With me.
He nodded. “That is very wise.”
I petted his forearm. Even that felt sexual. “I’m in roller derby. We have a lot of experience with injuries, dehydration, and exhaustion.”
“A warrior.” He touched my biceps, making me shiver all the way down. “You look very strong.”
“I’m a tired kitty this morning,” I admitted. I felt tongue-tied and horny. My heart gonged with that inner bell. “C’mon. I found the bathroom this morning. It’s horrible, but I bet the shower works.”
He wrinkled his nose at the bathroom. That had been my response, only louder.
I felt like I was leading an alien around. Everything interested him as if he’d never seen it. He wasn’t really bald. Fine blond hairs stood up on his scalp. I had an urge to rub the inside of my thigh against his head. Those wings…even dirty, they looked glorious, as big as a bed canopy.
When I got the shower working, he stepped right in.
He stood in the warm spray and closed his eyes. An expression of bliss transformed his face.
I couldn’t take it any more.
“Do you know how to soap up?”
I stripped off my pajamas from last night and stepped in with him.
There were, like, fifty shampoo and bath products in the shower, stuffed into plastic caddies on the walls, hanging from a sock thingy strung from the shower curtain rod, or just standing around on the flat shower floor, which was built like a spa shower, big and square, with half a dozen nozzles squirting us from all directions. I grabbed a bottle of shower gel at random.
When I reached for him, he leaned away.
“What—” he began.
“I won’t hurt you,” I said. “I promise.”
Now that we were so close, I could barely keep from bursting into tears, or biting him, or just throwing myself on him.
Water ran off his drooping, dirty wings and his shoulders and that smooth, powerful-looking chest. I wanted to wash him till he gleamed.
He looked into my eyes. I forgot to breathe.
“Very well,” he murmured.
I leaned in close and put my gel-slippery palms on his chest. “Let me know if anything is uncomfortable.”
As I ran my hands over him, he closed his eyes. His head tipped back and hit the wall with a clonk. I could see his chest begin to rise and fall.
Yet he didn’t reach for me.
I lathered him up more boldly. His body was totally hairless. The spray came and went as I moved around him, working downward toward his most heavenly muscle.
Every time a burst of spray hit him, he flinched. His chest began to heave.
Any second now, I thought hopefully, he’ll grab me.
“I’m uncomfortable!” he burst out.
“Open your eyes and tell me where.”
He opened those blue, beautiful eyes and stared at me. He looked hot and sweet and thoroughly confused. Then he looked at his cock. “There.”
It was huge and red. It seemed to be trembling. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t sticking it into me, or at least whacking off.
He’s an angel, Keek.
No kidding.
Did they even have sex in heaven?
According to my mother, no. Who knew Mom was so informed?
“I can fix that,” I said. “But we’ll have to move pretty slowly. It’s, uh, slippery in here.”
In me, too. I felt slippery as a water park slide.
“Yes.” He looked at his cock with alarm. “It’s never done that before.”
“Just follow my lead. Slow,” I added.
I reached past the mildewed shower curtain and pulled a stool into the shower.
The stool was yukky, too, but I couldn’t worry about that right now. I put it against the wall. “Sit down.”
He sat. With trembling hands, I adjusted a couple of sprays away from his face. I wanted to suck him, but I was afraid I’d drown, or worse, bite him. Not a good first experience for my angel.
My angel.
My heart danced inside me.
I leaned over him, putting my hands against the wall on either side of his head. “Very slowly,” I reminded him.
“Slowly.” He stared at my face. I’d never been naked in a shower with a man who looked at my face. It was unnerving.
I straddled his lap and sat down very carefully.
He slid into me, thickening every inch of the way. I felt tight and safe. He jerked, stiffened all over, gasped. His eyes closed, then flew open.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” he squeaked.
“Oh, no. Not at all.” I balanced myself by putting my hands on his shoulders and lifted myself up, then dipped. Thank God for roller derby; my thighs and legs could take the stress of dipping, lifting, dipping, lifting, oh baby. My heart pounded. I was getting light-headed from trying to use my leg muscles while, at the same time, my body was sending me urgent pleasure messages with every dip.
“I think you can touch me now,” I suggested.
He grabbed me and yanked me down onto his cock. My legs let go all at once. We slid off the stool with a thump and a splash, and then we were rolling and humping like bunnies, with water falling on us and the hard shower floor bonking our knees and elbows, and I didn’t care, I was so close to exploding like an egg in a microwave—
He shuddered, yelled in my ear, and slumped under me like he’d been shot.
I lifted my head. “You okay?”
“What was that?” His eyes were wide and bewildered. “That swelling. I think—I hope it didn’t burst too hard—”
I smiled tightly. Every nerve in my body was screaming, but he’d shrunk inside me, and his hands lay slack on my hips.
“That, my angel, was sex,” I said, striving for patience. I was ready to cram a shampoo bottle into myself. His hand. His foot.
“How very alarming.” His eyes widened. “Oh, no. I think the swelling’s coming back.”
“Thank God,” I said, and began to move on top of him again.
Oh, yeah. Definitely swelling again.
I’m not normally orgasmic with mere penetration, but that guy came four more times in the shower. He rolled on top of me. He did me standing up, which worked because he was apparently as strong as he looked, and he could hold me up against the wall. I think I came twice. I was delirious. His wings kept batting me in the face. I couldn’t concentrate. I was still reeling from capturing my very own angel and maybe from the hot chocolate that other guy gave me last night, which had left my mouth tasting of hash.
When I finally admitted that my quads were screaming and I needed to breathe and my hands and feet were turning into prunes and the shower smelled of mildew and I was so thirsty my head was splitting, we separated.
We took turns drinking from the spray. Then I turned the water off.
“Oh,” he said, with a little kid’s disappointment in his voice.
“The shower at my house isn’t as fancy, but it’s a lot cleaner.” I handed him the least-grotty towel. Then I went to work cleaning the last of my makeup off, which wasn’t easy because the mirror was all smeared up with lipstick writing.
“This isn’t your house?” he said.
“No, I think it belongs to those guys.”
“The demons.”
I took the towel from him. “When you say, ‘demons…’”
Keek finally called at ten thirty.
“Where are you?” I demanded. “Are you okay? I’ve been worried sick.”
“I found him!” Keek crowed. “Oh, Mella, he’s wonderful. He came five times just in the shower this morning.”
That’s exactly how my roommate thinks.
“Does he have a name?”
“Jioffriel,” she said. “Jeff for short. We’re going out to breakfast. The demons are having waffles, but I want to be alone with Jeff. If they’ll lend him some clothes.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, wishing, not for the first time, that cell phones had a little button you could press that would g
ive you a GPS location and a map for the person you were talking to. Keek’s lifestyle worries me. “He seemed a little short on wardrobe last night.”
Keek sighed theatrically. “He’s long on everything else.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“I’m in love, Mella!”
I sighed, but sadly. I was in love, too, with a— My brain caught up with my ears. “What do you mean, the demons are having waffles? Where are you? What do you mean, demons?”
“Just a minute, we’re walking back to look at the address. Forty-one twenty-one North Ravenswood. Got that?”
“Wait, wait!” I grabbed a Sharpie out of my purse and scribbled on my hand. “Demons, Keek?”
“Join us at Pauline’s. I can’t wait for you to meet him!”
And she hung up.
I threw my keys in my purse and ran out the door.
My body wanted to rush down the street to 4121 North Ravenswood and find my demon.
My brain took over.
Keek had found her angel. From the jubilation in her voice, I knew she’d already done that worrisome lifestyle thing. She was also head over ears again, which meant she would have the common sense of a newt for the foreseeable. But she knew stuff I needed to know. She was also closer by two blocks than this demon place.
Demons?
I went to Pauline’s.
Keek had changed out of her pajamas, thank goodness, and wore her usual high-top army boots, fishnet stockings, skimpy running tank, and a ragged, ruffled, black chiffon skirt.
Her angel, Jioffriel, a.k.a. Jeff, was wearing jeans and a Piddlies T-shirt when I found them at the table by the window in Pauline’s, and his wings were nowhere to be seen. He looked blond and chiseled and perfect and slightly goofy, which saved me from feeling uneasy around him. Pretty people tend to be such butts.
“Tell me about Mutt,” I said.
Keek leaned forward eagerly. “Are you in love? Don’t you just want him?”
Her hand was on Jeff’s knee under the table. Classy.
“I’m worried about what I might be getting into,” I said truthfully. “I don’t think I’m up to an exorcism. I mean, I’m not religious like my mom, but I frown on working black magic to, like, bind him or whatever.”
I felt bound to Mutt already.
“That would be bad,” Jeff agreed. These were his first words to me after hello, so I blinked a little at the moral certainty in his voice. Of course, he was an angel.
“Do you know Mutt?” I asked him.
“Only from last night. We were on the Joint Task Force together. He healed my leg after we left the cemetery, and the demon Baz cleaned and bandaged it later.”
My head hurt. “How many demons am I dealing with here?”
“Three, I think,” Keek said.
“Four,” Jeff said. “There is a black one who left early last night. And Baz, who cooks.”
Keek beamed at me. “Omigod, his waffles smelled so good. But we wanted to meet you here.”
“And Kamadeva. The Kama-Sutra Kama,” Jeff clarified.
My eyebrows were climbing into my hair. “Oh?”
“Your demon is going to share a room with me until another one moves out,” Jeff said, pouring peach syrup on his pancakes. “He will clean the skylights over the MJ plants and I will clean the bathroom. And we will learn to fix motorcycles.”
“Good.” I nodded as if this made sense. “Good.”
“They’re out of work now,” Keek said. “It’s because their mission was canceled, and everybody on it got erased from the supernatural computer system. Last night? All those raining men? Poof. Heaven doesn’t remember them. Hell doesn’t remember them.”
“It may be because of the love charm in the flying sparks,” Jeff said.
I put my hands over my ears. “I don’t understand a word of this.”
“Where is the bathroom?” Jeff said loudly.
Keek pointed.
As Jeff wandered off to the bathroom, Keek leaned forward again. “You won’t have to bind him, Mella. We met right after they got sprinkled with those fireworks we were watching out the windows last night. The fireworks were enchanted with a love spell. That means these guys are imprinted on us.”
I blinked. “Like ducklings?”
“Yes!” She did a little happy dance in her chair. “I’m in love, and I’m so happy, and he’s wonderful! Mella, he came five times in the shower. This boy does not wilt. And he’s supersweet.”
“I can see that.” I couldn’t quite see it yet, but Jeff had certainly been making goo-goo eyes at Keek, which was a good sign. “By the way, where’s his wings?”
“They retract.”
“Uh-huh.” The longer this conversation went on, the more convinced I was that I was dreaming. “Does he have another job yet? Besides cleaning the bathroom for demons?” Apparently, my role in this dream was to deliver straight lines so everyone could baffle me with their replies.
“I wanted to talk to you about that. I think he could be a male model, don’t you? He’s so beautiful.”
“You want him working around supermodels all day?” I said. Keek is short and round, while I am built more like a refrigerator with a head. I apologized. “Sorry, of course it wouldn’t matter.”
“I guess we’ll look into the job thing in a while,” Keek confessed. “I kind of want him to myself for a while.”
Nothing new there.
“Sooo, he’s going to live with us?” Our apartment was pretty small. Keek’s lifestyle had her sleeping out a lot, because I refused to cook for her numerous, uh, overnight guests.
“No, he’s rooming with Mutt at the demons’ lair, remember?”
I squeezed my temples and my brain squished back inside. Proper thoughts returned to me. “I shouldn’t want this,” I said, trying out a proper thought.
“Yes, you should,” Keek said firmly. “You deserve it.”
“Deserve to be in love with a demon?”
Her face lit up with joy. “You are in love! Oh, this is great! I’m so happy for you!”
I scowled at my orange juice. “He was probably in hell for being really evil. I shouldn’t love that.”
“Don’t judge, Mella. That’s how you end up alone.”
My head came up. “Hey! That’s harsh.”
It hurt, too. Keek was never alone…and never with the same guy for long. But did I judge her?
Well, I guess, yeah. I kind of did.
“And it comes from judging yourself,” Keek said, as if she could see the tears stinging the backs of my eyes. “You think you’re unworthy, so you come down on everybody else in retaliation.”
“I don’t think you’re a bad person,” I said feebly.
“You think you’re a bad person who doesn’t deserve love—”
“Hey!” I said.
“So you dump every guy before he even gets a chance to dump you.”
“Guys are jerks.”
“Yeah, yeah. There’s always something wrong with them. C’mon, Mella. Don’t be picky! You the jackpot! Forgive yourself, lay back, and enjoy it!”
I put that one aside, along with the arguments rising up in my throat.
They probably weren’t very good arguments anyway.
“Why don’t you tell me more about these demons? I’m kinda freaking out about that. I mean,” I lowered my voice, “we haven’t really met, but I feel a strong, um, impulse to get to know him. Mutt. From seeing him last night.”
This was an understatement. I could feel him out there, unmet, unkissed, twitching like a phantom limb on parts of my body I didn’t care to mention in a restaurant.
Keek, the lifestyle maniac, picked right up on that. “Ooo, we like ’em big and horny, eh?”
“I mean, yours is an angel,” I added desperately. “What do you have to worry about?”
I shouldn’t have asked a rhetorical question. Until Jeff returned from the bathroom, Keek explained that she had no worries ever, ever again.
&
nbsp; I tried to pin Jeff down about the relative evilness or bloodthirstiness of his friend with the red wings.
Jeff put his head on one side, chewing bacon. “I suspect he is no worse than any of them. He’s been behind a desk for eight centuries. Not a lot of opportunity for victimizing mortals, or even for tormenting the damned. Numbers have been dropping. In both offices,” he added sorrowfully. “You’d think at least people would care if they get into Heaven. We have cable now.”
I nodded and picked up my purse. The pressure of this conversation wasn’t letting up.
“Nice to meet you, Jeff. I think I’m going down the street now and see if I can find, uh, just take a walk. ’Kay. ’Bye.”
The factory doorbell rang.
I was lying on my back with my bat wings retracted and my head stuck under the downstairs refrigerator, trying to get the compressor to quit failing intermittently. The sound of my wrench clanking on the compressor housing echoed across the big, dark room, across the empty basketball court, against the factory’s big, smeared windows patterned with chicken wire, and the yellowing, translucent plastic panels nailed here and there where windows had broken and never been replaced.
Baz swished a block of frozen shrimp in a bucket of water with a barbecue fork in one hand and supervised me with a beer in the other hand. Beside him, the gas grill was heating up. A pound of butter sat melting in a giant coffee mug on the grill.
The doorbell rang again. He put his beer down. “I’ll get it.”
I felt a prickle rush up my back hairs.
He walked to the door, fifty feet away. I heard him say, “Sure, he’s here now. Come on in.”
Voices murmured for a few minutes. Then he brought the visitor to my corner of the factory.
“Well,” said a voice that froze my blood and sent my heart thumping into my ears. “I guess he’s handy around the house.”
I hit my head on the underside of the fridge, trying to slide out fast.
It was the blonde vampiress from the cemetery gate last night.
I scrambled to my feet.
She looked me up and down. “And you found him some clothes.” She sounded disappointed.
Baz smiled benignly beside her, the traitor.
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