by S A Gardner
That six-foot-five rat was playing with me!
Or was he? His face revealed nothing. No taunting, no boredom, no irritation, no nastiness—nothing, dammit.
They didn’t know someone like him would exist when they coined the phrase “face value.” What value would that be in his case?
I only had a counter-question in answer to his perfunctory inquiry. What my heart would soon splatter against my ribcage if I didn’t ask.
“What have you been up to?”
He tilted his head, acknowledging my volley. “Oh, I’ve been busy. Very.” He let this stand for a circulation halting moment. Would he tell me that he and S…? “I’ve ID’d my enemies.”
Blood drenched my vessels, propelled by a stampede of thunderclaps. So he was going to relate professional activities, but nothing personal. And they were his enemies now. Three months ago they’d been ours.
“It took a bit longer than I expected, what with the new developments. But I still used the intervening time performing cleaning sweeps.” He made a gesture, detailing his actions’ efficiency and finality. “Sort of weeding, thinning out their ranks from the ground up. But I’ve ID’d the TOP and PACT’ puppeteers. It turns out there’s quite the UN assembly of major movers involved. I bet you’ll find the list very interesting. In fact, your timing is uncanny. I was just drawing up my strikes.”
Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?
Don’t say it. Just don’t.
I said it. “And that’s what you were doing with Suz when I arrived? In you underwear?”
He looked down his ridged abdomen before he raised his eyes and scorched mine with their blankness. “I’m the only one in my underwear. Last I looked, Suz was in her nightie.” His calmness, the implications, the almost confirmed dread. The world exploded on a torrent of everything extreme and violent and damaging. I was going to do something irrevocable. Kill him. Kill myself.
Weep.
I only heaved up to my feet, staggered around. “I’d better leave you to get Suz down to her underwear, then.”
The crashing chords of my world ending ruptured my eardrums. And there was nothing to ward them off, to mitigate them. Nothing but silence.
Just get out of here.
I was at the library’s double-door when I felt him move. Every nerve in my back was yanked up with his rising motion. Then even through the cacophony roiling in my head, I heard him, the very sound of unconcern.
“You still haven’t stated your reasons for seeking me.”
This is it. This. Is. IT.
I whirled around and charged.
Seven
It was one of those temporally charged moments.
The ones that simulated hours. Those out-of-body experiences when I was seeing all, feeling all.
And all I saw and felt was him. My quarry. My tormentor. Standing there across the fast shrinking distance, waiting, assessing my attack, gauging how far I’d take it, deliberating his countermove.
He called it, his decision expanding his bulk, erupting from his eyes on a solar flare-level blaze. The first sign of life. A knockout of a response.
He could save it. He’d left it too late. Anyone doing any knocking out would be me.
But my running headstart had reached its end. To get at him, I needed a launching pad. I improvised one, my sneakered feet mounting the chair I’d just vacated, giving me the boost I needed for my momentum to segue into a lunge that propelled me across the width of his desk.
I was taking him down.
He watched me all the time, studying my every move, like those years when he’d trained and honed and driven me. Criticizing my technique, exasperated by my volatility, admiring my unpredictability, conceding my effectiveness.
And I had to revise my stance on heat vision. He must have it. I felt it singing me, pictured myself, instead of impacting him in a full frontal assault, drifting to the floor at his feet in ashes.
He left it till the last heartbeat before impact then he lunged right back. We collided. Full on.
Then we went down.
The way we’d crashed to the ground, he should have crushed me beneath him. He didn’t. He twisted, took me on top. It made me madder. Thanks but no thanks. If I didn’t have his love anymore, I didn’t want his consideration. I wanted a shred-you-to-pieces-shred-me-right-back-damn-you fight.
I didn’t remain on top for long. He heaved beneath me with his arms closing around me, squeezing me out of breath and fight, snatching me under him.
Then he crushed my lips under his.
He bore down into me, tongue and teeth, fury and arousal.
He was here, now, as blinded, as lost.
I cried out, in relief, in triumph. I got him. Made him admit it, lose it, do it.
He snatched the sound from my lips, dragged every one I had from my depths, his own rumbles pummeling me. I cried out again and surged, spread my legs for his demand, contained him, my heels digging into him, demanding him, rivaling his ferocity.
“Is this what you came here seeking?” he growled, ground his erection at the junction of my thighs.
Blackness frothed from the periphery of my vision, a storm-front of pleasure advancing from my core, where he was so near, so far. Where he wasn’t.
He ground into me, over and over, simulating the plunging I was charring for through our barriers. “Is it? Do you want this? Hard and fast and here, on the floor?”
“Yes—yes, Damian—all of it…”
He rose over me, crisscrossed his hands on the edges of my T-shirt, then in one impossible movement, explosive yet almost unfelt, he extricated me from it. He removed my jeans in another magical maneuver. Then he was all over me. Flesh to flesh, at last.
At last.
It seemed I’d said all this out loud. He took his chest away and my breasts wailed for its crushing. “We’re not flesh to flesh. Not yet. Now we’re in our underwear.”
He held my eyes as he hauled me to him, one hand arching me back, an offering to his whims, almost cruel as he closed his teeth over a nipple that would have cut through a less substantial cover. My bras were hard-duty, just like the life I led. Pleasure shot from his nipping teeth, jackknifed through me.
“Damian, just take it off—just touch me, devour me…”
It usually took me seconds to take off my bra. It took him a blink. I always wondered at his expertise in the art of undressing, preferred to think it part of his general ultra-efficiency. But this was virtuosity. It had better not be due to any recent intensive practice, or I would end up killing him.
Next second, nothing mattered. Nothing but having almost half my breast in the hot, wet possession of his mouth.
My hands convulsed over his head, tried to drive my flesh fully into his mouth, to drive my fingers into his hair.
I met the hindrance of his ponytail, went berserk. I tore at its confining band, panted at his pained growls, his retaliating nips. Then I was in tactile nirvana, fingers-deep in luxury and virility made shoulder-length, darkest-night tresses.
His growls detailed his enjoyment of my frenzy, my roughness, one hand tormenting my other breast, the other moving to my panties. Then he stopped. I followed his gaze, mine glazing over the contrast of our honed bodies, our bronze and palest gold biological weapons. Then I saw the cause of his fascination and the fine tremors of overtaking ferocity.
It should be a scary sight, this much destructive force under fast-draining control. It was the one thing worth seeing. Damian losing his mind, his all to me, to my power over him. And now to the sight of red panties with DD emblazoned on them.
A rumble rolled out of him, clawing with his intention. I clung to his hand. “It’s the only one I found…”
He grasped my detaining hands in one, slammed them to the ground, the other disregarding my plea, tearing the panties off me. “I’ll get more made for you. In every color, in every damn font. I’ll damn well tattoo my initials here.” His lips opened over the lips of my core, spread them. “Right here.” His
teeth pinpointed the bud where it all converged with a sharp nip.
And I exploded. I think I blacked out. I know I did.
I came to, to him, over me, watching me trembling with what he’d done to me, deluging me in emotions. After the void he’d subjected me to, they came too fast and thick for me to register, to decipher. There was no mistaking the taunt, though, when he said, “Now only I am in my underwear. Again.”
“I’m sick of hearing this.” I charged him, sank my teeth into his chest, over ‘my’ scar, where I’d opened his chest and held his heart in my hands, where he’d said I’d consolidated my ownership. I treated his boxers with all the hostility of the obstacle that had been keeping me from his sight, his feel. They resisted my tearing efforts, but at least
I got my objective, got them off. “Now you’re not.”
His laugh, drenched in lust and wrath and approval sent goosebumps storming through me. I went after more, sought his pleasures, his treasures. I worshipped his shaft, buried my face into his power and scent and taste, all-
Damian, all-male. My male. His muscled hips flexed, took one full plunge into my hunger before withdrawing. I hissed my protest. His answering growl knocked me back, his lunge positioning me, prostrating me for his domination. Then in one burning plunge, he was there, inside me, splitting me wide open. Flesh in flesh.
The shock to my system was total.
Paralyzed, I stared up at him, everything swollen and invaded and complete. He rested deep within me, over and all around me, as incapacitated.
I vented my incredulity. “How?”
How was it always a shock? How was every time a first time? Unrivaled and astounding? Did my body never believe it could have felt all this, so that after every time it told me I must have imagined such heights, such intensities? Then came the next time and it all shocked me all over again? The carnality alone, of Damian dominating me and dissolving in me would have been enough. But what took it all to over-the-top levels was the mutual surrender. On every level. Was that how?
His face was contorted on similar bewilderment. His answer to both of us was to undo my braid with a roughness that had me thrusting for his assuagement. He pressed me back into the thick spread it made beneath me, looked down on my arrangement as he withdrew the molten sword he’d thrust inside me, rested it at my entrance. I lunged up, seeking his impalement and he bunched his fist in my hair, tugged me down to the floor, exposing my throat, latching his teeth into my flesh as if he’d really devour me. Then he plowed back into me, reminded me that the first plunge had been just a halfway sample. He fed me more, then more of him on every lunge, forcing the familiar expansion within me, until he hit my very recesses and destroyed me.
I was finished, blind, mad, clinging to him, biting into him, convulsing, the ecstasy rending in intensity. And through it all I somehow saw it, his magnificent face almost frightening in his focus, intent on every sensation that ripped through me, slashed across my face, tension shooting up in his eyes, in his every muscle, as if he was judging the time, deciding when to let go, to join me in the abyss.
And I begged him, for him. “Give me—give me…”
And he did, give me all. I felt it all, each surge of his jetting climax inside me. It hit me at my peak, had me thrashing, weeping, unable to endure the spike in pleasure.
From an endless tunnel, I heard dark groans, found my lips lapping them from his Adam’s apple. Then I heard more moans, long and pained. Mine. He was leaving my body.
I whimpered my reproach, winced at the coldness that shuddered through me. And not because I’d lost the heat of his body. His words were the source of frost.
“I walked—or should I say thrust—right into that, didn’t I?”
He couldn’t mean…? The flare of amber and self disgust in his eyes answered me. He did mean it.
“You come here, flaunting yourself and como un idiota I gulped you down whole before you disappeared again.”
I staggered up on my elbows. “I didn’t disappear, buster, you did. And I gulped you right back!”
“You seemed to be having trouble gulping me down whole. You sure tried to chew and shred me to manageable pieces.”
My eyes widened in horror over the marks my teeth and blunt nails had left in his shoulder and chest. “Oh, God—Oh, Damian, I’m sorry—It must hurt like hell…”
“What hurts like hell is this…” He snatched my hand. He didn’t need to guide it. I closed it over the unabated engorgement of his erection, my insides cramping, gushing in demand for him to fill me again, long, long and merciless. “What hurts is that I’m not inside you again. That I won’t be.”
I caught him back to me, wound myself around him.
“Don’t say that—come inside me again. I missed you too damn much. The missing is just too huge, Damian. You have to fill it—fill me, again, darling, again…”
His threw his head back at my invocation, let out an elemental groan, his face twisted in carnal suffering.
“Bruja.” He still didn’t thrust into my greed, his mouth just opening over my breasts in turn, circling my areolas until white noise filled my ears. It had to be my nipples screeching for mercy. And I was the witch? He was the master mago. Yeah, I’d been learning Spanish.
He deprived me, kneading my flesh between tongue and teeth, every pull shooting a lance of molten fire to my core. My hips pumped at him. He kept me away, letting me reach nothing but the broad tip of the shaft. I was delirious to ease his suffering and mine. But if the minutes-ago shearing release hadn’t done that, we must need to burn to ashes before this madness lifted and this hunger abated.
And how I wanted to burn. I had to.
“Damian—I need you, please—need you now…”
My cry seemed to shatter something inside him and he plunged into me with all the force of the snapping momentum. I screamed, for that jarring ride. But he didn’t move, just rested inside me, crushed my lips in another exercise of abandon. I opened for him, took his tongue, felt it driving all the way to my loins, each plunge throbbing me around his invasion, pouring a surplus of readiness, tightening me around him in a vice until he growled, “Madre de Dios—so tight, so right.”
I thrust beneath him. “Yes, Damian. Yes.”
But he was leaving me, withdrawing from my depths. The implosion was crippling for a few moments.
“Damian.”
In answer to my desperation he hauled me around him, bit my ear on a rough “Hang on to me” that had me digging my heels in his buttocks. He rose and sat me on the edge of his desk, reached behind me and swept its surface clean, sending everything crashing to the floor.
Consternation surged, calculating the value of all the things he’d just destroyed, yet warring with a spurt of smugness. That he didn’t even hesitate, that nothing was worth delaying having me for another second.
And nothing did. He pushed me back until I was plastered to the cool mahogany, my legs splayed, a hungry embrace for his bulk, my feet braced at the edge of the desk.
He drew deep, then deeper from my lips as he plunged again, filling me beyond my limits, filling me with every power and weakness. I was master and slave. Goddess and worshiper. His hands roamed me, exacting every intimacy as he thrust inside me in an escalating rhythm, watching me climb, arch, seek.
The volcanic core of an orgasm built inside me again and he came over me, gave me his weight to writhe under, his fingers sliding between us, stimulating the focus of need, unlocking the code only he knew. Then he gulped down every screech of my double whammy climax.
It must have been another day, another age when I came back into my body, still keening, my teeth deep in his flesh again, my most profound thanks for the torment and the satisfaction.
He extricated my fangs from his shoulder, his smile feral as he withdrew from my body. Even lost in the bliss and stupor of post-orgasm devastation, I still whimpered at
his loss, at the sight of his erection still in full ovaries blowing glory, glisten
ing with the evidence of my pleasure.
He yanked me up, slamming me into his chest.
“Don’t worry. I’m far from finished with you.”
He raised me up until he had my limp body hanging above him at arms’ height, kept me there looking down on him, half-fainted with satiation, still shuddering with aftershocks. Then he let me slide down his sweat-slick landscape, caught my lips. Just as I caught fire again, sought him, the need to complete his pleasure mushrooming to unbearable level, he caught my hands.
“I said I wasn’t finished with you.”
Then with hands filled with controlled power and cherishing gentleness he turned me, laid me facedown on the desk.
I never let myself be in a position of no control. But this was Damian. If I had more than one life, I’d trust them all to him. And then this was payback. One I deserved, and lucky wretch that I was, I was overdosing on its pleasure.
But after a few minutes, I revised my opinion. So there was such a thing as torture by stimulation. Possibly death by arousal, too. Shouldn’t those megaton orgasms have taken the edge off my Damian cravings?
That’s why it’s called addiction, moron. The more you have, the more desperately you want him.
I lay there, helpless, loving it and him, hating it and him as he reclaimed my every response and inch, sliding invisible touches down every nerve path, sowing bites and suckles, knowing, pleasuring, punishing, in my every lightning-inducing switch until I felt my insides charring with the beauty, the expectation. The frustration. And then I got angry.
To hell with justified payback. I could barely talk through the tremors yet I issued my threat, “I swear, De Luna…if you don’t take me—now, you’re gonna regret it.”
“Take you, St. James? You mean like this?” He slammed into me. I screamed at the abruptness of his invasion. He withdrew all the way out then slammed back, with even more force. “Or like this?”
“Damian-Yes!” I clawed at the smooth surface beneath me, my mind detonating, all my strength behind thrusting back into his assault. I fought with him for deeper, harder, hating him for the inequality of our positions, that he could see all of me and I could only catch glimpses of him as he bent to exploit me.