by Skyler Andra
That was it. That was what I needed, and my cries took on a deeper tone until finally I shattered completely. One moment my body was wound up as tightly as a spring, and then the next everything opened up. I cried out and digging my nails into Rane’s hips, wanting to stretch this moment of intense pleasure out as far as I could. It felt so good, so very good, and I squeezed my eyes tight even as fireworks burst throughout me.
Rane’s hoarse voice cried out, and his hands landed on my waist, dragging me close for one final thrust, and when he came, he said my name over and over again.
In that perfect and drifting place right after utterly phenomenal sex, I wondered what it would be like if he had come inside me without the condom between us. With my previous lovers, I had never thought much of it, but with him, a godly avatar, how would it feel?
I whimpered a little as Rane pulled away from me, and I was vaguely aware when he rose up from the bed to clean up in the bathroom. My skin sizzled where our bodies had touched. My chest ached for him to return. My pussy wanted more of what we’d just done. My mind wanted for him to lie beside me, holding me, but that obviously wasn’t him.
I was just beginning to wonder at how long he was taking when he appeared again. For a long moment, he stood at the foot of the bed watching me, and then silently, he dressed.
“I’m going to get us some new clothes,” he said, then left.
The pleasure we’d shared together was still warm on my skin, but an icy cold hand gripped my chest. What the hell was going to happen now?
Chapter 10
Rane had been gone almost an hour and a half. Well, precisely eighty-seven minutes, according to the crappy digital clock on the bedside table.
To stop myself going insane with worry, I had a quick shower to clean myself of the sweat. Then I prowled through the room wondering what I had done, what he was doing, how I might have made a really, really dumb mistake by sleeping with him. Unable to relax, I dressed, because it was getting too chilly to sit around naked.
The TV only showed the same three black and white channels. A standard bible, along with copies of an old golf magazines, rested in the drawers. I sure as hell wasn’t going to put any quarters into the ancient vibrating bed.
Dammit. He really shouldn’t have left me all alone. The whole time I worried about the people in my apartment, the cops searching for me, and the men in black suits crawling over Rane’s truck and the diner. What if someone had come to kidnap me while he left me alone?
Boots clomped outside the motel door right as I thought that.
Oh god! They were here.
I scooped up the closest thing on hand; the remote control. Clutching it tight, I readied to throw it at the head of anyone who tried to cross me.
Instead of one of the men in black, Rane entered, shutting the door behind him.
For a few moments he blinked at me. His eyes dipped to the item in my hand.
“What in the hell would that do?” he asked, and a bemused look flashed across his face.
I scowled at him. “No one wants a television remote thrown at their head.”
“I see.” He hesitated, and then gestured at the corner of the room behind the door.
“You didn’t warn me that it was you.”
“Do we need a secret knock or something?”
“That would help.”
Rane gestured to the corner of the room. “You know, most people coming into a room never check that damned corner, even if they’re professionals who are meant to be clearing it out. If someone comes in and you don’t know who they are, that’s the best place to be.”
I smiled. “And then I can brain them with the remote.”
He sighed and put the bag he carried on the bed. It had the word ‘hello’ printed on it a dozen times. “I’ve heard of worse plans.”
I scowled again because I’d somehow almost managed to forget that I was angry with him. “You were gone a long time. I started worrying the men in black suits had nabbed you.”
“Buying these,” he teased, crinkling the bag at me.
I wandered over to them. “What did you buy? The whole shop?”
He made a sarcastic haha face. “The hotel clerk told me that there was an all-night place just a little while down the road. We apparently have different ideas of what a ‘a little way down the road’ is. I’m sorry it took me so long.”
I glared at him, wishing I could beat the urge to punch him in the arm for that. “No, don’t apologize for taking too long at the damned store.”
He looked at me with smoldering eyes that challenged me. “What should I apologize for, then?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him to forget it. I didn’t want to be the scared girl who whined to her one-night stand. But I took a deep breath and forged ahead. “It was a dick move to leave me alone and unprotected.”
Rane frowned at me. “Needed to clear my head. I thought you might have used your powers on me again.”
“I resent that,” I said, folding my arms over my chest. “I thought we had a good time.”
He looked up, boyishly eager, with a sexy, sweet smile. “If you want to do that again, I’m up for it.”
“So there will be a next time?” I asked.
Suddenly, he was by my side, lightly holding the tips of my elbows, and he smelled so very good. He touched my face with just the tips of his fingers, and he scanned it as if he always wanted to remember it.
“Yes, there will be a next time,” I said. “But first I want to see what you bought.”
He nodded and started to pull out the contents of the bag. I was grateful to find more underwear and some clothes, roughly my size.
The phone he had picked up for me delighted me even more, and I clapped my hands together. Without my cell I’d been out of contact with the entire world for what felt like years and Rane grinned as I tore it out of the wrapping.
“Here, give it to me, and I’ll get it set up,” he said. “I can get you service through the plan that I have, and then you’ll have my number too.”
“Sure,” I said, handing it to him, and he purposefully grazed my fingers.
As he tinkered with my phone, I went through the clothes he’d given me. The stuff wasn’t bad, even if it was cheap, a few T-shirts, some underwear a fresh pair of jeans. Until I got to a specific shirt. Unlike the others, which were black, green and gray, this one was pale pink, with curvy gold lettering on it, and stuck out like a sore thumb.
“What the hell, Rane?” I waved the shirt emblazoned with ‘love goddess’ in gold cursive letters in his face.
“I thought it was appropriate,” he said with an unabashed smile on his face. “Do you not?”
“I hate pink.” I tossed the underwear at his chest and he caught it. “And if this is your idea of a joke, I have nothing in the world that can help you.”
“You have to admit, it was a very good one,” he said gravely.
I growled at him, snatching it off him and stuffing it back into the bag. With any luck, we’d get through everything and I wouldn’t have to wear it at all before I got back to my own home and my own clothes.
For some reason, my life before all of this madness had started seemed a faint memory now. There was a part of me that was convinced that I had always been on the road with Rane, that we had always looked at each other like this, touched each other like this. That part never wanted this adventure to end. But it was bound to once we reached the other avatars in Seattle. Then what? Rane would leave to be his old loner self, leaving me a distant memory.
The avatar of Ares eyed me calmly, my new phone still in his hand, and then he stood and came closer to me. The seriousness in his face made a strange panicky feeling come over me. He looked way too serious for someone whom I had just had sex with.
“Were you frightened when I left?” he asked.
“Of course not!” I said, worried that he heard the lie in my bravado.
I turned away, grabbing a new pair of underwear and
a T-shirt (not the pink one) out of the bag, hoping he hadn’t noticed.
“I’m going to go change and then get some sleep,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, the bag rustling as he removed something.
Inside the cramped bathroom, I changed into a new pair of panties and a T-shirt, feeling fresher. When I emerged, he held up the condom wrapper with a quizzical expression.
“Er,” I said, wondering what he was doing. “You can toss that, unless you want to keep it as a memento.”
He smiled and it completely changed the solemnity in his face. “I’m just wondering how you knew that there would be a condom in the drawer.”
“Well, obviously….” I trailed off because there was really no obviously about it.
Back in my apartment I always kept condoms in the nightstand when I was sleeping with someone, but that had been a while. Plus, there was no reason to think that hotel would keep such amenities around.
I went to look in the motel’s nightstand, finding no other condoms in there. “Lucky guess?”
Rane tossed the wrapper in the bin. “That or this is some kind of strange manifestation of your power.”
I stared at him for a moment. “No.”
“Just…no?”
“Absolutely not.”
“What do you mean?”
“I refuse,” I said, and he frowned. “Refuse to be stuck with the powers of the god Cupid while being chased across the country by spooky men in black, and at the same time have one of my superpowers be the manifestation of safer sex products!”
Rane looked at me with admirable calm, and when he spoke, he was perfectly straight-faced. “Look on the bright side. You’re like a Boy Scout: always prepared.”
“No!” I said. “After this, we are going to buy our condoms like mature and responsible adults. We’re not relying on my supposed magical ability to produce condoms from thin air.”
Rane nodded as if amused, and I turned back to the bed, ignoring his muttered, “Still sounds pretty handy.”
We bushed out teeth together, Rane watching me out the corner of his eyes as if I were a curious science experiment he wanted to test further.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I said after rinsing.
“What?” he said, acting all innocent.
“Like I’m your experiment.”
His laugh chased me into the bed, where I curled up under the scratchy sheets. I tried taking my mind off my powers by fiddling with my phone for a few moments before setting it down when Rane approached. I admired him again as climbed into the bed with me. But he kept his distance, maintaining space between us, as if he was nervous about it. After five minutes, he tentatively came to rest against me, his chest to my back, one arm thrown lightly over my hip.
“I don’t do this very often, you know,” I said, so softly that he might ignore it if he wanted to.
“Neither do I.” The response came so quickly and so easily that it had to be true, but for a moment, I wasn’t sure I believed him.
“Looking the way you do?” I said incredulously. “Are you serious?”
“I could ask you the same,” he said, squeezing me a little. “It hasn’t felt right in a long time. And this, no matter how messy it gets, how fast it happened or what was behind it, this feels right.”
My mouth fell open at his response. Earlier he’d worried I’d manipulated him a second time with my cupid powers, and had left the motel to clear his head. Now he admitted to the complete opposite.
“And you’re not afraid that you were bewitched into it?” My chest stung a little as I asked the question.
That was the question hanging over us ever since we’d finished our amazing encounter. It had likely hung over Rane when he left, it had hung over me when I’d been alone in the room. But it had to be asked. Not knowing how he felt about it was killing me, and it was crazy that I wanted to know, when I hardly knew him.
“I’m not going to torture myself over this,” Rane said firmly. “I have wanted you since the moment I laid eyes on you. You looked like someone I wanted in bed, and the more time we spent together, the more I realized that I was right.”
“That seems…awfully convenient, doesn’t it?”
Rane sighed, and I felt a tiny sliver of arousal go through me as I felt his breath right next to my ear. “All right. I’ll tell you this story. About four years ago, I was doing some reconnaissance work. It doesn’t matter where or against whom.”
I turned to face him, wanting to read him. “You could tell me, but then you’d have to kill me?”
Rane chuckled but didn’t answer me, continuing his story. “I was in the desert, moving fast and traveling light, and I had been out there for almost two months. That’s a pretty long time for what I was doing, and I was happy when I made it to one of our safe houses. It wasn’t much, but it had an honest to goodness cot, running water, and even a refrigerator. I could stay there for a few nights before I moved on, and believe me when I say I was looking forward to it.”
“But there’s a catch, isn’t there?” I said, running my fingernails up and down his arm.
“Of course there was,” he said, shivering at my touch. “I was sleeping most of the day, but around dusk, something told me to get out. I was so exhausted, and just wanted to sleep through the night for once, and almost rolled back onto the cot and went to sleep.”
He stopped for a moment as if remembering the memory.
“But some primitive instinct in me shouted at me to get out,” he said, his grip on me digging into my hip. “Following it, I packed my gear and moved off into the rocky caverns. I didn’t go far, though, climbing a hill and hiding behind a boulder that overlooked the cabin. Ten minutes after I got settled, half dozen insurgents headed straight for the safe house, raking the place with gunfire. They shot up that place so badly that a wall fell in.”
I shuddered at the idea of that much destruction, but Rane wasn’t done with his story yet, and I stroked his arm, coaxing it from him.
“If I had stayed in that house,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I would have died. There’s utterly no doubt about that. Everything in the world was lined up for me to die right there and then. The fact that I’m alive right now is impossible.”
I couldn’t help myself, and held him tight. Right then, no matter how little I knew him or how very strange and foreign all of this was to me, I was relieved that he hadn’t met his fate in that terrifying jungle.
“So yes,” he added. “There are a lot of things I question. What the best way is to keep you safe is. Just about everything that Mads does. And I don’t stop until I get the answers that I need.”
His hand came up to cup the side of my face, and there was something so warm and lovely about it that my heart fluttered just a little bit.
“That also means that there are some things that I don’t question.” His fingers brushed my scalp, lighting a spark in my chest. “I’m not going to question this. I don’t want to.”
“But…”
“Let it go, darling,” he whispered, dislodging my doubt. “Haven’t you had enough trouble brought to your door lately?”
I laughed a little, because he was right. When I’d heard him call me ‘darling,’ I’d heard just the barest hint of a twang in his voice, nothing as far south as Mississippi or Alabama in his accent. Suddenly, I wanted to know all about him, where he was from, what he’d done before he’d gone into the military, what his life had been like before and after he’d become an avatar.
Trying to frame the questions in my head, with him holding me, his lips so close was near impossible.
Exhaustion finally caught up with me, and I fell into a deep and perfect sleep where no more questions were necessary. There was still more time for that.
Chapter 11
At a small town where the population couldn’t have been much over two hundred, Rane picked up a wideband scanner cheap from a junk shop. It was ancient, a relic from another era, but as we ate sandwiches in th
e shade of a national forest, I watched in fascination as he prodded it to life like he was a natural with it. Equipment like that must have been what he used when deployed as a soldier.
“Felt like catching up on your easy listening?” I quipped, but Rane shook his head and glanced out the car window at the darkening skies.
“Just wanted to get a better picture of what we might be driving into,” he advised. “Rain’s been falling hard all over this part of the country recently, and that might slow us down. I’m not sure whether going slow is better or worse than just saying fuck it and making a dash through the storms for Seattle.”
I ate my sandwich that we’d picked up from the local diner while he scanned the airwaves. He had told me a few things about the other avatars who were gathering in Seattle and waiting for us, well, waiting for me. The more I heard about it, the less certain I became. What did I know about Rane and Mads after all? Or about the people who were apparently going to meet and decide on my fate? For one, I had to assume that they were better than people who broke into my apartment and sent the police after me. Then I wondered what would have happened if I never inherited the powers of Cupid.
Rane made a soft sound of dismay, and I tuned into what he listened to, learning quickly what distressed him; a news bulletin.
“The couple were last seen crossing state lines fast from Indiana to Illinois,” the somber reporter announced. “The two man and a woman are wanted for armed robbery in Indiana. Police say there are armed and dangerous, and have posted a reward for information leading to their arrest.”
Ice crackled as it settled over my ribcage. Of course the descriptions read out matched Rane, Mads and me.
I swore softly. “That’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”
Worry crammed behind Rane’s troubled gaze and he rubbed the back of his neck. “It isn’t ideal. Are you done with your food? We should get out of here. It’s getting dark enough that we should look for a place to stay.”
