“Taste it,” Amanda said.
He tasted it. “Whoa. Brisket?”
“Yeah. You made it the day you left,” I said. “I saved you some, so you could know how it came out.”
He chewed. “Damn. I’m good!”
I jumped up and hooted. Amanda and Beth and Jee jumped up. We hopped around his dog bed, jerking our arms in the air and going, “Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook! Ook!” and occasionally beating our chests.
On his dog bed, Reg bent crosslegged over his brisket and chewed and blushed.
Jee was the one to say it. I was glad. It couldn’t have been anyone else.
She reached down and took his plate away and put it on the table. Then she hauled him to his feet. “I’m gonna regret this,” she said, holding both his hands in hers. “But I don’t see any way to avoid it. Reg?” She looked him in the eye.
“What?” He still sounded like a southwest side dork.
“That dog bed? Toss it in the dumpster.”
He gave her a trembly smile so mushy, I had to turn away. “Okay.” He gathered up the dog bed, first picking out his squeaky bear toy and stuffing it in the pocket of his bathrobe, hauled the bed to the window, dragged a chair under the window, bent the floppy dog bed in half with some difficulty, climbed onto the chair, and crammed the dog bed through the window. He peered out the window. We listened. The dog bed went flump in the alley outside.
Reg looked back at Jee. “Does close count?”
Now Jee was making a goo-goo face. “This once.” I rolled my eyes. She said, “I just can’t... do that now.”
Reg sniffled. “You’re not gonna boss me no more?” he whined.
Now Jee rolled her eyes. “Well. I won’t beat you. And you can sit at the table.”
“Right. Let’s eat,” Amanda said, rescuing us all from what threatened to be a gag-worthy corny moment.
“I’m starving,” Beth announced.
“Me, too,” I said.
“Me three,” Reg said, dragging the chair over from the window to the table.
Amanda and Jee made a place for him between them.
Jee sucked down an entire beer in one long swallow. She was red to the tips of her ears.
Jee
When he’d finally eaten enough, Reg spent half an hour tidying my room and bemoaning the condition of my wardrobe. He was especially upset over the gold dress I wore last night to the convention center and my subsequent adventures at the hotel. We’d left that dress on the floor of his room in his mother’s basement.
“But I liked that dress!” he mourned. Boy, freedom from his mother—or from the dog bed—was certainly making him bloom fast.
“That’s what money’s for,” I said.
He put away the last of my stray shoes, turned down the bed, and set the venetian blind so sun didn’t fall on the pillow. He put last night’s clutch full of business cards on my makeup table. He tidied up used tissues. He straightened my perfume bottles and made sure the caps were screwed on.
Feeling like I was caving, I blurted, “I want to go to bed now.”
That was as close to begging for it as I’d ever get, dammit. Where was my docile little sub now?
“Really? It’s, like, one o’clock in the afternoon.” But he was smiling hopefully. Plus, the boner.
I narrowed my eyes at him. He had the brass nerve to look deep into my eyes, as if checking for a hole in the back of my head. I put steel in my voice. “Really.”
There was definitely something different about my whispered jerk. He seemed more solid. He’d been quiet at lunch, but when he spoke, he wasn’t brash or meek or even particularly vulgar, for Reg. I didn’t know if I felt ready for that.
And now this searching look.
I stared him down.
He nodded. Quietly he took off his clothes and folded them and set them neatly on top of his shoes on the floor at the foot of the bed.
He moved differently. He seemed to belong here.
As I watched him, something settled in my tummy like a question answered. My team had certainly accepted him back. Now I realized I’d been holding my breath. Did I accept him back?
No, that wasn’t the right question.
Was he back for good?
I realized suddenly why I’d freaked out so much when his mother took him back. And why I’d freaked out again when I realized why he wouldn’t leave her. And again, when I saw that chain on his ankle.
Reg had to choose. What was worse, he had to keep choosing. He couldn’t be forced to stay. He’d even figured out that he wouldn’t force himself to stay out of guilt. His mother had crashed and burned with him. He was twenty-three, so it had taken her that long to wear out his patience.
I suspected I didn’t have that much slack.
If I’d been in the habit of taking long-term slaves I might not have thought all these things. But I was, as Beth had so tactfully and frequently pointed out, new at it.
If he wouldn’t be shackled and he couldn’t be guilt-tripped, he’d have to decide to stay.
I started trembling.
He began taking my clothes off, very delicately like a maid or a nurse, keeping even his fingertips off me. He was putting out heat like a Fiat engine. When he was behind me, I shut my eyes.
That apparently answered a silent question he’d asked.
Suddenly he was up against my back, his hot arms gently folding around my front, bathing me in warm comfort. I opened my mouth to say, Did I tell you you could do that? but no air came in or out, and my bones melted and I faded back against him.
Yes. I’d told him he could do that.
I felt his breath warm on my neck, on my ear. He whispered, “Wanna lie down now?”
He was making me choose. I trembled harder. I rubbed my head against his, and immediately regretted it, and then wondered why. What the fuck was the matter with me? Before I could think about that, because I was losing control, I was done thinking, I turned in his arms and crammed my face against his neck.
So I guess he got that answer too. He picked me up and slid me into the bed and then slid in next to me, so I could snuggle up to him tight, tight as a baby, and he was cuddling me the way he did at night, whether we were in the same bed or in separate rooms that were miles apart or not.
“Adindaku, baby upiak,” he whispered to my hair, and I dissolved into his warmth and gentleness and the safety of his arms.
I woke up a little later because I was hiccuping in my sleep. I must not have been asleep long, because little glints of sun still poked at the same angle between the venetian blinds. Reg was still stroking my hair. Not that that would have told me much. He would stroke my hair all night if I let him.
I pulled in air and held my breath to settle the hiccups. I felt small in Reg’s arms. His chest was all wet, and my face, too. This again. I wasn’t used to crying in front of him or anybody.
I didn’t feel up to bossing him yet, but I had to find some strength.
“Want to have sex?” I murmured. Shit, I’d asked him. Should have told him.
Instead of jumping me and humping me, he touched my face and made me look in his eyes. After an excruciating pause he said, “Not right now.”
“What?” I surged up, hearing panic in my voice. “What do you mean, not right now?”
He said seriously, “You’re still a little kid in there.”
I stared at him. “And you can tell this how?”
“It’s in your eyes. How you smell.” When I made wide gestures of incredulity, he added, “I don’t know. You smell like a kid, that’s all. I ain’t fucking no little kid.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. When had I started turning into a child in my sleep? How long had he been here? And then, a terrifying thought occurred to me. Had it started when Reg first turned up? When I made him—okay, when I let him start taking care of me?
I felt as if a bomb had gone off days ago, and I was only just now waking up from the coma and realizing that I’d lit t
he fuse myself.
I was thirty seconds away from kicking him out of the bed. Or running away.
He blurted, “Jee, can I show you something?”
I stared at him wildly. I was trembling. “What?”
He was making a hell of a lot of eye contact since we got back from his mother’s place. He looked nervous, but still solid somehow.
His face shifted. I recognized what was happening—he was changing his appearance by thinking about how he wanted to look.
This was how he wanted to look?
He shrank in my arms. He seemed weedier, about twelve years old, and zitty, too. His eyes came too close together, and his hair bushed up in an uncut, uncombed mess. He squinted earnestly at me.
This was the real Reg. Or... the Reg he turned into at night, with the chain on his ankle and his feet screaming in pain. Or the Reg he felt like when his mother started up her endless criticisms.
I realized what he was doing now. He was trying to show my own kid something, the kid he said he could smell.
Was I her again? Had I shrunk in his arms to that little brown scarred-up girl with no forehead and the squidgy nose and a fucked-up eye?
I was terrified to look at my own skin.
I couldn’t run away from him. I’d just put myself through hell to get him back.
I couldn’t run away from myself and oh, I wanted to.
“Reg,” I whispered. “I have no idea how to do any of this.”
He shrugged. “Like I do?”
I swallowed a huge scary lump. “Let’s be our new selves,” I pleaded. “I can’t take this.”
He nodded, and then he held absolutely still, watching me.
He was waiting for me to turn back into my succubus self first.
I breathed through my mouth, hoping to keep the hot tears back. How did I deserve this much consideration?
Carefully, trying not to pull away from him, trying not to panic, I stretched myself back to my six-foot length, fixed my skin and my hair and oh everything, returning to the supermodel disguise that had grown so comfortable. As I did so, I started feeling horny again. Damned succubus body. It never let a girl rest.
I couldn’t stop crying. I sniffled slurpily and glared through the tears, daring him to mention them.
Now he changed. The Reg I knew came back, the Reg who was always inside him, handsomer, older, bigger and more manly. Our demon bodies were masks, but they revealed more than they hid. His eyes were still steady on mine. He seemed just as real.
His boner was bigger, too.
I smiled for what seemed like the first time in days. “You can’t hide from me, either.”
“‘At’s okay.”
We sighed together, two big, shuddery, holy-shit-thank-goodness sighs. Then we laughed.
And then we did it.
Readers who would like to hear the lullaby Reg sang to Jee can find it here.
Acknowledgements
Many people have made these books possible. I want to express deep appreciation to my publishing team, Mark Collins and Chaz Brenchley, and for advice from Vonda N. McIntyre, Jeffrey Carver, and Dave Smeds. My heartfelt thanks go out to all my beta readers and supporters: Kate Early, Pat Rice, Mindy Klasky, and Sherwood Smith, Michelle Hoffman, Kristine Davis, MJ Reynolds, Kimmie Nelson, Roger Jean Fauble, Anne G. Kasaba, Karen Kumprey, Brandee Heller, Shirley K. Lohrricci, Michelle Hoffman, Cheryl Liacos-Halstead, Beverlee Smith, the enigmatic lrap1230, Jennifer Hill, Mary Szigeti, Julia Wallace, Linda and Rob Williams, Bari Silver, Loralei Moir, Sue Heneghan, Shirley Márquez Dúlcey, Emily Pennington, Cheryl L., Tammy Brazeau, Evonne Hutton, Anna Trombley, Mary Nickell, Pamela Gramlisch, Silva Presler, Peggy Fowler, Mrs L J Williams, Julianne H., Beth L. Rodriguez, Aimee Bowyer, and Sandra Spilecki.
If I have omitted someone from this list, it is because my sieve-like brain cannot contain the immensity of the world’s kindness and generosity. If I have erred, it is not their fault, but mine. If I have offended, then I guess I’m doing my job. If I have entertained, thank goodness.
Copyright
COED DEMON SLUTS: JEE
Jennifer Stevenson
Published by Book View Café
www.bookviewcafe.com
Copyright © 2017 by Jennifer Stevenson
ISBN 978 1 61138 627 1
All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Cover design by Mark Collins
Horns headband logo design by Mark Collins
Copyedit by Chaz Brenchley
This book is a work of fiction. All characters, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in an imaginary manner to entertain, and any resemblance to any real people, situations, or incidents is purely coincidental.
COED DEMON SLUTS: MELITTA
Jennifer Stevenson
www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café 2017
Copyright © 2017 Jennifer Stevenson
For my babe, Rich
Melitta
I was now the biggest screwup in my high school.
I was fat, homely, vertically challenged, badly dressed, freakishly bookish, too brown for the princess squad and not brown enough for black pride, my mother named me after a coffee filter, I was hopelessly unpopular and I had asthma, but none of those things would get you anything special at my school. I went to Chase Washington, a public high school in a Chicago suburb so expensive that only money could get you in.
That makes it sound like I was a short-bus kid, but I wasn’t. Oh, no. After acing my way through eleven grades plus kindergarten, I was repeating senior year.
This was a huge disappointment to my mom, who would have loved to blame me on something. She was Chase Washington’s guidance counselor. I think I had every allergen test known to medicine. Also, the Asperger’s spectrum tests, the developmental challenges tests, the lactose and gluten intolerance tests, thyroid tests, childhood-onset diabetes tests, Myers-Briggs tests, gender-identification tests, sickle-cell tests, you name it. I did fit the profile for children of school guidance counselors: statistically, you were either a saint or a screwup. This was not good enough for my mom, but that fit the profile, too.
So you can see I was kind of a career screwup.
Failing the twelfth grade the first time around led to this latest epic screwup: I entered my senior year the second time, this year, having already turned nineteen, along with the trailer trash who started repeating grades in their single-digit years, when a person is supposed to show signs of failure. You’re not supposed to start failing in high school. For one thing, it puts you totally beyond the pale, socially. For another, it embarrasses your mom. QED.
The fact that I knew what “beyond the pale” and “QED” mean cut no ice whatever.
But being nineteen meant that I was eligible to sign a contract to become a succubus in the second circle of hell. Which, believe me, I jumped at.
Rats. That’s more than two hundred and fifty words for the abstract. I’ll never make it into scholarly journals at this rate.
Back up, then, and take another run at it.
Something I failed to put into my abstract is that my stepfather was the psychiatrist for the entire school district. My mother met him at a conference. He had been, how shall I put this, more affectionate than fatherly since he moved in, and I had never encouraged him, but my mother said that I’d never really given him a chance. Blended families always have trouble adjusting at first, blah blah. Darned right I hadn’t given him a chance. Did she even care that I could become a statistic? Sometimes I thought she would find it a relief. Then she’d have had something to blame me on.
But he was way too slick to get caught. My mom had been pulling psych jujitsu on me since my birth, which was a thing that cut two ways. On the one hand we cannot communicate and never could. On the other, I was used to having the ground cut out from under me by slippery shrink logic and deaf-and-blind concern and all that I know you and I love you mor
e than you know and love yourself baloney. Nothing either of them could say could fool me.
But my stepfather was a doctor, not a mere social worker, so although he was no better at mind tricks than my mom, more importantly, he had more credibility. Apparently, in a courtroom, as if she would think of divorcing him over me, he would win just because he out-credentialed her. He got his job with the school district kind of over her head, which I thought was unfair since she’d been working there a lot longer. But I guess a combination of MD and PhD will always beat out an MSW.
He pointed all this out to me when I got snarly with him, late in the summer of last year, and we had had a stand-off, kinda, ever since. I stopped trying to drop hints to Mom to pay attention where his hands were, and he backed off the pressure. Kinda.
I was not okay with this, needless to say. My stepfather was still inappropriate with me, mostly verbally, since my boobs grew so big last year and I was officially nubile. He called it loosening me up so I wouldn’t be a social pariah, and Mom apparently bought that. But there were plenty of girls in my school who had it worse. The judge knew about the Moran sisters, and their father still had custody. So.
Anyway I was more than ready when Delilah approached me in Starbucks with the contract.
She wore red leather all over, but not in a cheesy Dancing With The Stars way. I knew she wasn’t trash because her shoes were so expensive. In our upscale, right-leaning community, shoes are the test of social class. These were Manolos, pointy but not cheap-ho high, a faintly richer red than her leather pantsuit. Her hair was dark and cut like Daisy Rawson’s mom’s hair, kind of a sexier Hillary. Her skin was a little darker than normal, too, which made me feel good. Aside from my gym teacher, and the South African Presbyterian assistant minister and his wife, and the Johnsons and the Watkinses and Sanjay Halong’s family, everyone here is super white. My mom wouldn’t have gotten her job here if she hadn’t already been divorced from my dad, who is half Polynesian, half black, which made me what the six black kids in our school call “high yellow” and I thought was just boring.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 37