by Cecilia Tan
Winston snatched up his clothes and tore out of his secret room, wrenching the concealing shelf back into its proper place and pounding up the stairs. The lights on the floor above stabbed at his eyes and seared his brain, but he called for more lights as he stumbled into the bathroom. Had to make it look like he’d actually been living here.
Clothes: into the hamper; hot water: on; grid: on to some sports channel. He practically scalded himself in the shower and then realized he shouldn’t’ve wet his hair. Damn. Would she ask? Maybe not. There was little enough of it, anyway.
His ass had just touched the sofa cushions when she sailed in, all aglow with the success of her most recent project. A school in Mana’am. A school for young ladies. Isn’t it marvelous dear?
Yes, yes. Wonderful. But think how much more wonderful it would be if you’d shut up and give my fucking head a rest.
At least, that’s what Winston wanted to say. Instead, he just nodded. Nodded and flailed as the waves of guilt closed in over his head.
That had been Sunday—a shitty beginning to the week, no doubt about it. But one thought kept him going. Next weekend, Amelia would be gone again, this time to some war zone. He couldn’t remember where. Was it Ecuador? The Balkans? Montreal? Anyway, it didn’t matter. All he had to do was hang on ’til then. Letitia would wait for him.
But on Monday, that all came apart.
Just a short trip, his CEO said. Just a little jaunt over to Tel Aviv to make them understand how beneficial this merger was going to be.
Fine, Winston thought. Except Friday is their goddamned holy day. The talks won’t even start ’til Saturday morning.
It was all so unfair! He could have cried. He could have slugged someone. But he stuck it out. Forced everything down. The company wouldn’t understand any more than Amelia would. Anyway, it might be possible for him to sneak away early.
That hope was what he survived on all week. By Saturday, the idea of Letitia’s cunt was so fixed in his mind that nothing short of an earthquake would have kept him away any longer. So he handed it over to H. David—why did lawyers always stick that dumb-ass initial out front?—and got on the first semiballistic out of there.
Images of Letitia flashed through his mind as he hurtled through the stratosphere. Of his baby doll rising out of a foaming tub. Of his angel lying across his lap with her can bulging obscenely out of too-tight panties. Of his come, pearly white, in her hair.
It was high noon when he arrived and the house was locked up tight. But the minute he stepped inside, a feeling of foreboding welled up. He dismissed it as paranoia until he went to drop off his suitcase in the master bedroom and caught sight of the open closets, of Amelia’s ravaged jewel case.
Jesus, burglars! Had they found—
He flew downstairs, heart racing.
When he got to the library, that same heart nearly stopped for good. The shelving had been swung back. The inner door was exposed and ajar.
He went to that door and eased it open with quaking fingers.
The tableau that greeted him was far removed from anything he could have imagined.
Amelia was spread-eagled in the center of the bed. She wore a blue gown, half her jewelry box, and a thin sheen of sweat. Her legs were drawn up and her creamy thighs were spread for a familiar little slut who was lapping at his wife’s furry quim.
Winston stared.
Letitia was all done up in her Waverly things. She seemed the perfect little schoolgirl: quiet, obedient, and well dressed. Except for the huge pink dildo stuck up her ass and how she was gently, at Amelia’s urgings, fucking his wife with another. Winston gripped the doorjamb with white-knuckled hands, while his better half, eyes closed and unaware of his presence, directed Letitia to push it in deeper.
Deeper.
Amelia hissed with pleasure. Her black hair, unbound and tousled, streaked the pillow. She bucked her full white hips and murmured obscene endearments as she ground Letitia’s face into her rosy cleft.
It went on until her climax, when Amelia’s eyes fluttered open.
She shrieked and struggled to sit up, screamed at Letitia to stop, pushed her away. Her eyes darted from her husband to the doll, who was now sitting quietly on the bed, her eyes focused on nothing at all. Amelia’s eyes flicked back. And forth. Like an animal. Trapped.
Then, she burst into tears.
Words popped out of her, between the sobs. Apologies? Pleas? At any rate, nothing lucid.
So it came as a surprise when Winston sat down and put his arms around her, coaxing her head to his shoulder and rocking, rocking. He rocked until the flow of tears had stilled, until she pulled back to see if her husband’s eyes agreed with what what his arms seemed to be saying.
Amelia gazed at him for a long moment. She sniffled, and wiped her nose. When Winston said nothing, she allowed herself a smile.
Gently, Winston took her hand, held it against his straining erection, and smiled back.
Marked by Cody Nelson
Zack stood in the doorway, hands in his jacket pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold. Cold, except for the warm spot on the top of his left shoulder, where the Mark was, that never got cold. His shirt was wearing through over it again, and he’d have to patch it soon, or it would start coming through his leather jacket as well, and he couldn’t afford another jacket, and he didn’t want the cold wind whistling through a hole in the shoulder of his clothes.
He took a deep breath and stepped out of the doorway, striding down the sidewalk with all the confidence he could muster. The key, along with keeping the telltale holes out of your clothes, was to act as though you were clean, as though you’d never woken up one morning with a small, hot, circular design etched into your skin that you couldn’t remember getting. And you had to remember that, although you could look into another’s eyes and tell instantly whether the Mark was there, the Unmarked couldn’t, they wouldn’t know unless they saw the Mark itself. So you were safe from the gangs, and the witch-hunters, and the gawkers, as long as you kept your shoulder covered and your walk steady.
And never let anyone get too close to your left arm.
The bar was in a slightly disreputable part of town. There was a thin, yellow-haired woman leaning against the bar wearing a sleeveless blouse and a short skirt, the Mark standing clearly against the pale skin of her left shoulder. In the corner, a man sat nursing a beer, the fabric of his work shirt frayed and discolored over the seam of his left sleeve. There were at least three others Zack could spot right off who were definitely Marked. He sighed and let his jacket slip off, wanting to protect it against exposure to the Mark as much as he could. It was a losing battle, no doubt—even with the shirt between his jacket and Marked flesh, the strange disintegrating effect wasn’t entirely staved off. But he wasn’t looking forward to the time when he couldn’t walk the streets without his condition being known. He craved his small privacies, his illusion of normalcy, of safety. He longed, with all his heart, to be rid of the Mark.
He stepped up to the bar and ordered a beer. The woman smiled at him. Her eyes were bright and hot. The spark that passed between them was inevitable, and meaningless. He smiled back, automatically.
“Nice jacket,” the woman said softly.
“Thanks.” She was sizing him up: the leather jacket, patch-sleeved shirt, jeans worn but clean, young, moderately good-looking, hair only a little too long. A whore’s appraisal, but casual, a force of habit, not serious. He wasn’t a buyer in her market.
“You working tonight?” Her smile was crooked, showing a set of sparkling white teeth. Her skin almost glowed.
“Maybe. Depends.” It was almost impossible to hold a regular job when you were Marked. Not surprising. The Mark affected people strangely. But there were also plenty of thrillseekers who liked the heightened sensitivity and edge of unpredictability the Mark gave its chosen, and were willing to pay for it. When the money ran low, you did what you had to do.
She shrugged and nodded, the crooked smi
le still dazzling. “Ah well. You got your sign out, you try that guy over there.” She nodded towards the opposite corner, where a heavy man in a dark overcoat sat in a booth with an untouched glass of coffee in front of him.
The man gave Zack the creeps. “He’s buying? So why aren’t you selling?”
She shrugged again. Tiny lights glinted in her eyes like Fourth of July sparklers. “He likes boys, is all.”
Zack nodded. Maybe. But he’d have to have a few drinks first. “Thanks for the tip. I’m Zack.”
“Shelly.” She didn’t offer her hand. It hurt for them to touch each other, skin to skin.
“Haven’t seen you around.” He took a sip of his beer: cold and rich and yeasty. The bubbles tickled his throat as they slipped down.
“Been traveling. Had a guy up Seattle way, till his wife found out.” She giggled. It sounded like chiming bells. “So I’m gone.”
There was a trace of a sharp edge in her giggle. The whites of her eyes had a slightly blue cast. She was on the way down, Zack thought sadly. Wouldn’t last the year, probably. What would it be? Car accident? Drug overdose? Gang attack? Or would she just snap one day, her pretty mind burned out on all the unrelenting sensation, and go catatonic? The Mark turned hard and black when its chosen died, like a charred scar.
“How long has it been?” He didn’t say since what. There was only one event of importance among the Marked.
“Three years. Three and a half.” Suddenly, her face was dreamy and sad. “I was one of the first. I’d never even heard of it when it happened to me. My boyfriend thought I’d got drunk and got a tattoo and couldn’t remember.” Her laugh was soft now, a gentle echo. “Then we started hearing about the others. And I lost my job, I couldn’t stand the noise.”
“What did you do?”
“Worked in a drug store.”
He stared.
“Oh.” She laughed. “It was the bell, when the door opened. All day long, ching, ching, ching. Finally one day I heaved an iron at it.” She smiled pleasantly at the memory. And he could see it clearly, almost in slow motion—the sudden flash in her eyes as she whirled away from the counter, grabbing the iron from the appliances on the shelf, flinging it toward the offending door, tongue in the corner of her mouth. And the satisfying crash of metal against glass as the torturous bell was silenced.
He smiled with her. “I’d like to have seen that.”
“Security vid has it all down. But they wouldn’t give me a copy.” She leaned in to him, grinning, eyes half-closed, as if she meant to kiss him.
He felt the bright spark in his groin, the teasing spark that was always there between the chosen, and an awkward motion that wanted to go towards her turned into a sudden jerking away.
She stood back, blinking away a wave of melancholy that dimmed her eyes for a moment. “Sorry. Too much to drink.” Then the glaring smile was back. “Working tonight, you know. Can’t deal with the natives sober.”
Which reminded him, he needed to work on his own intoxicated state, if he was going to move on that man in the overcoat before someone else got him first. Zack tipped up his glass and downed about half his beer, glancing back at the man in the corner. The overcoat was fine wool and well-tailored; his hair was thinning, but elegantly styled. There was nothing flashy about him, but he had a quiet air of money. He sat soberly, his glass of coffee still untouched, a predatory gleam in his eye that took in the whole bar with a softly simmering calculation.
He looked like someone who’d pay well for his pleasures. But those pleasures might well give a simple young hustler nightmares for months. He still gave Zack the creeps.
“I know what you mean,” Zack agreed, then he finished off his beer and ordered another. Two beers should do it. He hadn’t eaten much that day, and the hypersensitive Marked were more susceptible to alcohol, anyway. Then he’d make his approach.
“So what about you, Zack? How long for you?” She was leaning forward onto the bar on her elbow, one foot up on the rungs of the stool behind her, skirt pushed up on a creamy thigh.
“Just over a year. I was in college. Junior. I tried to finish, but....” He’d have had his degree by now, if he hadn’t woken up one morning with his roommate standing over him, nervously shifting from foot to foot, saying, Man, you gotta get out of here. You’ve got one of those things. Your shoulder just burned through the sheet, man, I’m sorry, I can’t deal with this. It could have been worse. He’d heard of lovers or roommates who’d gone for a gun, and the newly Marked hadn’t awakened at all.
“Too bad. But what the hell good’s a degree going to do you anyway, right?”
He took another gulp of beer, and clinked his mug against hers. “Right.”
“Still. Always wanted to go to college. Never would have anyway, though, so what the hell.”
“What the hell,” he agreed. He drank again. The quick beer and a half was going right to his head. Which was a danger, too—he didn’t want to be so drunk he couldn’t judge what was being done to him. Only two beers—and in his student days, he wouldn’t have even considered that drinking. Well, it wasn’t student days any more. He’d wakened one morning with the Mark, and that changed everything.
They worked on their beers a while in silence. It was hard to keep a conversation going for long between two chosen; they distracted easily and couldn’t keep track of what they were talking about. And Zack was particularly distracted tonight—he hadn’t even been sure he wanted to work when he’d come out, thinking only that he’d have a beer and see what happened—but now the presence of the man in the overcoat was weighing on him, tickling his nerve endings, making the Mark burn.
So, he might as well stop putting it off and go see whether he’d be able to pay another week’s rent on his cheap hotel room.
He slid into the booth across from the man. “Hi. Would you like to buy me a drink?”
The man looked at him appraisingly. A slight smile played about his lips. But his eyes were cold. “No. I prefer my companions to be sober. To be completely aware of their actions at all times.”
The man’s coldness made Zack shiver. Was he already too drunk? He almost hoped he was. “Coffee, then? And tell me about your... companions.”
The man cocked his head for a moment, then spoke, his voice low and smooth and calm. “I have a notion I’d like to watch two handsome young men enjoy each other’s bodies tonight. Would you be interested in such an arrangement?”
Zack nearly choked. Well, he got right to the point, didn’t he? So, was this prospect better, or worse? He wouldn’t have to touch this strange, cold man himself, but what would his “companion” be like? A handsome young man, but, perhaps, a cruel one? “What exactly would I have to do? And for how much?”
“The usual sex acts. Oral and anal penetration. The details I leave to you and Brendan. The pay would be substantial. Say, three months’ rent in whatever dive you’re currently inhabiting?”
Three months. God. It was far, far more than one night’s work was usually worth, and it scared him witless. There had to be a catch—what did this man want that he was willing to pay that much for it?
But—three months’ rent. “Can I decide after I see your friend?”
The man drove a Mercedes. Zack had never been in one before. It felt like riding in a cocoon, soft and warm and isolated from the outside world. He sat, rubbing his thumbs on the soft leather upholstery by his hips, staring out the window, trying not to think. His shoulder burned under the Mark. It made the rest of his flesh shiver.
The house was, surprisingly, not huge or ostentatious. Just a well-kept Victorian in a pleasant but not overly expensive part of town. Probably a pied-a-terre, perhaps the companion’s apartment. Zack followed the man up the front steps, stamping his feet a bit against the cold while he waited for the man to find his keys and unlock the door. They entered a dim hallway, parquet floor and dark paneled walls, lit by small lamps high on the walls. Somber and moody.
Down the hallway, up a narro
w stairway, another hall, all without a word or a sound besides the tapping of their shoes against the parquet. Zack was wound up like a clock, breathing hard when the man finally opened a door and ushered him in. It was too dark to see more than slippery shadows, but Zack thought he could make out a huge bed, and a form moving in it. Zack rubbed his shoulder absently, and the patch on his shirt came off in his hand. It smelled slightly smoky.
“Brendan?” the man said quietly. “I’ve brought someone I think will do.”
Then he turned on the light.
Marked. Brendan was Marked. Zack didn’t have to see the black design on the shoulder of the young man turning sleepily under the sheet to know. He knew it at once, and felt it, that inevitable spark, tingling in his cock, making his flesh crawl. Brendan sat up, covering a yawn, pushing dark auburn hair out of his eyes, mumbling softly. His skin was milky white and sweetly touchable; his face was classically formed, as if made of marble; his blue eyes gleamed with a feral glow as he slowly came awake and fastened his gaze on their guest. And Zack stood rooted to the spot, his mind blotted out by the siren call, beautiful and deadly, of the Mark.
“I... he... he’s Marked,” Zack managed to stammer.
“Yes,” the man agreed calmly.
“We can’t touch. It will hurt.”
“Yes.”
Zack felt absurdly as if he were speaking another language. “I can’t do this.”
Brendan slid out of bed and walked up to Zack, smiling hazily, white teeth worrying his lower lip, eyes still gleaming. The whites were nearly as blue as the irises. He was insane, Zack thought. He must be insane. His milky white skin seemed to glow in the pale light. He was naked and smooth and white as marble, except for his dusky rose-colored cock, jutting half-erect from beneath the red-gold thatch at his crotch. He reached out a hand toward Zack’s face, and Zack’s eyes fell half-closed and his breathing seemed to stop....
And then he was jumping back, his shoulder blades abruptly meeting the wall behind. “It will hurt,” he protested. Brendan just smiled.
