it was all he could do to just hold against her. “Fuck. This is—fuck. More. More.”
He clamped an arm around her back and rolled to the side. He helped her haul her leg out from under his weight and then they were all spiraled around one another. There wasn’t much leverage or depth in this position, but neither of them cared. She was a writhing, slippery revelation and Arturo could barely keep a grip on her.
He rolled them back over so that he was on top again and tipped her hips up toward him with one strong palm. He kicked back onto his haunches and hauled her toward him.
She watched in rising, suspended fascination as he licked one thumb and used it to play loosely with her clit. He had the air of an expert who was absolutely lost to the experience. She had the feeling that his body was taking over where his mind could no longer guide him. His eyes were clouded and harsh, locked on her face. His cock was moving deeply inside her but not sharply. He was soft and so, so intense. Martine loosened the grip of her legs and instead just opened herself even further to him.
His hips stuttered and his thumb work, work, worked her. Ther
e was no more room for thoughts. She rose and rose, trembling.
Their energy began to mix, blurring together. Where there had only been stripes of yellow and blue, there was now a gorgeous, bright green. It was the color of springtime, of growth and newness and renewal.
Arturo’s hips picked up speed. He lifted one of her legs and pressed his face into her calf. His mouth came open and he couldn’t help but clamp his teeth around her there. Taste her skin.
She arched and her hand joined his at her clit and he felt her tighten hard around him. His eyes came open as he fell forward onto her and rode her straight through her orgasm. Their energy swirled and whipped around them, almost completely green. He hugged her to him and fucked the hell out of her, four hundred years of loneliness and pain rolling off his back like sweat. He eclipsed, double-helixed, spun away from this earth on another dimension.
Their energy, green as the bud of a young flower, tightened inexorably around them and then exploded outward. The house shook on its foundation. Every lightbulb shuddered, gasped and blew. The house lit green and gorgeous in one second and in the next second, fell exhaustedly dark.
CHAPTER TEN
In every wing of the house, there was a couple laughing. Tre lifted his head and stared in shock at the three lightbulbs in their room that had just completely blown their sockets.
“Show off,” Tre muttered, chuckling and burying his face in Caroline’s hair as he tugged her closer.
“Wow,” Caroline laughed in amazement. “You think Arturo and Martine finally did it?”
“I’m thinking yeah,” Tre said.
Then she sat up and clapped her hands together. “Oh, I’m so happy! Maybe now they won’t be so lonely.”
“Is there anything that doesn’t make you happy?” he asked her, tugging his little Wonder Woman back down to his lips.
Across the house Thea sat all the way up in bed, her mouth open wide enough to catch a passing 747. “Can you believe that son of a bitch?” she griped about Arturo, but the laughter in her eyes softened her words.
“I guess when you don’t get laid for four hundred years, you tend to shoot the lights out when you finally do,” Jack drawled, feeling lazy and sated from the love he’d just made with Thea. He watched his hand slick up her pale back in the moonlight. There was something about Utah that was bothering him, that he couldn’t quite put a finger on. But right now? When the sun was set and the dark was comfortable and cool and everyone in the house had just gotten laid and well, life was pretty all right.
Thea lay back over Jack’s sweaty chest. Neither of them particularly noticed when he started fiddling with the bare skin on her ring finger.
At the other end of the house, Celia’s hysterical laughter finally had Jean Luc laughing, too. They’d been mid-coitus when Arturo and Martine had burst out the house’s electricity and it had scared the living daylights out of both of them. They’d sprung apart, Celia pulling the covers over her head and Jean Luc finding himself naked and springing across the bedroom floor.
Once her heart had started beating again, Celia had nearly lost her mind with laughter.
“Are you standing in a karate pose?” she gasped at him as Jean Luc bashfully raked a hand over his face and made his muscles relax. He stalked across the floor and yanked her covers back to crawl in next to her.
“Maybe.”
“You saw that green burst of light, thought to yourself—I don’t know—aliens were attacking with ray guns… and you were going to naked karate chop them?”
He chuckled low and deep and brought her flush against him. “I figure that’s better than hiding under the covers. At least I was gonna go out in a blaze of glory.”
“You were going to go out butt-ass naked pulling a full on Ralph Macchio. I wouldn’t exactly call that ‘glory’.”
They laughed into each other’s mouths, but promptly stopped laughing when their bodies demanded that they pick up where they’d just left off.
Back in Martine’s room, she and Arturo lay in a twisted pile, breathing hard and trying not to fade off into the sleep that tried so hard to pull them both under. Neither of them wanted to miss a moment of this.
Now that they’d finally let themselves feel how much pleasure they could find in the arms of the other, it was painfully clear how much time they’d let slip through their fingers.
Arturo got up to fill them glasses of water from the bathroom tap which they both slugged down immediately. They collapsed back into one another’s arms and Arturo began to gently play with Martine’s hair. He knew that at some point he was going to have to speak. To put words to what had just happened. But he had the sneaking suspicion he was going to have to learn another language in order to talk about that, because there wasn’t a single English word that would suffice.
He’d never, in his entire life, felt anything like that. It was better than sex. Better than intimacy. Better than ecstasy. In those moments when their energies had mixed, there’d been absolutely nowhere to hide. Darkness had no place there. It was only light. He was seen and known. And vice versa. She’d opened herself up to be known in every single way. She’d pressed herself into every single nook and cranny of his soul.
Also, she’d just lost her virginity.
What a complete and total mindfuck. He figured he didn’t need to wax poetic. He just needed to at least speak.
He was just opening his mouth to make sure she was all right when she spoke up first.
“Sometimes at night I imagine that I’m a schoolteacher.”
“What?”
“And that you’re a mechanic. And we meet each other in a grocery store.”
“Oh. God.” He understood now what she was saying. She imagined them as ordinary people. She imagined them as two people who were allowed to love one another.
“You ask me on a date and come to my house with flowers. Like in the movies.”
He kissed her forehead and fitted her a bit more tightly against his chest. “Then what happens?”
“You kiss me long and slow on the porch after the date. A few weeks later, I let you take my clothes off.”
“You make me wait weeks?” he laughed.
She nodded. “We have perfectly ordinary sex that feels so good we never want to let each other go.”
“Ordinary sex? Us? Not possible.”
“We worry about things like taxes. And parking tickets. And how to make ends meet.” She tipped her head back and reached up, playing with his hair for a second. “Actually, I don’t even know what ‘making ends meet’ means. It’s just something humans say a lot.”
He might have smiled, but his lips didn’t get much beyond pressing against hers. There was a tenderness for her rising up within him so brightly it was painful.
“What happens next in the dream?” he asked her quietly.
“We get married in a small church and our friends are there. You take me to the mountains for a week and you make love to me three times a day.”
“You’ve thought about honeymooning with me.” He repeated the words with a sort of blank wonder in his tone. It had simply never occurred to him that she’d want that with him. There was suddenly a hell of a lot to get used to.
“Of course. I’ve been thinking about it for centuries.”
She watched his face shutter down, his eyes grow dark and distant.
“That makes you sad?” she asked.
“Not sad,” he said at length. “I just think about who I was these last four hundred years. The things I’ve done for the demon. And I think about the fact that you wanted me, even then. And…” he trailed off, not wanting at all to say what he had to. “I just can't help but feel that I don’t deserve you. That I didn't deserve you.”
She opened her mouth to object but he beat her to the punch, clapping one hand over her mouth.
“Then again,” he grinned down at her, “modesty was never exactly my strong suit. Maybe I don't deserve you and your perfect, golden self. But I don’t give a fuck an
ymore. I know how badly self-sacrifice can turn out, for everyone involved. And I’m taking this and running with it, okay?”
He rolled her over top of him so that her legs straddled either side of his hips.
“I’m going to make you happy every single second that I can. No turning back.”
“No turning back,” she said with a sharp nod. Her green eyes filled up her face. Martine gasped as Arturo gripped her ass in his hands and shifted her so that she slid along the length of him.
But he was the one gasping when she reached down and guided him into her and then thrust herself down.
“I might not survive this,” he groaned when she started to move her hips in an enthusiastic and unschooled way. She fell forward on a laugh, taking his lips with hers.
***
Martine was the one who woke late the next morning. There was a vase of flowers on her bedside table and the unmistakable sounds of a man in her shower. For a moment, the only thing that Martine was capable of doing was grinning at the ceiling, naked in her bed.
Her entire existence she’d wished that she could know what it was like to be human. To experience normal human things. And now she was having her very own morning after.
She rolled out of bed and practically skipped to the shower. She pulled open the shower door with a toothy grin on her face. It faded into heat as she took in a soaking wet and sudsy Arturo.
He was tall and wide-shouldered, but trim. His muscles were not vanity muscles. He was built like a man who knew how to be active, who knew how to get things done. His hair was inky black and flat under the water. She wanted to lick the ash brown hair on his chest, the stubble on his cheek.
He turned and his eyes heated.
“Your eyelashes are stuck together,” she told him with something akin to wonder in her tone. She was thrilled with her discovery, thrilled with him. With life.