Shit, that wasn’t good. I went and sat next to her. “Jee, what was you doing there? Where was Pog and the others?”
“They won’t let me go trolling with them,” she said darkly. “Not until I stop screaming in my sleep.” I thought she would say something else. She just pressed her lips shut and pinched up her nose.
“Jee, they’re right.” I picked up her hand. “You mustn’t do shit like that.”
Her voice cracked. “Who do you think you’re—”
“It ain’t safe. It ain’t good for that little kid to get so scared.”
She pulled it together enough to pshaw at me. “I could have killed them all. Reg, I turned into a tiger.” She sounded more shocked than bloodthirsty.
“It ain’t good for the little kid to hafta kill a buncha guys, either,” I said quietly.
She just blinked at me for a while. Thinking, I guess. I felt great, holding her hand.
I must of forgot she was naked. Because all of a sudden I remembered. Plus, and this shows you, I’d forgot I was naked too. Because now I noticed I was all boned up.
She looked right in my face and smiled. “Make you a deal,” she said softly.
“What?” I croaked.
“If you break off this chain, I’ll fuck you. No. I’ll make love to you. We’ve never tried that.”
My bone got harder.
Her hair was drying, hanging deepest brown and thick and wavy around her face. She had these high sharp cheekbones, very supermodelly, but all I saw was the little kid smiling out at me. Confusing.
“I can’t break the chain,” I whispered.
She reached out and pushed hard on my shoulder. “C’mon. You can. You’ve got a sex-demon body like mine now. I bet you haven’t even tried half the stuff you can do with it.”
“Whoa.” I sat there with her other hand still laying in my palm. I looked at our hands. “You think?”
She leaned forward. It seemed to me her boobs got bigger, which was crazy, but hey, if I could make myself older or younger by thinking about it, she could make bigger boobs. I even seen Beth do that. Jee started to smell really good. I smelled that smell on her before. When she wanted to you-know.
She leaned even closer and her boobs brushed against me. She whispered in my ear, “Reg, we’re going to try something new. It’s called carrot and stick. I’m showing you the carrot, see?” She shook her shoulders and her boobies swayed and I almost passed out. “You get the carrot if you break that chain. If you don’t, I’m going to give you a hard time.”
“You’re already doing that, babe,” I groaned.
Then she reached out and gave me a big shove. I fell backwards on the bed.
All right! This was more like it.
But she just said, “Sit up. Break that chain.”
I sat up, feeling hurt. “You know I can’t.”
“You make a hell of a big tiger. Betcha he could break it.” And she shoved me over again. This time she also gave me a light smack on the face.
“Not funny!” I struggled up again.
“You’re a sex demon now, bro. Fight back.” And bam, she pushed me over again, this time tickling me in the side, too.
“Okay,” I wheezed, “this is war!” I lunged around and grabbed her and tried tickling her, too. She made a little squeaky noise.
God, it was fun. We wrestled on the bed until I thought I was gonna spunk all over her, but if I tried not to, she tickled harder, and even when I spunked, I got hard right away again. I hadn’t done that since I was thirteen. I couldn’t breathe for giggling and wrestling. Couple times I felt like I could take her, and I mean take her—first time ever I felt as strong as she was, maybe stronger. I din’t think I could feel bigger or hornier than I already was, but while we wrestled, oh yeah.
We was face-to-face, wrestling and laughing, and I was using all my strength and I think she was, too. Then she gasped out, “Reg, I’m going to cheat now. You ready for me?”
I looked right in her eyes. “I’m ready for you.”
Her eyes got bigger and darker. I felt her get heavy in my arms. And heavier. And bigger. I smelled that animal smell. Cripes, she was turning into a tiger again!
She started to say something, maybe, “Reg, can you do this too?” but that mouth wasn’t made for talking.
I squeezed and shoved with all my strength, but she got so heavy, I hadda take a breath or be squished. And then I shoved back and growled.
I almost let go right then. Holy shit, what a noise!
But my arms was fulla big hot furry cat, and her breath was nothing to laugh about, and she leaned over on me with all her weight, and purred halitosis in my face. Jee laughing, cat-style.
I kicked with my feet, and took a bigger breath, and slid up against her even tighter, growling these big dark noises in my chest, and I got bigger and bigger—my feet got a grip on her stomach—I kicked hard—
She flew off me and landed across my basement bedroom, smack into the game shelf. Everything crashed down around her. She landed on her four feet. Her tail was lashing.
I was standing on my bed on all fours. And I was a tiger too!
It got crazy then. I crouched on my bed and glared at her and wiggled my butt and lashed my tail and boy was I gonna get her, but it was all in fun. I jumped—and she jumped sideways, an amazing move. They couldn’t make a video game this cool. I jumped after her.
Right in mid-air I felt a yank on my leg and wham! down I went on the floor on top of all them game boxes and stuff.
When I looked up, Jee was sitting on the floor just outa my reach, a naked woman again, laughing at me.
I looked down at my leg. Damn chain. I gave that shackle a good smack with one paw.
It broke.
I looked at it stupidly. I felt myself turning back into a human. Close by come a growl that got all the hairs on my neck sizzling.
I looked up fast. Before I know it, I was a tiger again.
It got extra crazy then.
We wrecked my bedroom.
It was awesome.
I din’t even notice my bedroom door opening.
I sure heard it slam.
I was doing stuff with Jee that I could never, ever have dreamed up. Not even with Hustler Magazine and seven hours of Final Fantasy and a giant pepperoni pizza before bed. So I pretended it was the wind shut the door.
When the lock clicked on the door, though, I stopped moving and groaned. It come out a big old tiger roar.
Footsteps thumped up the basement stairs real fast.
Ma was home.
“Oh, foo,” Jee said, after she turned back into a woman. “Do you think she saw us?”
“Oh, yeah.” I looked around. “Man, we really did it.”
All the shelves was off the wall. Nothing was stacked up anymore—stuff lay around all broken, my old ship models, my boxes of movies, my clean and dirty clothes, the TV, all my video games.
Even the bed was mashed down on one end. We bent the steel legs! Two tigers is a lot heavier than two people, I guess. Just thinking of my Ma walking in on that, I felt the hairs stand up on my neck. Then I laughed.
Then I saw that chain on the floor, and the shackle where I smashed it open.
I looked up at the ceiling. Ma, are you still up there?
I listened. Then I listened harder. I could hear the kitchen clock ticking. Guess I was getting them demon powers good. Could I hear her breathing?
I could hear Ma’s heart beating. She was farther away than the kitchen. Upstairs. Other end of the house—her bedroom. Bedroom closet. I heard hangers tinkle together in there. The dog whimpered and she shushed it. She had the dog in the closet with her!
I looked at Jee. She was watching me. She looked all mussed and pretty and happy. I said, “You like tiger sex better.”
She tried to frown. “I do not.”
“I can tell. You don’t even crack a smile after all those other guys. I seen you. You just pull your skirt down, like, business as usual.” It felt ma
jorly weird to talk that way in this room, in Ma’s house. I felt like we’d wrecked my old life. Just smashed it into the poopy old smelly carpet. I took another look around. Nope. Not one thing was left unbusted.
She pulled herself together and shrugged, all haughty. “Maybe it’s just sex with you, Reg,” she said, looking down her nose at me.
That twisted my head. Was she mad? Was she trying to make me cry with happiness?
I looked closer.
She was trying not to cry, herself. I gave a little smile. I din’t know what she wanted from me.
Ah, hell, yes, I knew. I looked at the ceiling again. Oh, man. This would not go well. I sighed big. “All right. I’ll go talk to her.”
I thought Jee would bust out crying then. “Have you seen my purse?” was all she said.
Right then I heard her phone ring the ringtone from one of the sluts. It was somewhere on the floor. We pawed around and found it in her little stringy handbag. The handbag was crammed fulla business cards.
Jee pulled out her phone and looked at me.
I nodded. Squared my shoulders. Looked around, found a pair of jeans not too dirty. I pulled them on and went to the door barefoot.
“Hey,” she said, and I looked back.
I seen in her eye that she wanted to encourage me or something. But she was afraid to go soft on me. And she din’t want to seem like she was pushing me into this.
I come back and kissed her on the cheek. Then I went to the door and hit the catch with my fist. That din’t work. I gave it a solid kick, and the door smashed right off.
Cool.
Upstairs, the dog whimpering got louder.
“Ma?” I called when I was on the stairs, so she wouldn’t think it was a tiger coming up there. “It’s me.”
The dog stopped whimpering.
Her bedroom door was locked. I stared at it a while. Well, what could I do? Things would never be the same now.
I turned the knob and pushed the way I know how to do, and popped the lock open. I heard coat hangers tinkle in the closet. “Ma? You can come out now.”
The closet door opened slow, but she din’t come out.
“Look, Ma, I’m leaving. I got this great job. I can pay you a nice allowance. You gotta stop with the pension and welfare fraud or you’ll end up in jail.”
No answer.
“Ma?” I waited a minute. Then I said, “Thing is, it’s never gonna be like it was again.”
Not a peep outa the closet.
I remembered her beating my feet and all of a sudden I felt like throwing up. I swallowed. “Never again,” I said in a hard voice. “Piss me off and I stop the money.”
Hangers tinkled again and the door open wider and she peeked out. She looked scared shitless. She had the dog under her arm. It growled at me.
I growled back. It come out tiger-deep.
The dog squeaked and tried to hide his face against my ma’s boob.
I felt powerful. I’d broke her chain for good. I could see it in her face. She knew I wasn’t her little boy no more. I was out of control. Now she knew I could turn into a real monster if I wanted.
I felt like there was a big space between my ears, between my shoulders.
The real me, down inside, wanted to be sitting on my dog bed in the kitchen at the Lair, drinking beers with the girls and watching ESPN. I almost laughed.
She said in a quavery voice, “I don’t have to do what you say. Just because you—that thing—down there—” She started panting. Her eyeballs were bugging out. She looked totally freaked.
Man, I liked how that sounded. I was about to tell her about stuff like legal penalties for pension fraud, but the doorbell rang.
I started down the stairs to answer it. Ma come pattering behind and pushed past me. The dog stayed on the landing. Heh. She went to the front room and peeked through the curtain and hissed, “Don’t open that!”
“Open up, Mrs. Rupak. We have a warrant to search the premises. We’ll break the door down if we have to.”
I knew that voice! It was Pog!
“No!” Ma whispered. “Don’t open it! I’ll be arrested if they find that—that tiger down there.”
“They would of arrested you if they found me chained up in the basement, Ma. And after that, even I couldn’t keep you out of jail. Maybe I can fix this for you.” I looked her in the eye. “But I can unfix it, any time. You should take my offer. A check every month that you don’t hafta break the law for. And you can redecorate that basement room.”
She din’t say a word.
I opened the door.
Pog was there in a cop uniform. She pushed her way inside, same time as she handed my Ma a piece of paper. Beth and Amanda come after her wearing jeans and beige polos. Beth had a camera and Amanda had a big ass rifle with a goofy-looking nozzle. One look at that rifle and Ma about choked. Their van was out front of the house, back door open.
They made Ma come downstairs into the basement.
Ma actually shit her pants. I smelled it.
Beth and Amanda went into my room first. When they come out, Amanda had Jee, who was being a tiger, walking sweetly next to her, and they walked right up the stairs. I heard the van door slam.
Beth and Pog stayed in the basement with Ma, asking questions and taking pictures of the wrecked room and the broken door and the chain. They took samples of tiger hairs from all over everything.
Ma was speechless. She looked at me, like, Save me.
That felt good.
“I dunno where the tiger come from, Officer,” I told Pog. “She had it in my old room. I don’t live here no more.”
Ma sent me a hate look. I glared right back, thinking about how I done the laundry and the dishes, and cleaned the oven, and washed the windows, and shampooed the carpets, and rubbed her feet, and put medicine on her back, and done all the shopping and the errands, and how she beat my feet and drugged me and brought out the chain again. That one hurt. I looked her right in the eye with all these thoughts in my head.
Ma looked away.
I’d beat Ma in a staredown!
I felt as tall as a house.
Finally Pog said to Ma, “Mrs. Rupak, we’re taking custody of the tiger. That’s an endangered species. You admit you have no permit to keep it. These are also unfit conditions for keeping a large animal. You’re looking at four violations of local ordinances. Also nine state and federal violations. We’ll ask you to come downtown and sign a statement when the paperwork is ready. You’ll continue to reside here? Because if you flee, the penalties double.”
Ma flashed a glance at me, like, Fix it, I’m begging you.
I said, “She’ll stay here.”
“Mr. Rupak? Will you come downtown and sign a statement for us?”
I sent Ma a be-good look. “Sure.” I went to that basement room for the very last time and got a pair of shoes. Then I brushed right past Ma in the hall.
Out at the curb, the slutmobile waited. Amanda sat in the front passenger seat.
I looked back from the porch. A big puff of stinky air come out after me. It smelled like Ma’s foot medicine, and that dog, and shitty basement carpet, and generic mac’n’cheese, and tiger sex.
I thought about the smell of Pog’s cooking.
I walked to the van and I din’t look back.
In the van, Jee was still a tiger. She pulled me outa my seat with giant velvet paws and pulled me down on the floor and lay down on me, heavy as sin, purring and cat-laughing in my face.
Pog
Maybe because Jee wanted to remind Reg where home was, we celebrated in the Lair, starting when we brought him upstairs on our shoulders, hooting like cheeseball movie cannibals bringing home the bacon. Once we set him on his feet in the kitchen, Beth hugged him about forty times, smiling and weeping. Maybe that was why Jee dragged him away to the shower.
That gave me twenty minutes to pull some food together.
I had some frozen bacon-wrapped scallops from Costco in the freezer, and some cr
ab cakes, and a couple of bags of la-di-da Korean dumplings, and a sheet cake, and a giant box of family-size chicken pot pies. I fired up the oven.
While it was preheating, I called Dave’s Italian Kitchen and offered the usual extra hundred dollars if they’d deliver all the way down to Ravenswood Manor, and placed our regular order: four sixteen-inch thin-crust pizzas, one garlic and anchovy, one primavera, one Hawaiian, one with bacon, ham, and two kinds of sausage; one order each of fettuccini gorgonzola, four-cheese ravioli, angel hair pasta aglio e olio, mussels marinara, rotini diavolo with double shrimp and double calamari, romano-cream risotto with garlic and chicken, steamed spinach with garlic, spinach ricotta cheese pie, lemon scallops, chicken vesuvio, chicken cacciatore, a tray of meatballs, twelve orders of garlic bread, a tray of cannoli, and a tray of tiramisu.
Amanda opened a case of bottles of Chianti—where had she been hiding all that? Because Jee would have found it by now. Jee loves wine and hates grocery shopping.
Beth helped with the instafoods.
When I hung up on Dave’s, I went downstairs and stuck my head out the front door and heard, yes, a paleta vendor’s pushcart rolling by on Ravenswood Avenue, jingle-jingle! I ran out, gave him twenty bucks to come and wait by our door, ran upstairs, got another two hundred, and bought all the ice cream bars in his little bike-mounted freezer. Amanda helped me bring them upstairs in five-gallon buckets.
Beth was making a mess with the Margaritaville machine when we got the last of the ice cream bars crammed into my freezer. Everything was ready except the sheet cake (still frozen) and the crab cakes (which take frying, and nobody fries in my kitchen except me).
The table was loaded, as were all the countertops. Dave’s was due to deliver in half an hour. We’d be hitting the wine pretty heavy while we waited for that second round of food, but the appetizers were done, thanks to Beth.
The kitchen door opened. Jee padded in looking smug and Reg pranced after her. They wore bathrobes. We all sat and loaded up our plates.
The first dish I put in front of Reg was leftovers. He sat on his dog bed beside Jee’s place at the kitchen table, with his paper plate in his lap, and poked at the brown mess with his fork. “I’m home only an hour and already I’m getting dog food?”
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 36