by Jade Alters
“Can…I come in?” Cece asks. The unexpected question takes me a minute to sort through.
“I suppose there’s no sanction preventing it,” I say. I wrap my hand around the heavy steel handle to disengage the lock. When I throw it up, air hisses out from inside the pressurized room to the hallway outside. The black cover slides over the window automatically. I let it swing out past Cece, into the otherwise normal Academy dorm hall. “Come in,” I invite, as I understand hosts are obligated to.
Cece ducks under the top of my heavy door frame, though she clears the opening by a whole foot, easily. Her eyes glide from one corner of the room to the next, as if the ceiling might fall on her any second. She traces the countless scars etched in the walls. She sizes up my academic stack in the corner. She saunters alongside my cot, fingers sliding along the edge of my imprint in it. Cece’s huge blue eyes drop down to the desk beside it, to the picture of us framed there. A fond finger runs over the edge of it before she settles into a comfortable seat on the edge of my cot.
“Bryant… They really put you in here?” Cece asks. A sour taste seems to stick to her tongue as she says it.
“This is the room I was assigned,” I confirm. I shut the heavy iron door to the hall and latch the steel lever. The room begins repressurising with little puffs of air from the nozzles built into the ceiling. Now any particles of corrosion that emanate from my body will be contained for filtration, rather than escaping into the rooms nearby.
“It’s like a prison cell,” Cece says.
“You’ve never been in prison,” I conclude from this statement alone.
“Well, no, but…” She doesn’t seem to know how to continue.
“You don’t get to keep personal pictures in a prison cell,” I tell her, “but you do get your own toilet. Usually.” Cece nods with that same somber look on her face. Then her eyes brighten with surprise.
“Wait…do you not… Bryant, do you ever go to the bathroom?” Cece asks.
“No. I’ve never entered one, because I don’t defecate like humans do. I don’t eat, either, unless I want to,” I tell her, when I see her face light up with yet another follow-up question.
“Holy shit. Why is there so much I don’t know about you?” Cece laughs.
“I suppose it’s because, in the past, I haven’t been very forthcoming. It’s not you. You ask plenty of questions,” I assure her. I can tell from the pain in her face she’s already busy blaming herself.
“Yeah, geez, open up, Bryant,” Cece teases me.
“I already have, today. I opened up my door to my first guest,” I tease her right back as I sink down on my cot beside her. It groans a little at the weight of two people.
“No kidding?” Cece marvels. “I’m your first guest?” I nod. “I’m honored. I’ll be your second and third too, if you like.”
“No more than that?” I play dumb.
“As many times as you want, Bryant,” Cece assures me, thinking I truly don’t understand what she means. When we first met, I wouldn’t have. I would have taken every word literally, instead of every other word, thanks to her careful tutelage. I grin to let her know I understood the first time, and that I was teasing. She slaps my armored shoulder. “You shit! I’ve never been so proud,” Cece laughs. When the chuckles die down and the ambient hum of magical light takes over again, I ask:
“Why today?” I look over to see Cece waiting for more. “Why did you decide to come visit me today? Why not tomorrow or yesterday? There has to be a reason.” Cece stares down into her thighs.
“There is… It’s because I’m wondering something. I think you might be one of the only people who could clear it up for me,” Cece explains. Her hands bunch up in her lap. Her fingers twirl around one another, picking nails and flicking past each other. It’s almost like she’s trying to recreate one of Serge’s tricks. I’ve never seen her play with her hands like that, or heard such silence in place of what she really wants to say.
“I don’t think I can, if you won’t say it,” I urge her. Cece’s shoulders rise with the influx of a deep breath, then sink with the release.
“You were…raised in Hell, right? Not in this Realm?” she finally manages to pass.
“I spent most of my young years there, yes,” I tell her.
“What do you remember about it? What was it like?” Cece asks. I lean back on my cot, hands tight around my pants.
“That’s tough to answer. Everything works differently there. Touch… Time… There’s no easily distinguishable sun, so the days are harder to track and more like one continuous blur. Everything is more fluid there, too. Matter is in constant flux, from all the Demonic manipulation,” I do my best to sort out the major details. It’s a bit much to explain in so short a time, especially when it was so long ago.
“It’s hard to believe a place like that exists… Are there cities? Villages? Do Demons live in big communities there?” Cece asks. There’s a certain edge to her voice, a little sharper than simple scholar’s curiosity.
“There are…structures that multiple Demons might inhabit for a time. Before they’re disassembled and repurposed,” I tell her.
“Would you ever want to go back there?” Cece asks. My smoldering orange eyes shrink back in their half-closed sockets. It’s hardly a yes or no answer. It might be the toughest question I’ve been asked, since coming to this Realm – most of my life.
“For someone who’s spent so much time here…it would be overwhelming to the senses. I don’t think I could even say senses work the same in Hell as they do here. It was a powerfully confusing experience coming here, when I did. I don’t think I would willingly undergo the reverse experience to return to Hell.” Cece’s head slowly bobs up and down, though the troubling curiosity has hardly left the lines scrunching up around her eyes.
“Say you did go back… Would it make you stronger? Were you stronger when you first came here from Hell?” The question slants off of Cece’s lips with an uncomfortable tilt. It’s like she regrets every word more that leaves her mind.
“I wouldn’t say I was more powerful… Just less adapted. More destructive. Cece, what in the world are you actually wondering?” I ask. Even I realize these questions have a point, even if meandering around it. It’s all too specific for her to “just be wondering”. Something weighs heavy on her chest.
“What you said before…about why I didn’t come yesterday. Well, I couldn’t. Because I spent the day yesterday at the Kyrie Stronghold,” Cece admits. Her voice is hardly able to make it up her throat, so saturated with guilt.
“Why?” I ask, sure to exclude any implications of suspicion. If Cece was so deep in enemy territory, I’m not just confident there was good reason – I’m positive.
“Believe it or not…to meet my father. Turns out Dorian, their leader, is my biological father. And he wanted some daddy-daughter bonding time. Thise asked me to go in, undercover, to see what I could learn about the Kyrie’s plans,” Cece tells me.
“And they want to find the Realms of Power,” I conclude. “But we’ve known that since the Point Arena incident last year. Why is it bothering you so much now?” Cece traps her bottom lip in her clenched jaw. When I remember how good it felt to have her body on mine, I lay a rocky-armored hand on her leg. I apply just enough pressure to her thigh to remind her that she’s not alone in the room. Cece answers me without looking up.
“Dorian… I’m still angry with him for leaving me behind. For never coming back for me. But…he doesn’t seem like a bad man. He says the Dragons are after their Realm of Power to defend themselves from the Council, and find answers about their origins. I…just wanted to get an idea of how much shit he’s full of. Sorry about the twenty questions.” It takes a moment for me to recount them in my head.
“You’ve only asked twelve, unless I’m mistaken,” I remind her, as the number twenty seems to carry some weight for her.
“Twenty questions is this dumb game humans play sometimes,” Cece snorts. “Some peopl
e use it as an expression to represent a long list of questions.”
“Come on,” I challenge her, just to pull that smile out. “That one’s just ridiculous. How is incorrect numeration an expression? And what’s the point of it, if only some people use it?” With each further question, Cece devolves further into a laughing fit. Then I realize. “Is this an appropriate list to abbreviate as twenty questions?” Then she guffaws so hard that I lose it, too. Before I know it, we’re rocking back on my cot from laughing so hard. It sends warm tingles through the cracks in my blackened chest. When we wind back down to a relative calm, I tell her, “I wouldn’t concern yourself too much with the Realms of Power.”
“And why’s that?” Cece asks. “Worried I’m getting in too deep with the other side?” I can tell from the sharpness of the sarcasm that she already knows, it’s not me concerned with her getting in too deep. It’s the only other person who’s ever set foot in my room.
“No. Because even if your Realm of Power can increase your strength…it can’t make you more perfect than you are now,” I tell her. It was little more than an instinct spiced with the warmth from our shared laughter and memories of our touch, but it hits Cece like a bat in the stomach. She curls over from the sudden shift of blood to her heart. Her brows curve up at me again, but not in empathy. I hardly understand the feelings in my own chest, and yet I’ve infected her with them.
My breath evacuates my chest when Cece’s lips crash into mine. She’s never kissed me quite this way before. Her thighs swing over my waist to perch on top of mine. Her arms slide down the back of my neck to the middle of my back. Her tongue slides in onto mine while she presses her chest down onto mine. For a moment, it feels so good that I let my hands climb up her muscular bottom. I round my grasp around her curves and squeeze, just like she taught me. Then she retreats from my face. She crosses her arms across her body to grab the bottom of her shirt. Our mouths unlink just long enough for me to remember. For her face, tainted with black branches, to shoot across my mind.
“Cece, we shouldn’t,” I say the very last thing I want to. Excitement is already spreading through the cracks in my thighs and groin again. For some reason, all I want to do is pull her down onto me, even harder. But now is the time to fear. Before we become entangled too tightly, too passionately, to notice what my body does to hers. Like last time.
“We just have to be quick. Or minimize skin-to-skin contact,” Cece tells me. She doesn’t wait for an answer before she pulls her shirt up over her head. Her dark hair bounces down around her shoulders while her breasts bounce in the cup of her bra. Another pulse of excitement jolts through the area between my legs. “Your parents were able to figure it out, right? Leave your clothes on. We’ll see how long you last.” Cece’s eyes flit down at me with a devious tint like never before.
“How long I last?” I repeat.
“You’ll see,” Cece assures me. She guides my rocky hands up her sides, to the flanks of fabric on either side of her breasts. “Reach behind. Feel that clip? Push the two ends together then… Wow, you’re a natural,” Cece laughs when the bra loosens from her chest. She rolls her shoulders to let it drop onto my chest, then sweeps it off to the floor. Her nipples are so different from mine, yet their transformation mimics what my body can do. She swoops low to let them graze along the edge of my shirt, flicking past the ridges of rocky armor beneath. With each twitch, her nipples firm up and poke out, until she brings them up to my face. “You can kiss them. Gently.” I lean in and push my lips around one. Cece lets out a little gasp. She arches her back to let it further into my mouth. “Use your tongue like a finger- ah.”
I must have done it correctly. I feel Cece become even harder inside my mouth. She rocks forward against my waist for a few seconds before pulling back. The tiniest black roots work their way back to the center of her breast, where they began, and disappear. Her body can handle it, it seems, for short periods of time. How long mine can handle it for… I’m getting an idea of what Cece meant. With every slide forward, I feel something change in my body. I feel the excitement heighten and spread.
“I’m…not sure what that is,” I tell Cece when something materializes at the center of my groin. It grows in little pulses with the quickening of my heartbeat and presses into Cece’s underwear under her Academy skirt. She smirks at me as she guides my strange new appendage up between the lips I felt with my hands in our last encounter. The sensation of her fingers against it sends shivers and warmth through my thighs in waves too fast to distinguish. She slides down on it until it pokes the little bulb of her own pleasure.
“I do. I knew I felt something on our date!” Cece smiles. She rocks down, mashing my newly formed muscle up into her newly pronounced one. Our elated grunts collide in the air between our lips where they hover so close. She lowers her bare chest to my shirt. Her nipples draw lines up and down me as she pushes me into her, separated only by a thin layer of clothing.
“That feels… I don’t know...how that feels,” I admit, surprised to find how short of breath I am to do it.
“You’re about to be even more confused…” Cece pants. “In the best way.”
She reaches down to unzip my Academy slacks. With some careful positioning and deft fingers, she grabs a hold of my penis. I’m familiar with the human male reproductive system from listening to researchers describe my differences from their own. I’ve never had a penis before, nor tried to form one from my matter. Yet Cece pulls a dark gray rod of unarmored muscle from the opening in my pants. The feeling of her skin around it is electric. Every downward stroke she gives it forces my back to decline further, until I have to support myself with my hands on my cot. Cece slides her rounded grip down to the base of it and rubs it against the bulb between her lips.
“Is…this the confusing part?” I ask, mind racing.
“Not yet,” Cece smirks. I’m not sure exactly what I’m feeling for a moment and have to look down.
Cece uses my penis to catch her underwear and move it sideways. She unveils a pair of shallow lips, more slender than the ones on her face, and oriented vertically. My eyes widen when she pulls my rigid muscle up between them. Then they shut tight under the strain of too much sensory input at once. I can’t afford to see while I feel something so potent and powerful. A few wiggles of my penis fixes it at an opening, which Cece slides down over me. It feels almost like a kiss – wet, warm, snug, but with the effect magnified by a billion. My penis throbs against her inner walls as she wiggles her hips to get comfortable. My head rolls back. I let in a sharp gasp as she rises for the first time. She uses her entire body like a tube, sliding up and down it. At the bottom of each rock, I burst up into her so far I think I must be hurting her. But the noises from her lips aren’t painful in the slightest.
“Wait,” I realize. “This is too long. I’ll hurt you-”
“Trust me. We’ll be fine…You’re almost there.” Cece cuts me off between quick, shallow breaths. She grabs one of my hands and pulls it in to where our bodies are linked together at the waist. “What you did for me in the courtyard? Do that,” she commands. I ease my armored finger carefully into Cece, between the base of my penis and her pleasure center. Her thighs squeeze tight around me. Her hands clamp onto my shoulders. “No matter what sounds I make, don’t stop.”
I rub down, then up, once, and I understand the warning. Cece grunts like she’s been punched. But, true to instruction, I keep rubbing. Cece’s humps quicken and condense. Her butt slaps against my thighs with such force it starts to bend my cot. She groans, grunts and even screams with the tempo of her slam into me, with the pace of my penis stabbing up into her. She roars through red cheeks with her eyes shut while the walls of her opening shudder and throb.
The convulsions hug me even tighter, until a warmth spreads across my own cheeks. It surges down through my chest and stomach, right to my groin. It culminates in an uncontrollable spasm of muscle inside of Cece. I feel warmth spread to fill every unoccupied inch between our inte
rlocked parts as a single, raucous...
“Oh!” escapes my lips. Cece snickers while she thumps her waist down on me harder than ever. I collapse back on my cot while we vibrate together. Fatigue sweeps over me like a tidal wave as Cece finishes me off by slowing to a few, final gentle rocks. Each one fizzles out an aftershock of sensation through my penis. It lets out a few, final twitches of heat, before I can hardly move at all. Cece climbs off of me just in time to keep the corruption localized around her legs. It begins to vanish almost immediately. “I… That was…” I struggle to describe, right up until the legs of my cot finally give out. My back hits the floor as it’s reduced to splinters and mesh beneath me. Cece gasps, then breaks out into laughter.
“Do not tell them how that happened,” she advises. When she sees I’m in no condition to get up from the collapsed mound of wood and screws, she kneels beside me to lay her head on my clothed chest. She glances down, astonished as I am to find my penis already shrinking back into my body. It takes seven seconds for it to vanish completely.
It takes me a few minutes to realize Cece hasn’t moved from my chest because she’s already snoring. I glance down for a quick check that our bare skin isn’t touching anywhere before I let myself drift off beneath her. We don’t need to be in direct contact for even me to understand how good it feels to have her there.
The Big Briefing
Cece,
It’s a sharp, shrill sound I know well that wakes me from my slumber later that same night. I blink myself back to life, not entirely sure which bed I’m in. The admittedly comfortable temporary mattress Dorian set up for me in the Dragon’s Quarter dorms of the Kyrie Stronghold? The shattered cot between the shimmering gray walls of Bryant’s room? It takes a few glances around to realize the answer. Neither.
That’s right, somehow I managed to get up, get dressed and drag myself back to my own room just before curfew. With the chaos and excitement of the past few days, I’ve been solidly asleep since then. I might have caught up on a few missing hours, all the way until morning, if it wasn’t for that sound.