by Lila Dubois
“Candles?”
“Michael insisted I get them, along with holders. He wanted to be romantic with Jane. I picked these because of their interesting texture. Perhaps I knew I would need them.”
The tapers had a narrow base, and were clearly meant for candlesticks, but were wider than a plain taper. They had a twisted spiraling shape, and were studded with small gold circles. Runako handed one to her, and Margo ran it through her hands. The gold circles were not paint, but small metal decorative studs that had been pressed into the wax.
She’d never been interested in wax play, she was afraid of being burned, but, as she handed the candle back to Runako she knew that she wasn’t going to say no or try and stop him.
“Back on your hands and knees,” he demanded, and she rolled over almost gratefully. She really hadn’t wanted wax on her nipples.
Runako spanked her until she was arranged to his satisfaction, then plunged a finger into her pussy.
Margo shuddered in pleasure and relaxed. He was strong, sure of himself. It was a pleasure to be touched by him.
His finger left her, and something cold took its place at the entrance to her sex. He pushed the cold thing into her. The candle.
He pushed, the widest part of the candle forcing its way into her. She could feel the metal studs, and the ridges and curves of the candle as he inched it into her. The candle was cold, startlingly so. By the time he stopped pushing she was panting, desperate for release. Her nipples were diamond hard, and she rocked forward so they rubbed against the stone, wanting, needing, some stimulation.
Runako braced one hand on her ass, grabbed the candle with the other, then pulled it out. He removed it fully, and Margo felt moisture pour from her sex. Runako slid his fingers into her expanded body and teased her clit with his thumb.
His wet fingers moved to her ass, pushed the cheeks of her ass apart, exposing her. Something hard pressed against her anus, and Margo twisted her head to see what he was doing.
Runako loomed there, dark and menacing, his mahogany skin glinting in the firelight. The white candle was in his hand, poised to violate her ass.
“It’s too big,” she stammered.
“No. It’s not.”
The base of the candle, the part that was narrow to fit into the candlestick, breached her ass, forcing the tight muscles open. Margo turned her face back to the blanket, biting it to muffle her whimpers. It hurt, what he was doing hurt her, but the fact that he was doing it, that he would force this thing into her, was terribly arousing.
He kept up the pressure, pushing, pushing. The widest bit slid in, and Margo cried out.
“Oh it hurts, it hurts.”
Runako spanked her and kept forcing the candle in. Margo realized that she was rocking back and forth, forcing her ass back onto the candle. What was she doing? Why? This felt good, but it hurt. It hurt so much but felt so good and she wanted it, wanted him.
Then he was behind her, his hands on her hips. And his cock was there, rubbing along the lips of her sex, teasing her clit. Then he was in her, his cock settled with one long smooth thrust. His belly bumped the candle, which shifted in her ass.
Margo screamed in pleasure. His cock felt huge in her sex, her ass was stuffed with the candle. He thrust, filling her sex and shifting the candle in her ass.
On his third thrust she came. Margo screamed as the pain-laced pleasure of orgasm overcame her. Her hands curled into claws, raking across the stone. She reached back with her right hand, needing to touch him. He grabbed her hand, and she dug her nails into him, holding on to him.
As her orgasm faded Margo decided she’d had enough, and with tears of fear, pain and pleasure on her cheeks she closed her eyes.
In the split second before his orgasm overcame him Runako felt Margo go limp. When he slid out of her Margo collapsed, seemingly boneless.
He’d killed her. He’d fucked her to death.
Runako stared at Margo in horror. No. She couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t leave him.
Margo sighed and shifted.
Runako staggered, then sank to the floor. She wasn’t dead. She was sleeping.
A corner of his mouth kicked up. He’d fucked her into unconsciousness. That bout of sex had been incredible. The kink she’d allowed him was unexpected. Luke, and porn, had assured him that humans knew about and appreciated most of the better kinks that he’d learned from the succubae.
Despite knowing this, the power of what had just passed between them surprised him. Margo surprised him. Her capacity for passion, for finding passion in the darkest of places, was staggering.
Climbing to his feet Runako carefully extracted the candle from her ass. He examined it to be sure it hadn’t broken or that pieces hadn’t come off within her. Casting the still whole candle aside he lifted her in his arms, staggering slightly. He carried her to the bathroom, where he took her into the warm shower. That woke her slightly, and she burrowed against his chest. Runako used his hands to move the warm water and soap over her body, carefully washing her ass and between her legs.
When they were clean he toweled her dry, then took a fresh towel and wrapped her in it. He carried her to the couch and laid her down, carefully as if she were made of glass. He gathered her damp hair and moved it away from her skin so she wouldn’t grow cold.
He darted to the other cave, gathered up the blanket and brought it back to her, tucked it around her.
She looked peaceful in sleep. Her lashes were dark against the caramel of her skin. Her wet hair was like the night sky, soaking in the light.
His mate was beautiful.
Runako dropped to his knees beside the couch. It could not be. He’d chosen a human to be his mate?
No, not a human, Margo.
But how could they be together? How? He would not live the life of a human. He was not like Luke and Michael, content to spend his days in a body that was not his. He loved his true self too much to give it up.
He had not meant this to be complicated. He’d taken her to have sex with her. It had been part curiosity—he’d never been with a human—and part desire to be rid of her. He’d spent too much time thinking about her, and he’d thought having her would rid him of the need for her.
Perhaps that last bit of sex had affected him more than he’d thought.
Runako moved to the armchair and settled himself in it, his legs stretched out.
He could not be with her. He would not give in and become one of them.
Chapter Twelve
Margo woke up hungry.
Correction, she woke up starving.
Runako was passed out in the armchair, his mouth open, snores echoing through the cave. She closed his mouth, and the snores stopped.
Making her way to the ice chest from where the pizza had come, she found a box of chicken nuggets. She snatched them up and headed for the microwave. She traced the electrical cord back to a little gas generator. Satisfied that there was power she heated up the chicken nuggets, using the box as a plate. While they cooked she went looking for hot sauce, but had to settle for ketchup.
She popped the first super hot nugget into her mouth and chewed happily. Breaded fried chicken—yum.
Wishing for Tapatio hot sauce she drenched the remaining nuggets in ketchup and wolfed them down. When she was done she was still a bit hungry, and went back to the chest. There was a wealth of tasty frozen food in there. Margo checked the nutrition facts on the ketchup-smeared box of nuggets, winced and closed the ice chest.
“You need to eat.”
Runako’s voice, less than a foot behind her, caused Margo to scream. On reflex she twisted and smacked his leg with the nugget box.
He looked at her, then at the smear of ketchup on his calf.
“Don’t scare me like that,” she said.
“I’m hungry.”
“No kidding. I was starving when I woke up.”
Runako leaned down, his bare chest looming over her, and threw open the ice chest. He pulled out two lasagnas
and a chicken chow mein dinner.
“Let’s have those too,” he said, heading for the bathroom.
“Interesting combination,” she called out. She thought about objecting to his assumption that she would play little woman and heat up his food, but then decided that, under the circumstances, the Feminist Majority would let her keep her membership, even if she microwaved his food for him.
She put the first box in and stood, stretching. Now that the rumbling in her belly was gone she could concentrate on other parts of her that hurt. When Runako came out of the bathroom—his leg free of ketchup—she was twisting trying to see her own ass.
Runako slid his arms around her, pulling her back against his chest.
“Are you hugging me to keep me from seeing the bruises you put on my ass?” she asked, snuggling into his arms. It felt good to be held by him, scarily so.
“Yes,” he replied truthfully.
“There are bruises on my ass, seriously?”
“Oh, you haven’t seen them?”
“No, but I can feel them.”
“I was hard on you,” he said, rocking their joined bodies back and forth, almost as if they were dancing.
Margo tilted her head up, waiting.
“What?” he asked, after a minute of her staring expectantly up at him.
“I’m waiting for you to apologize,” she said.
“Why would I do that?” he said.
“Uh, because you bruised my ass.”
“It wasn’t an accident.”
Margo opened her mouth, closed it. She wasn’t sure how to take that.
“I like seeing your body marked by me,” he said. That tipped it into sexy as opposed to sadistic.
“Well don’t think you get to do that every night, buddy. My ass can’t take it.”
“I don’t plan to do that to you again. You have to be returned to L.A. the day after tomorrow, and you won’t have recovered enough before then for me to treat you that way.”
Margo ducked her head to hide her expression. She’d made it very clear that she was planning on continuing to see him when they got home, and he’d just shot her down. She was his weekend sex-slave fling.
It wasn’t fair. It really wasn’t. He made her feel beautiful and desirable, but then casually dismissed her. If she really were as beautiful and sexy as he said she was he wouldn’t be so eager to get away from her.
Margo slid out of his arms. Ignoring the scent of sodium overload microwaved deliciousness she returned to the couch and curled up with the blanket tucked firmly around her.
Runako didn’t even notice.
He turned to the microwave and popped the next dish in. Margo fumed. How dare he not notice that she was not talking to him?
Runako slid a piping hot plastic dish of lasagna onto her lap, carefully wadding the blanket under it so it didn’t burn her. He returned a moment later with a plastic knife and fork, wrapped in a napkin, which he set on the arm of the couch.
Watching him shuttle her food back and forth, Margo’s anger melted. He was so earnest—smiling as he wrapped the knife and fork carefully in the napkin—that she couldn’t hold on to her anger.
“Thanks,” she said. The fight ended with Runako never the wiser that they’d been having one.
He ate the chow mein as an appetizer and followed it up with the second lasagna. Margo told herself she wouldn’t eat all the lasagna, but she did. Stopping just short of licking the remaining bits of cheese from the plastic container Margo set everything aside and inched down until she was once again lying on the couch.
She flicked the dark TV on. Reservoir Dogs was still in the player, and she was feeling too lazy to get up, so she turned on the director’s commentary.
“This is what you do?” Runako asked, motioning to the TV.
“What do you mean?”
“The man talking, this is what you would do?”
“No, the guy talking is the director. For this project, your project, Cali will be our director. I’ve produced projects with other directors, with people outside of the Calypso. It really depends on the project as to what director you get.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a producer.”
“You sing?”
“Uh, no. Oh, oh, you must have seen The Producers.”
Runako belted out a line from Springtime for Hitler in a clear voice.
Margo giggled, “Very nice. That movie was about people producing, being producers, on a theater production. I produce movies. At least I want to. See I started in commercials, Cali and I both, but commercials are addiction-inducing nightmares. Though the money’s good. Commercials are how I raised the goods to buy in to Calypso.”
Over the next hour Margo explained the movie business, the industry, to Runako. Usually talking to a real outsider was tiresome. Most people didn’t understand how much went into any project produced on film. Over the years she’d learned to spot the difference between people who wanted to know the inner working of it—the people who watched director’s commentary and making of documentaries—from those who wanted a laundry list of famous people you knew.
Runako was great fun to talk to because he knew almost nothing.
“So you will be like…E from Entourage.”
Margo barked out a laugh. “No. For better or worse no. He’s a manager, and though he got producer credit on that movie they made that’s not what I do. I’m more of a…logistics manager. There are a lot of pieces that go into a movie. Far more than just the camera and actors you see. For example, you have location. You have to take a script and figure out how many different locations are needed. Are they outside places, inside? Are they places that we could build, basically could we make fake ones in a warehouse that would be good enough to fool people? Once you know what you need you have to find possible locations and take pictures and get information on each. Sometimes a place may look perfect, but be too expensive to use, or a place will be close but not perfect but cheaper, so then we have to try and guess how much we’d spend making it perfect. And what would be the factored labor costs if we’re going to Canada or New York where we have to use local labor—”
Margo was talking to herself by this point. Talking to herself, and making herself nervous. She’d worked her way up to producer in commercials, coming up through the ranks of production assistant, production coordinator, and production manager before hitting producer. She’d done a stint in music videos, which were more fun than commercials, but trying to fake petty cash receipts to cover buying drugs for the set was stressful.
She’d produced one movie, only one, and she’d had an experienced producer, one of her professors from cinema school, helping her. That had been a low budget indie film, the one that had made everyone sit up and notice Akta, who’d starred, but it had been a low-pressure situation.
This movie was going to be anything but low pressure. This movie had to get made, and once made it had to work. Most of that pressure was falling on Jane who was writing the screenplay, and would transfer to Cali once shooting was underway, but between the screenplay and the first day of filming lay the landmine scatter field of Pre-Pro—pre production.
Lena, who was working financials, couldn’t move forward without her estimates and budgets. Margo had to find all the pieces, identify them, and then put them together so they could move forward. In the end the movie would have very little resemblance to what Margo was mocking up. The locations would all be changed, the budget numbers would be off and money would have to be shuffled around.
But none of that could happen until she did her part.
Runako, lounging in the armchair, was frowning at the ceiling. “You have to do all this? You will go to different places, ask for prices, take pictures?”
“No. We’ll bring in a location scout who will do that. They’ll give me information and I pick the best of what they find, check to see how it fits with what we need, and include it.”
“So you must supervise this person.”<
br />
“Yep. And that’s just for location. There’re a million things besides location that haven’t been taken into consideration. The pink neon elephants in the room are the Monsters.”
Runako looked around, presumably for an elephant, “There are no pink elephant monsters.”
“Good to know. What I meant was that we aren’t sure how we’re going to do the Monsters in the movie. Realistically it’s going to have to be some form of CGI, but we might be able to do it with modeled live action. Meaning we might get some of you to be our models, take a 3D scan of you and feed it into the computer. Then we would hire actors who would work in front of a green screen, meaning they would stand in front of a green wall, and act out the motions, but instead of seeing the actors the computer would assigned the actors movements to the digital model of you.”
Margo held her breath to see if he’d understood that. It didn’t seem like a complicated concept to her, and even most lay people would understand it, because they’d seen enough behind the scenes footage to get the basics.
Runako had done his movie pop culture homework, but unless he’d watched all zillion hours of behind the scenes footage on The Lord of the Rings he might be lost by her explanation.
“It is like…The Two Towers, or Return of the King.”
Figures. “Close. What we’d want to do is actually closer to what Tom Hanks did with The Polar Express but I’m guessing you don’t have that DVD with you. We’d want to use the technology from that with live action settings. A cartoon, even a good one, won’t have the same effect.”
“That is very complicated.”
“So now you know why I need to go home.”
Runako ignored that. “Why don’t you just use the real Monsters?”
“You mean you and Luke and the other guys?”
“If it will be a movie about Monsters there should be real Monsters in it.”
“That would be simpler, but we need actors.”
“We would be the actors. Why do you assume that performance skill is not something we are capable of?”