Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5

by Jennifer Stevenson

  She gave up and cut another bite off the golden, fluffy stack of cakes on her plate. Wow. “Good, Reg.”

  He beamed.

  “So how’s the plan coming, Beth?” Pog said, intruding on her thoughts. “Are you getting what you want out of the hunt for the whyness of Blake and his divorce?”

  Beth flushed. “I’m thinking about it.” She wasn’t comfortable discussing her personal life in front of Reg. Their conversation last night came back to her. He hoped he could become a good love slave. That was so creepy. She wanted to say that to Jee, but not in front of him.

  Jee was cutting her stack of pancakes and shoveling it in extra fast. “Got an interview,” was all she said. She got up and patted Reg on the head. “Do what Pog needs today.” She bolted out in a clatter of designer heels.

  Beth turned wondering eyes on the other two sluts. “Isn’t that her third interview this week?”

  “She doesn’t expect to get the job,” Pog explained “More milk, Reg?” But Reg was already there, pouring milk into her paper cup. “She just fucks the interviewer and walks out before he can say, ‘We’ll call you.’”

  Beth looked at Pog wonderingly. “We’ll call you?”

  “It’s been a while since you interviewed, hasn’t it?” Pog said. She wiped her milk moustache off and threw her paper napkin on her plate. “Reg, I’m thinking today you should move the fridges one by one and clean under them.”

  “Okay,” Reg said. He was already picking up her plate and separating the disposable paper from the metal utensils bound for the dishwasher.

  Beth stared. “What are you doing today?” she ventured to Pog.

  “Gonna try my hand at this messenger thing,” Pog said. “Jee and I cooked up an idea last night. It’s a variation on what she does.”

  “You have to have a j.o.b.?” Beth said incredulously.

  “It’s pretend, dummy. The plan is, I walk into some office wearing my messenger duds, and I say I have a packet for Joe Dokes. Pick him out of the roster on the building directory. It’s a private message, you see.” Pog winked. “Get him alone in his office, tell him, Surprise! Candygram! You’ve been selected randomly among respondents to a quiz on Facebook. Or something. And then I take off my clothes.”

  “What if he’s married?” Beth said, somewhat outraged.

  “What if he ain’t on Facebook?” Reg said.

  “It’s an experiment. To see how gullible and horny these guys are,” Pog said shrugging. “If it doesn’t pan out, I may actually have to, you know, apply for a job.” She shuddered. “Or I’ll think of something else.”

  Now Beth understood the outfit Pog had on. Her long legs were encased in brightly colored tights that made her little newscaster’s behind look bigger and curvier, and a zipper hoodie. The zipper was unzipped, so Beth could see Pog wasn’t wearing a bra.

  “He’ll believe you’re a messenger in that outfit,” Amanda said, “But he won’t believe you’re a Candygram unless you wear a nice bra.”

  Pog looked down. “Good point.” She departed, presumably to put on a nice bra.

  Beth looked at Amanda helplessly. “Why doesn’t she just apply for a messenger job?”

  “Pog’s allergic to taking orders from men,” Amanda said, getting up and putting her own knife and fork in the sink. “Besides, this’ll make Ish happy.”

  “Why?” Beth said.

  “She’ll claim she’s doing a blind study of the gullibility and horniness of random businessmen. The Regional Office loves that stuff.”

  “But why does she want to make Ish happy?” Beth said again, and stopped herself. She sounded like her kids when they were four. “I mean, I can see that if she’s trying to be a homewrecker—”

  “You’ve got homewreckers on the brain,” Amanda said. “We’ve told you and told you. All we have to do is fuck. Collateral consequences are pure gravy. But then there’s this: the Regional Office has over thirteen hundred employees behind desks for every one in the field. A study will give them some numbers to crunch. They love that stuff. What are you going to do today?” she added.

  Beth felt a twinge of guilt, since she had not given one moment’s thought to what she herself could do for a j.o.b. Frankly, she’d felt she was lowering herself sufficiently by agreeing to have sex with three different men for thirty pieces of silver a month.

  “I don’t know if I can find a job,” she confessed. “I was ready to stick my head in the oven before—” She remembered Pog warning her not to mention Delilah. “Before. Because I couldn’t find a job.”

  “If you feel guilty, help Reg with the kitchen,” Amanda suggested. “I gotta warn you though. We really can’t support more than one slave.”

  Beth sputtered.

  “I’ll go over the punchlist with Carl this morning. The incentives checklist is inside the freezer door on the far fridge,” Amanda reminded her in a pointed tone. On her way out the door, she turned back and sent a wink to Beth’s outraged and indignant face.

  At the dishwasher, Reg snickered. “I din’t think she had a sense of humor, did you?”

  “I do not want to be a slave!” Beth sputtered.

  “You won’t be. You gotta have someone teach you. She’s just messing with ya.”

  Beth started automatically clearing the table, putting away eggs and syrup and butter and milk and the leftover basket of blueberries and the ingredients for Jee’s morning mimosa. “What shall I do with this whipped cream?” she said, holding up the bowl. Reg must have whipped it. The girls, she knew by now, would have used canned rather than bother to whip their own.

  “Will it keep until tomorrow morning?” Reg said.

  “No. There’s such a lot of it,” Beth fretted. She looked at the bowl of pancake batter still sitting on the stove. “Did you have enough breakfast, Reg?”

  “I din’t have any,” Reg said, as he wiped down the kitchen table.

  “What! Sit down. I’ll make you pancakes.”

  “No!” Reg leaped for the bowl in her hands. “I don’t have permission.” But he looked into the whipped cream with such hungry eyes that Beth was touched.

  “I’m giving you permission.”

  “Only me and Pog cook in here,” Reg said.

  Beth already knew that the kitchen was Pog’s domain, but she felt oddly offended at being told to butt out by Reg. She inhaled semi-patiently. “All right. You can cook yourself some breakfast and eat it. I said so.”

  “Not if you’re not eating, too,” he said anxiously.

  “Oh, all right!” She threw her hands in the air. “Cook some for me too. Aren’t you allowed to feed yourself?” she said, sitting back down, then getting up again to reset the table.

  “Sit, sit,” Reg said, gesturing with both palms. “I might get in trouble for it later, if Jee finds out.” He sent Beth a calculating look.

  “I wouldn’t tell her,” Beth said. “Why? Does she punish you if you feed yourself?” That was so icky.

  A slow smile spread over Reg’s face. “Kinda.”

  Beth shut her mouth, which was hanging open.

  “How many more pancakes you want?” he said, looking into the bowl.

  “How much batter do you have?” she said, realizing she was ravenous. Again.

  “Eight, ten more pancakes. I’ll make more,” Reg said, and went to the third fridge, removing the eggs, milk, butter, and blueberries that Beth had just put away.

  “Make enough for forty more pancakes,” Beth said. If she couldn’t eat ten, at least she could see that Reg got the rest. The boy looked scrawny. She wondered if he had suffered the same kind of magical transformation the women had—so that he got fatter if he failed to eat. Beth suspected that, in spite of his salary, Reg wasn’t getting many of the Regional Office benefits.

  That thought annoyed her so much that she opened the freezer door on the last unit and examined the checklist. A drywall guy named Nando was on today’s list to receive incentives.

  She wondered if Nando had had a bath re
cently.

  Only one way to find out.

  It turned out Nando was still pretty tidy. He was measuring drywall to fit around the sinks and mirror-cabinet units when Beth came into the bathroom. Carl was there, peering at the complicated set of pipes for the fancy new multi-jet shower, while the plumber whom Beth had already incentivized explained something. The two of them looked hungrily after Beth as she led Nando from the room. Their voices dropped when she was out of sight. No doubt discussing the incentives program.

  “Do you know the deal, Nando?” she said, more bravely than she felt. “By the way, I hope you’re not married or engaged or anything like that.” Then she kicked herself for talking like that stuffy socialite the detective had mocked. What kind of sex demon worried about her partner’s marital status? “Never mind. Forget I spoke.”

  She was tempted to do him in Jee’s room, but that would be an unacceptable intrusion. Instead she took him to her own room. There she backed the wide-eyed, grinning Nando up against the door and unfastened his belt. Then she dropped her bathrobe to the floor. “This won’t take long.”

  It didn’t. Nando’s eyes were round. He was six inches shorter than she was. He didn’t grab her or try to kiss her, which comforted her. In a bland way, Beth found that she was eager for penetration. Boom, he was inside. And boom, she came. She felt the rush and burst of pleasure as if they were no more than a cold beer on a hot afternoon. Nothing like the emotional roller coaster of her encounter with the detective yesterday.

  She patted Nando the drywall guy on the cheek, helped him fasten his belt again, and sent him back to the bathroom.

  Then she put on her new basketball shorts and tee shirt and sneakers and went back to the kitchen and thirteen more of Reg’s pancakes with butter, maple syrup, blueberries, and whipped cream. Reg ate thirty-five.

  After that he was more willing to accept her help in the kitchen. Together they cleaned up after the morning fressen. Then they rolled the first fridge off its position against the wall.

  “Ugh,” Beth said, looking at the uncovered patch of linoleum.

  “How long you think that’s been sitting there?” Reg said.

  “Ten years?” she guessed. “That refrigerator-freezer model isn’t very recent. They wouldn’t have installed a new fridge over a dirty floor, would they? Don’t answer that.”

  The linoleum was tarry with old grease and dust and studded with stuck-down bottle caps, broken glass, cigarette butts, and random splashes of gummy guck. The guck looked so old, she doubted it would ever come up.

  “We can do this,” Reg said bravely. “We got the technology.”

  He showed Beth where all the cleaning supplies were hidden under the sink. They pulled on rubber gloves and drew a bucket of hot soapy water.

  Cleaning the floor soothed Beth. The two of them worked steadily, and slowly the linoleum began to reappear. She found herself telling Reg about what she’d found in Blake’s apartment at the Doral—skipping over the part where she and Jee took their clothes off for Pog’s camera, and dwelling with some bitterness on the properties Blake had forced her to sell and then secretly bought up at sacrifice prices, the credit cards he hadn’t told her about, the fake identity and the cash bonuses he had desposited under that name, all the while he was telling her she needed to tighten the family’s expenditures.

  “I don’t get it,” Reg said, putting his back into scrubbing up a ten-year-old ketchup packet, burst and glued to the floor. “You talk about wasting your life on this guy, but seems like it’s just the money. He shorted you, his check bounced. Is that it? Because, have you seen the price of silver these days? In two years here, you’ll make more money he ever seen in his life.”

  “No, it’s not about the money,” she said through her teeth, tugging at a stuck-down beer bottle cap.

  “Because maybe you undersold yourself. I mean, not just on the settlement. The whole time.”

  “I did not sell myself. I did it for love.”

  “Yeah? How’s that work?”

  She glanced up sharply at him, but he was focused on his scrubbing. “When you love someone, you do things for them out of love.”

  “Sounds like the other thing to me,” he said, squeezing his sponge out in the bucket.

  After twenty seconds, she couldn’t stand it. “What other thing?”

  “You know.” He glanced up under his eyebrows and back down at the floor. “The S-word.” He shifted the magazine under his knees. “Jee told me about you and that housewife slavery. How you don’t get paid and they treat you like shit and you can’t quit. North Shore fancypants housewife. AKA slave.”

  “She talked about me to you?” Beth gasped.

  “Hey, hey.” He showed her his sponge and his empty rubber-glove-covered palm. “I’m just one a the girls.”

  “No, you’re not,” she snapped. “You’re Jee’s slave.” Everything she’d thought last night came up in her throat. If she couldn’t get Jee to see it, maybe she could explain it to Reg.

  He smiled, washing out his sponge. “Her love slave.”

  “Whatever kind of slave! She uses you!”

  “Best kind.” Reg expanded philosophically. “You was just unlucky. You gave your love slavery to people who shouldn’t be allowed to own slaves. Just like some dogs is unlucky enough to be owned by people that shouldn’t own pets.”

  “There’s something wrong with that logic,” Beth said. “Really, Reg. This is not a good bargain.”

  “Better’n your North Shore gig. Old Blake wouldn’t even look at you.” Beth felt that like a slap in the face. “That musta sucked. You’re tryin’ to show your love and he don’t want it. That’s the worst. Nobody loves you, hey, everybody’s got that problem. But if you got nobody you can give your love to?” He sounded sober for once, as if he knew.

  Pain tightened around Beth’s chest, squeezing the air out of her lungs and two tears out of her eyes.

  Reg didn’t notice. He scrubbed and rinsed and scrubbed some more. “See, that’s why I’m so happy to be on the team. ’Cause now I got a outlet for my love. And I feel love back.”

  She was flabbergasted. “What? From whom?”

  “Jee, of course.”

  “She tortures you!”

  “I wouldn’t call it torture exactly. Besides, she also lets me, uh, do stuff with her.” He ducked his head lower, and Beth saw his ears go red. “We do it together. She’s not just letting me do it to her.” He smiled wistfully. “She don’t hafta do that.”

  “How is hitting you a sign she loves you?” Beth had been through this with a friend from Junior League only two years ago. She thought she knew what to say.

  Reg silenced her with his next remark. “She cares more than the rest of you. You guys threw me off a balcony,” he said, shocking Beth again. “I bet even my Ma would do that if I pissed her off enough. You see, I don’t have to be here. I could still be living in my Ma’s basement. But why would I go back to that? Instead of this? Are you kidding? You guys give me more than anybody ever has. Jee...she’s trying to make something of me. Nobody ever done that,” he said with wonder. “Nobody.”

  “She’s trying to make you a slave,” Beth said again, ashamed because she had stood by, shivering in her underwear after his casual grab at her boob, and watched the others throw Reg off the balcony, and when she got home that night she’d forgotten all about it, never even noticed that his twisted, broken body had vanished from the basketball floor. She almost felt ashamed for trying to burst his bubble.

  Reg said seriously, “Well, I hope I can be a good slave someday. ’Cause it’s the kind of slave-and-mistress thing where she works with me a whole lot, until I get it right. She don’t have to do that. That’s love. And I love it. Ahh, gotcha,” he added, carefully peeling the ketchup packet off the floor with finger and thumb and holding it up to show Beth.

  “Are you sure you know what love is?” she said helplessly.

  “Are you?” He looked at her at last. “Hey, you cryin�
�?”

  Beth took one huge hot gasp of air and burst into tears. She’d been trying to strip away Reg’s faith in Jee, and instead he’d shown her exactly how she had kept thinking of the money as Blake’s language of affection.

  Reg shuffled across the soapy linoleum on his knees and put an arm around her. “He din’t love you back enough. That don’t make you a bad person. He’s the bad person.”

  “Stop saying that word!” she wailed. “Oh, God.” She turned and shoved her face against his shoulder while storms of sobs shook her.

  “Ain’t you cried this whole time?” he said incredulously. He patted her on the back with his rubber-gloved hand. “I shouldn’t a said that.”

  “No, it’s true, it’s true, oh, oh no, it’s true.” It was that word love. Hearing it in Reg’s mouth had shattered her defenses. She blurted, “As long as I kept worrying about money, I could push all my w-worries about l-love away. Blake was always too busy working to b-be affectionate. His money was how he loved me. That’s what I told myself. Years and years ago. And then the kids came, and he worked more and more, and I’d better believe it really hard, because the money was good but there wasn’t any love—”

  “He insulted your love, the prick,” Reg said, petting her head awkwardly, his rubber glove catching on her hair. “‘At’s gotta hurt.”

  She crashed her face against his shoulder again. “It does,” she choked. Her tears stung, as if the hurt was bleeding out of her eyes. She wrenched her thoughts away from a memory of Blake at twenty, handsome and confident and so proud of his first big paycheck. She sniffled hard enough to give herself a headache.

  No wonder Jee’s deal seemed good to Reg. She had to admit that Jee took a lot more trouble to manage Reg than if he were just a dog chained to a post. What kind of life does he come from that makes that feel like love to him? His mother must be a piece of work.

  Or she might be just terminally exasperated with his denseness.

  Yet sex slavery was bringing out a sensitive side of Reg that astonished Beth. If he was right, if he saw something inside that scarred, angry heart of Jee’s that Beth couldn’t see, then what kind of life had Jee led that made this thing she did with Reg into a labor of love?