Pog was in trouble because of him. It was his fault she’d been a hooker, and his fault she’d gone to jail in the Regional Office. He was damn well going to get her out of there.
And he was scared out of his mind.
That was the definition of a hero, right? Guy who’s scared to death but does it anyway? The other kind, who did it but wasn’t scared, that guy was technically an idiot.
They decided to send him through a Twinkie portal. Ish had heard of them. Never met anyone who used one. Amanda thought it would more discreet than popping out into whatever red-carpet zone the emblem-slash-door thingy led to. He could choose his destination and arrive accordingly.
“You know your way around down there?” Amanda said while adjusting straps on his backpack.
“I worked there for ten years. I oughta.”
“You hid at your desk for ten years.”
“And you didn’t? Something is poking me in the gizzard,” he grumbled.
“It’s the grenade launcher.” She fiddled with it.
Just then Melitta and Cricket came in with a supply of Twinkies for his transport. “Cleaned out 7-Eleven and two Walgreens,” Melitta reported.
“How does it work again?” Cricket said.
I’m glad you asked that, Ish thought.
“I’m glad you asked that,” Amanda said. “Here.” She unwrapped one. “To find a really quickie gateway to hell, one, bite both ends off a Twinkie.” She bit. “Two, suck the filling out.” She handed another Twinkie to Ish. “Three, make yourself real small, and four, crawl down the Twinkie tube. You’ll come out wherever you want.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Ish stared at the yellow, oily little pastry tube in his hand.
“Of course,” Melitta said. “Everybody knows Twinkies are not really food. They’re indestructible. They have infinite shelf life. They don’t even decompose properly when you eat them.”
“That’s because they’re from an alternate universe,” Amanda said.
Ish put his hands up. “Don’t tell me any more. I might not believe it. Then where would I be?”
“Fucked, that’s where,” Amanda said seriously. “You know how the Regional Office works.”
“I ought to.” It was another big reason why he was going. An hour of smoke from that hookah and eight hours of frenzied messing with rose petals had somehow put heart into him. Nobody who’d sat under the nuns knew the stuff he knew about the way hell worked. He would prove to Pog he wasn’t a coward. Well, he would prove he could do something that scared him.
“Okay, make sure you picture very clearly where you want to go,” Amanda said, stuffing individually-wrapped Twinkies in crinkling cellophane into crannies in his backpack and the pockets in his borrowed cargo pants. “You only have so many of these. There are other ways to get out of there, but this is fast and direct.”
Ish grumbled, “I can get out of the Regional Office. I could always get out of the Regional Office. I just didn’t want to.”
“Great!” Amanda punched him on the shoulder. “Make us proud!”
The other girls came up and embraced him.
Reg said seriously, “Boss, if you step in it, just holler. Me and Jee will rescue you.”
“Groovy.” Ish shifted his shoulders. The backpack weighed a ton. Then he remembered, belatedly, that he could be stronger if he wanted to. He was darned if he would grow those big dumb demon muscles. He just imagined the backpack felt lighter to him, and shazaam, it did.
He looked at the tiny hole in the eviscerated Twinkie tube in his hand. Seriously? He put it on the much-maltreated basketball deck, stepped back, and looked around at his team.
He had never felt less like a hero. “Geronimo. Or something.”
Then, focusing hard on the tiny pastry opening, he shrank, backpack and all, smaller and smaller, until he had to walk what now felt like twenty yards to the mouth of that glowing golden tunnel.
Polly, he thought, I’m coming to save you. I hope.
Ish stared in the open doorway of Pog’s cell. “You’re kidding me.”
She shook her head. Her face was stained with tears, and her eyes were tragic. “How can you look at me?”
“I can’t stop. I’ve missed you for ten years. Thirteen years. Don’t forget high school.”
“Ugh,” she said, and tried to smile.
“You can come out now,” he offered. He held out a hand. “I owe you a kiss.”
She looked at his hand. Her face darkened. “You’re really a demon pretending to be Ish, aren’t you? They finally rounded up someone to taunt me.”
He reached through the doorway that didn’t even have a door. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”
She backed up, stuffing her hand into her pajama pants pocket. “I’ve got rose petals and I’m not afraid to use them.” She lunged forward and dropped a fistful of dried rose petals in his open palm.
“Good girl. Is that why there’s no guard?” He smiled. “I’ve got a fucking backpack fulla rose petals. I’ve been pumping them into the air ducts, contaminating the central cats’ pee supply, spraying them all over the carpets and doorways, and dribbling them into that little coin-return pocket in the vending machine door where everybody always sticks their finger even though they know they won’t get any change.”
Her eyes went round. “That's brilliant.”
He felt his chest expand. He almost felt like a hero. “Now you should come home, huh?”
She just stared at him, looking tragic.
“I’m not a demon! Here—” He ate the rose petals she’d put in his hand. “I don’t care if I’m in love with you for a thoufand yearf. Now leff go.” They tasted kind of sweet.
“Don’t. Look at me. That’s why they did this to me. Because they know I can’t get out. I haven’t had anything to eat for weeks. They don’t even feed me bread and water,” she wailed. “And then they put a mirror right in front of the door. That’s so mm-mme-mean!”
She was a little bigger than usual. He felt so bad for her, he wanted to hold every inch up against his boner. And then he’d—
Whoa. Back off, hero.
He looked around. Not a demon in sight. He took a little walk up and down the corridor and gave the carpet a good spritzing with whole rose petals, just so they’d be really obvious, and then came back to her. “Give me a hand, will you? This thing is strapped on every which way.” He backed up to the doorway.
“You should keep it on. You don’t know when you’ll need it.” But she helped him rip open all the velcro and things. He handed the pack in the doorway and then walked through, himself.
She backed away, her eyes getting round. “How did you do that?” Then she blinked. “Oh. Of course. You’re thin. You haven’t been here very long.”
His mouth fell open. “Is that how this works?” He looked around the tiny room, then back at the open doorway. Outside the door he could now see a mirror propped up on the far wall. It hadn’t been there two seconds ago, before he walked in.
Regional Office rules. He realized Amanda was right. Only somebody who knew the RO could get a prisoner out of here, and only he could get Pog out.
She swallowed. “Get out. Get out now, while you still can.”
“I’m not leaving without you.”
“When did you last eat?”
“Pizza. The night you were arrested,” he said. “We had some smoke, but—” He shrugged. “We were busy.”
“That was weeks ago!” she said, frantic. “You could be gaining weight just standing here!” She tried to shove him out the doorway, but he wouldn’t budge.
“That was yesterday.” He looked down at himself and thought for a moment. His anti-demon commando outfit vanished. In its place he wore a pair of pajama pants printed with red vintage Corvettes. His naked chest looked a little weedy so he let it bulk out a bit. Gotta look good for the girl. “This is the Regional Office, Polly. Time works differently here. Everything is what we make it. We’re free if we think we’re free.”
/> She stood there, close enough to hug, her fists working at her sides. “Don’t. Mock. Me. I’m hungry as hell, but I can still punch you.”
He sat down on the only chair in the room. “I’m not moving.”
“You’ll get fat, too!”
“So I get fat. I’ll be fat here in this room and you’ll be with me. I’ve been wanting to be with you for months. Years. Most of my life. I think falling for you when we were eight counts.” She was tear-stained and her hair was a mess and she looked twice his size and he wanted to rub himself all over every inch of her.
Whoa again. That boner thing. Maybe he was getting hungry. “It’s the demon appetite. We either eat or we you-know.” He grinned hopefully.
Her head came forward, her eyes bugged out, and her jaw dropped. “You came here to make me fuck you.”
“Oh, good grief. I shouldn’t have said that. I was trying to explain. When you come here, you create your reality.” He was beginning to hear himself, and some very odd things were happening in his head. “If you think you’re getting fat, you get fat.”
She blinked. “And if you think you’re a coward, you just sit there and let Delilah use you.”
POG
“Ouch. I shouldn’t have said that.” I felt awful.
But Ish seemed to be thinking. He said absently, “That happens here. Until you get used to playing to the pose, you don’t know how to lie. Everything you think just comes out of your mouth.” He shifted my chair so that it stood against the wall, making a little more space between us.
“Hey! How did you—that was bolted down!” I was dumbfounded.
“And I’m sitting in it, so now it’s not.” He didn’t look bad in those dumb pajama bottoms. “What you said, that’s true. I thought I was a coward for not finding you and taking you away from that pimp before he killed you.”
“Ish, he did not kill me.” I felt horribly exposed. He was in this tiny room with me, and I had expanded until I must be a size twenty-six.
“I thought I was too miserable to live, so I jumped off the Skyline Bridge. Because I got you killed.”
“I didn’t die!”
“But I thought you did. So it was true for me. So I wanted to die. So Delilah rescued me and brought me here to be her spy. And I took these Regional Office clowns seriously because I thought they’d leave me alone then. And yadda yadda, until here we are. You thinking you can’t get through that door.” He swallowed. “And me thinking I don’t want to live without you.”
I sat down with a bump. To my surprise, there was another chair under me. “Now we are in a mess.”
He smiled slowly. “Maybe, but I like it.”
I pointed at the doorway. “You’ve been here three hours and you’re already bigger.”
“I’ve been here fifteen minutes. Counting spritzing the carpet out there to make sure we have privacy.”
“You can probably still slide through.” I swallowed. I wanted to hug him and cry all over him and be a big sloppy weepy fat pig. Ugh. No.
“I don’t want to. I’m not leaving until you say it again.”
I began to blush. Since my pajamas were mostly ripped off my hugely swollen body, the blush must have been pretty obvious to Ish. “If I say it, will you get out now?”
“Try it and find out.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me.
Dammit. “I l-love you, Ish. Now go.” A treacherous hot spot formed in my chest. He’d come all this way for me got up like some kind of special ops dude and he contaminated half the Regional Office to boot.
“You’ve gotta convince me.”
I sniffled. “Fuck you!”
“Say it like you mean it. Put some truth into it. Like this.” He scootched his chair forward a few inches until our knees touched. The cheaterpants. “Polly, I love you. I’ve loved you since we were eight and you were nice to me in that horrible third grade class with Sister Mary Joseph and her camphor-smelling socks.”
“Man, that was a long time ago.” I smiled in spite of myself.
“I’ve loved you since we stole green apples out of Mrs. Chockis’s garden when we were nine. I’ve loved you since we showed each other our junk when we were ten.”
A giggle burst out of me. “Like that was a thrill. After what you must have seen at your dad’s club? You’d probably already seen it all on a dozen girls.”
“Of course. But it wasn’t your junk. I thought if you saw mine you would like me more,” he said humbly.
I swallowed. “I did.” I remembered that early September Saturday, first weekend after school started up again, the air still hot and stinky with the smell of corn cooking at the corn syrup plant. Ish had a kiddy wading pool in his back yard. We’d pulled down our bathing suit bottoms for each other. “I didn’t care about being naked, particularly. But,” I found I was staring at the wall, and turned the stare on him. “It was you. Looking at me.”
I saw him swallow, too. “Like that, yeah. So. Convince me.”
Tears were heating up my eyes and my lip trembled. “Mal, you were my only friend.”
“You can call me Ish,” he said, looking embarrassed.
I cleared my throat. “I feel more convincing when I call you Mal again.”
He rolled his eyes, but I knew he was pleased. “Go ahead—Pollywog.”
“You were kind to me, Mal,” I said. Now I remembered what I wanted to say to him when I kissed him, before I chickened out and hid in my room at the Lair that night. Was it only two days ago? Felt like weeks. “As long as I’ve known you, you were nice to me. Nobody else was nice.”
“How about Gabrielly, that Brazilian cook you had? She was nice. She fed us some excellent food. Stuff even your folks didn’t get.”
“Gabrielly! You’re really yanking my heartstrings, you bastard. I loved her, too. She got fired,” I said, sobering. “When they caught her feeding me behind their backs.”
“They couldn’t fire me,” he said, as if boasting.
I looked at him soberly. “No, but they could send me to a private high school.”
“Is that why? To get you away from me?”
“No. They just did it. Just like they did everything. It was their idea. As always. They didn’t ask me. I was painted on the backdrop of their lives.” My mood darkened. “And then I got fat, and they painted me out.”
He put his hand on my knee and shook it gently, shocking me back to the present. “Hey. This is not about them. This is about me, remember?”
I looked at him bleakly, my heart stuck back in seventh grade, staring at my first-ever dinner of eight spinach leaves. The walls of my tiny cell seemed to get closer.
He cupped my face in his hands. “Polly, did you love me then?”
Slowly, I examined him. There was a lot of eight-year-old Mal in him still. And twelve-year-old Mal, woofing down Gabrielly’s best pão queijo with me at the kitchen counter. And fourteen-year-old Mal, swapping bikes with me because his had an adjustable seat and my legs were longer then, even though my bike was relentlessly pink, like everything else my mother bought me. His legs got longer later. That time he kissed me at the Piddlies concert, he’d been taller than me. He leaned down to me and touched his lips to mine and then he stepped a little closer and put his warm hands around my face very gently, the way he was doing now, and then he’d really kissed me, my first real kiss. Maybe, now that I thought about it—
But I wasn’t thinking about it. I was kissing him again.
The next thing I knew, I was sitting on his lap, really kissing him. I was making growly noises. His hands were all over my ass, my breasts, stroking carefully and softly and covering every inch. He smelled sweaty in a yummy way. I moaned.
“I could eat you up,” he said, coming up for air.
“Let’s get rid of these chairs,” I said.
“Done.” And lo, the chairs were gone, and we were lying on something soft. “Don’t think about it,” he said, biting me lightly on the shoulders, making me dizzy.
“Why—I’m not us
ually—Mal—don’t stop!”
“I won’t.” He was lying on me, somehow without pajama impediments on either of us, holding himself off me as if one-handed push-ups were totally his thing. “It’s the demon body. Do you want to eat, or do you want to—”
And then he descended, big enough to make me feel small, even now.
Twenty minutes or maybe a month later, we lay on our backs on a thick carpet of moss, staring at the ceiling of my cell, panting and sweating. My giant boobs heaved like pink mountains. My whole body was naked and pink, with red marks on my thighs and shoulders where Mal had bitten me.
I glanced over at him. “You’ve gained weight,” I said without thinking. We had been at it a while.
“I love you, too.” He smiled.
“Boy.” I cleared my throat, trying to pull myself together. “Demon bodies, huh?” I glanced at him again, up and down. Yup. He was definitely a few sizes bigger. On him, it looked good. “Too bad sex doesn’t make you skinny.”
He rolled onto his side. “I’m not leaving here without you.”
I shook my head in wonderment. “You’re not leaving here anyway. You can’t get through the door.”
He looked disappointed. “I didn’t want to get up yet.” He heaved a sigh and rolled to his feet. “Here, watch this.”
Naked, he walked five feet to the doorway—five feet? How big was this room now?—and straight through it. He didn’t even have to turn sideways. Outside, he stuck his head through and put his tongue out at me. Then he walked back in and sat plump—very plump—down next to me. “Regional Office, babe. We make our own rules.”
I’d sat up so quickly, my head swam. “How—?” I jumped up and went to the doorway. Slowly, I edged forward. Nnnope. Close, though. Oh, no, not even close. I could feel the fat on my thighs touching, and my knees too. On the other side of the corridor, up against the wall, that mirror mocked me. Holy hippo, I looked awful. My hair was ratted all over, my body was a mass of folding-over flesh, big, puffy—
I turned away.
Mal came to my side and nudged me over. “Here.” In the mirror we looked the same size. How was that possible? Moments ago, he was smaller than me. He took one giant step forward.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 98