Freaks Under Fire

by Maree Anderson

  Too, she would let him go if he demanded it of her. Or, if the rational part of her brain deemed it the only way forward for them both, she would push him away, do whatever it took to make him hate her enough to excise her from his life and his heart… even if it meant she would spend the rest of her existence mourning his loss. And if Jay had possessed a soul, and believed in an afterlife, right now she would have prayed to every deity humankind believed in for that day to never come.

  “God, Caro.” Tyler puffed out a breath, all the while keeping his eyelids firmly shuttered. “Can’t you see I’m working? What does a guy have to do to get some alone time around here?”

  “It’s me.”

  His eyelids shot open. He rolled off the mattress, scattering manuscript leaves as he launched himself at her.

  As much as Jay wanted—needed—to have his arms around her, she fended him off with the palm of her hand. “Careful.”

  He halted, the hurt in his expression swiftly morphing to concern. “What the fuck did Robot-Boy do to y—? Oh.” His tension visibly eased as he gazed at the sleeping pup.

  “He’s exhausted. Do you have a box, or somewhere I can put him?”

  Tyler glanced around his room. “Here.” He strode to the battered dresser beside the bed and yanked open the top right-hand drawer. “There’s a bunch of my old t-shirts in there—should make a pretty comfortable bed for the little guy.”

  Jay carefully decanted the pup into the makeshift bed. Before she could turn, Tyler’s arms crept around her waist and he tucked her in close to his body, resting his chin atop her head. He inhaled, and when he exhaled, she felt the shudder that coursed through him.

  He remained silent for fifty-three seconds—a span that Jay knew humans considered to be a significantly long moment.

  “God. Jay. You’re finally here.” He murmured the words into her hair. “I should never have left you with him. If anything had happened to you, I swear I would have hunted Sixer down and—”

  “Gotten yourself killed,” Jay said briskly. “It would be the height of stupidity for a human to pit himself against Sixer. Never make the mistake of thinking he’s anything like me, Tyler.”

  She felt his flinch at her blunt words, and turned in his arms to meet his deep, chocolate-brown gaze. “You made the right choice, Tyler. There wasn’t anything you could have done to assist me. It was your baby brother or me. There wasn’t any other choice you could have made.”

  Tyler swallowed, his gaze searching hers. Yet another significantly long moment passed before he nodded. “I know. Doesn’t make my decision easier to bear, though. I had to trust you could save yourself but it almost killed me, Jay. He shot you multiple times with whatever the fuck that weapon was, and God, you looked real bad. I thought….”

  He closed his eyes and learned his forehead against hers. His hand crept to her nape, cupping it, infusing her cool skin with his human warmth. “I believed he was gonna destroy you. I thought I’d never see you again.”

  There were a number of assurances Jay might have given but she doubted any of them would benefit Tyler. His emotions were too raw for platitudes.

  Nor would detailing exactly what had happened between Sixer and herself alleviate Tyler’s obvious anguish. Such facts would only serve to highlight how helpless she had truly been. So Jay opted for humor—a well documented distraction technique that served humans well during stressful or unhappy situations. “Apparently, Sixer was programmed to be what is commonly referred to as an ‘ass man’, as well as a ‘chest man’.”

  Tyler’s chin lifted and he stared at her through slitted eyelids. His fingers clamped around her nape. “What. The. Fuck?”

  Apparently dark brown eyes could turn molten and fiery with repressed rage. Fascinating.

  “As you witnessed,” she said, “he shot me in the chest.”

  Tyler’s lips compressed. “Three times.”

  “That is correct. He woke me to assist him, however when it came time to facilitate his escape, he mistakenly believed he had to incapacitate me again. So he—”

  “Shot you in the ass?”

  “As I was already in motion, his second shot missed and entered my thigh, but I believe he was aiming for the buttock.”

  She waited for him to laugh. Or at least crack a smile. But her attempt at humor had missed the mark for Tyler was counting beneath his breath. He’d only reached three when he hissed from between tightly compressed lips, “Show me.”

  Jay blinked. Even though there was no possibility she had heard wrongly, perhaps she had misunderstood some essential subtext in that brief statement. She decided it was imperative to request clarification. “Show you my buttocks?”

  “Yes.”

  No misunderstanding then. How… unexpected.

  “Now?”

  He released her and stepped back, dropping his hands to his sides. His hands clenched and unclenched. Clenched again. Crimson blotches mottled his neck and throat. “And your chest, too. I need to see what he did to you.”

  He noted the gaze she shot toward the door and swiveled on his heel. “Now, Jay,” he threw back at her as he locked the bedroom door to insure their privacy.

  Jay healed with inhuman speed, and the wounds had been what she termed minor injuries. In mere days, there would be no evidence of the five wounds she’d taken during her encounter with Sixer to distress Tyler. However, perhaps seeing the evidence firsthand, knowing absolutely that she had taken no lasting harm, would help him to shed whatever misplaced guilt and anger he harbored over his inability to protect her.

  “Very well.”

  She shucked her t-shirt, kicked off her sneakers, and shimmied out of her jeans. She hadn’t bothered with a bra this morning so that was one less item of clothing to remove. The leg of her underpants could easily be tugged up to reveal the healing wound on her buttock, and after a quick internal debate, she could see no harm in leaving them on. There was no reason to remove her socks—that portion of her anatomy had not been injured. And so she stood there in her underpants and socks, waiting for Tyler to do… whatever it was he needed to do.

  Chapter Three

  Tyler approached her as a human would approach some wild creature that might bolt at the slightest provocation. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  He waited until he stood directly before her, half an arm’s length away, before responding with, “Does it hurt?”

  And then, before she could formulate a response, he reached out, skimming his fingertips over each slightly raised disc of newly formed dermis. The first atop her left pectoral muscle… the second opposite the first… the third atop her left internal abdominal oblique. Sixer had been precise with his aim, and the projectiles had been designed to lodge in muscular tissue rather than rip through organs and splinter bone—not that Jay’s skeletal structure could be damaged by such small projectiles.

  Each touch of Tyler’s fingertips left behind a tingling trail of heat. Jay inhaled, willing her racing pulse to calm, but as her diaphragm expanded, Tyler moved closer. His palm flattened over her abdomen. “Tell me,” he said, using the clipped tone that indicated he would accept no prevarication on her part.

  “If you refer to the wounds inflicted to my torso region, then no, they don’t hurt.” He was already aware that she didn’t experience pain as humans did, but Jay believed he wouldn’t appreciate the reminder at this particular moment. “The projectiles entering my body caused negligible physical damage,” she told him. “The damage caused when Sixer digitally extracted them was more severe, however it is healing well. In a few more days, the areas where the dermis has re-grown will be imperceptible to the human eye.”

  His eyes appeared to darken a few shades—a fascinating phenomenon that Jay would have liked to test further, but this was hardly an opportune moment to propose an experiment.

  “Sixer dug the bullets out of you.”

  Jay nodded. “Three of them.”

  “Three?”

  “He correctly est
imated it would take three specifically designed projectiles to completely incapacitate me and render me insensible of my surroundings. I regained conscious awareness as the third projectile—” she covered his hand with her palm “—the one that cause this wound, was being extracted.”

  He didn’t respond, and his silence grew heavy.

  Jay had believed she knew Tyler well enough by now to accurately gauge his emotional state at any given time, but clearly she was mistaken in that assumption. Right now, the physical cues he was giving off were contradictory in the extreme. He radiated textbook symptoms of anger, frustration, concern and desire, and she found herself unwilling to make an educated guess as to his current state of mind for fear that she was wrong.

  Best to wait until she had gathered more data.

  Too, her own responses surprised Jay. Beneath Tyler’s hand, her skin prickled. The fine hairs on her arms and nape had responded by rising. Her breathing had quickened, and even though she knew her heart wasn’t literally fluttering in her chest, “fluttering” was an accurate description of the strange sensation. Her salivary glands had increased production of saliva, moistening her mouth, and some instinct prompted her tongue to dart out and lick her lips—a gesture that drew Tyler’s gaze. And then the heat of his gaze enveloped her, flushing her body with still more warmth.

  Jay didn’t have any issues regarding nudity. As she had informed Allen when he’d interviewed her for the position of nude life model, it was just a body: Every human had one. She’d concluded during her first day at Greenfield High that young human males considered her form and facial features pleasing, despite making no effort whatsoever with her grooming, nor exuding appropriate pheromones to attract such attentions. In fact, the attention her physical form had garnered back then had been most inconvenient.

  Now, having interacted more freely with humans, she understood that by today’s standards her physical form fell into the category of “unconventional beauty”—a quality that was sometimes considered desirable precisely because it didn’t conform to the social norms. This knowledge pleased her—not because her evolution from unfeeling machine to one capable of an ever-increasing range of emotions gave her the capacity to embrace vanity, but because she knew that Tyler appreciated the unconventional beauty of her physical form.

  Just as she appreciated his. The width of his shoulders, the expanse of his chest, the lean musculature of his belly, the narrow hips and powerful thighs of a young, physically fit human male.

  Tyler could be described as a typical “jock” but for his hands—large and strong, yes, but with long, sensitive, talented fingers that coaxed songs from the strings of his guitar fit to make angels weep. Despite modern-day reluctance to use the word “beautiful” to describe a male, to Jay, Tyler was beautiful. To her, he was precious, not only for his physical form and his unique talents, but for the way he made her feel alive and cherished—so much more than a cleverly crafted machine conceived and designed by one brilliant, flawed man.

  She had never felt more alive, more cherished than now, when Tyler had inched close enough that each of his exhalations was an exquisite torture—a tantalizing near-kiss from phantom lips hovering above her skin. And then the phantom kiss was reality, for he bent his head and pressed his lips to the scar above her left pectoral.

  Jay’s inhalation sounded loud and harsh and demanding—a stark contrast to the smooth, gentle, petal-soft pressure of Tyler’s lips as he kissed the second scar.

  The palm resting on her abdomen moved, skimming upward, coming to rest on her ribs, below her breast and oh, how she yearned for… for… something she was at a loss to define, as though some alien part of her had burst to life, demanding more.

  And then Tyler was exerting pressure with his palms, turning her, and although she could easily have resisted, Jay surrendered to his will.

  Now both his hands settled on her hips, holding her slightly away from him. Facing this way, unable to observe his face to gauge his expressions, waiting and wondering what he intended to do next, only heightened the anticipation throbbing through her veins. And when he swept his palm over her buttocks, a thready moan that was so needy, so full of want, so… human that it seemed to come from another being altogether, escaped her lips.

  His fingertips gently probed the area surrounding the scabbed wound on the back of her thigh. “And this one?”

  Jay shook her head to clear the haze from her mind. “It is taking longer to heal because it lodged so deeply in my flesh. The last two projectiles resulted in some loss of function and I had difficulty digging them out.”

  She sensed movement behind her, and realized that Tyler had knelt. His fingers hooked the waistband of her underpants, and before she could offer to remove them, he skimmed them down her thighs.

  Jay’s exhalation exited her throat in a series of feline-like mewls. She didn’t understand how having someone she cared for remove a piece of her clothing could affect her on so many levels. Her capacity for logical thought was rapidly shrinking. Her ability to sense the world around her was diminishing as more of her receptors diverted to analyze what Tyler was doing to her, and why her nerve endings seemed to be sparking beneath the slow stroking of his palms down her flanks.

  Right now, she would be fortunate to hear someone knocking on the bedroom door.

  “If you were human,” he murmured, his cheek resting against her left buttock, “this would leave a horrible scar.”

  “It will heal without scarring,” Jay felt compelled to remind him. “My dermis is extremely resilient. And I’m sure I recall mentioning I do not feel pain the way humans do.”

  “I’m grateful for that,” he said, coaxing her to lift first one foot and then the other to remove her underpants from her ankles. “God, I’m so grateful you aren’t human, Jay. Because if you were, you’d have died. I’d have lost you, and I couldn’t bear to lose you again.”

  He surged to his feet, his arms wrapping around her hips and urging her flush against him.

  Jay swallowed, tried to speak, but the words caught in her throat and died unspoken. Just as well, for she suspected anything she uttered would be garbled and likely make no sense whatsoever.

  The walls of the bedroom seemed to contract, cocooning them both in a haven that blocked all intrusions from the outside world. There was only the fabric of Tyler’s jeans scraping the backs of her thighs, the heat of his body blanketing her spine, the pressure of his fingers as they flexed against her waist, the brush of his worn t-shirt across her shoulder blades, the warm caress of his exhalations against her bared skin.

  One of his hands drifted from her waist, but before the protest that bubbled to her lips could escape, he had swept back her hair to expose her nape and pressed his lips to a highly sensitive spot below her right ear.

  Jay gasped. Her diaphragm heaved as she fought to inhale sufficient oxygen, fought to contain the sensations sweeping through her—sensations that were scrambling her rational thoughts and turning her into a creature that yearned for nothing else except Tyler’s heat, Tyler’s caresses, Tyler’s kisses.

  Tyler.

  At some level she comprehended the danger of letting emotions swamp reason and she struggled to regain the ability to think clearly and logically—a futile effort, for no matter how she tried to think logically she didn’t know what to do—what to say, how to act.

  Remain passive and let nature take its course?

  State clearly to Tyler that she welcomed the next step, so there could be no misunderstandings?

  Perhaps it would be more prudent to show him, rather than tell him—Jay was all too aware that at times her manner of speaking and the way she expressed herself could disconcert humans. But what was the best way to show Tyler she truly wanted to be intimate with him?

  And, to complicate matters further, her brain chose that moment to replay a previous encounter with Tyler. One where she’d been ninety-five-point-seven percent certain she’d correctly interpreted his emotional and physi
cal state, and had indicated her readiness for intimacy by grasping his hand to lead him to the bedroom… only for Tyler to turn her down, insisting she wasn’t ready.

  The encounter unspooled in her mind.

  How to put this so Tyler would understand? “I have extensively researched human sexuality and I am fully aware of what’s involved,” she told him. “Further, if you have concerns at my readiness, I am capable of manipulating my body functions to insure my—”

  She broke off as she noted him biting his lip. It appeared he was attempting to hide a smile. Likely, this was one of those times when detailed explanations were not appropriate. But she couldn’t help feeling… unappreciative of his capacity to be amused by her at this current time. “Perhaps it would be best if I did not explain my capabilities in this instance.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Awesome as it is to know you can get yourself all fired up without any help from me, we guys kinda prefer to think we’re the ones responsible for girls ‘getting ready’. If you know what I mean.”

  “Then before I provide you with any further amusement, perhaps you would care to explain what you meant by your previous statement about ‘readiness’.”

  The instant the words left her lips she knew she should have made an effort to moderate her tone, but it was too late. Tyler would have to, as Caro would say, deal.

  Thankfully, he didn’t take offence. In fact, if his pulse rate and relaxed muscles and even breathing were any indicator, he was now calm and unworried. Which was very confusing indeed.

  She re-ran the significant portions of the encounter in her mind, analyzing them for nuances she might have misinterpreted. But there was no misinterpreting what she had seen and heard. Tyler had clearly indicated he desired intimacy. She’d made it clear she desired it, too. Yet he’d turned her down.