As soon as her cries faded, he dipped down to lick at the fresh draft of her juices, lapping as eagerly as a thirsty man—or a thirsty dragon with a dry mouth.
“Can I have more of you?” he asked between licks. “Please, can I have more of you? Can I touch you? You haven’t let me, and I…”
“Yes. Cover me. Cover me and take me, pet.”
Valorie unfastened the ties of her halter from behind her neck and at her abdomen, where the deep V plunged between her breasts. Lying on her back, she didn’t have much more than her nipples, but that didn’t seem to bother any of her partners. They loved the deep V, and they loved her nipples, as though because they were the only things there when she was on her back, her nipples got all the attention women like Maya or Kitty got for the whole of their breasts.
She hummed in pleasure and wrapped her arms around his beautiful body as he kissed up to the navel that he’d saluted earlier, stroking his palms over the tattoos that embellished her hips. He slid his hands under her shoulders to prop her up. The protruding buds of her nipples called him like they called others. Men just couldn’t seem to keep their teeth off, tugging at the flesh before sucking almost all of her breast into their mouths. John was no exception. His cock smeared sticky pre-cum against her thighs as his body undulated over her.
He crawled up farther and marked her neck with his teeth. The roughness of his bites left her squirming underneath him. Arousal vibrated through her like electricity all the way to her fingertips. She liked it rough, had been screwing mostly demons for the last twenty years. If there was one thing she could give to Lennon, it was how good his sharp little demon teeth felt on her skin—not quite as much as she liked his tentacles in her cunt, but a close second. John wasn’t the dragon that she called him, and Bell hadn’t seen fit to follow that characterization to its logical conclusion—yet. But he did just fine, pressing harder when she didn’t express any discomfort and instead scratched at his shoulders, curling her leg around his hip and bucking up as though her pussy begged for his cock after his thorough tongue.
“Can I kiss you?” he pleaded against her neck.
He’d learned at least some of his lesson about consent. Under other circumstances, she might have considered the constant questions for permission annoying, but she found them endearing, especially with his history. Better safe than sorry. And he’d probably lose some of that uncertainty about what she wanted around the same time he lost his obedience. At that point, the punishments would flow, but so would their comfort with each other, to the point where he would no longer have to ask. She’d almost miss it.
She guided him up by his chin and opened her mouth for him, this time letting him control the kiss. When she was on top, she wanted the control, but when she took the bottom, she wanted to be taken. He was frantic, fevered, driven by a rhythm that moved all the way through his body. His cock slid through her slick folds as he rutted but didn’t take, not while he was kissing her. Not while he hadn’t made sure that he could, even though she’d already given her order and her permission.
She smiled as she sucked at his tongue and lifted her hips to poise the head at her cunt. Her teeth raked along the length of his tongue as he entered her, the weight of his cock slipping him in before he was ready. Valorie exhaled sharply as he slumped against her, his belly flush with hers. He had almost single-handedly heated the whole back of her tent with his fevered body. She was sweating where their bodies met.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
“Well, go on. Don’t rest on the job,” she said with a grin. She kicked his still-sensitive ass with her heel.
Her mouth fell open with a delighted gasp as he raised himself up again on his knees with her legs wrapped around him and kissed her again, even as the push of his cock inside her forced her hips to rise off the ground. He was so rigid, so thick, she thoroughly felt each unrelenting stroke as he pounded into her with the same rhythm that he kissed. The arousal in her head from his touch and from his mouth joined the purely physical arousal that he’d stoked between her legs. The intensity nearly had her screaming.
This time when she scratched her nails down his back, she definitely broke the skin. His hips jerked at the new pain, burying his cock even deeper at a new angle.
She broke away from his mouth to push him down to her neck so that she could breathe her encouragements into his ear again, her mouth so near his collar. “Yes, pet. Yes, yes, so strong, so big inside me. Skin’s burning. You’re gonna make me come so hard. Should I let them all hear what you’re doing to me? You know they’ve been imagining it since they saw me own you. You know they’ve imagined you licking me, fucking me, sucking me. Everything you’ve been doing, just keep doing it, just…like…that…”
His shout got lost in her neck, but she let hers out as he snapped his hips and pushed his cock in as far as it would go at the ripple of her pussy around him. Valorie shoved her hand between them to stroke her mound and her folds around her clit—the little button too sensitive to take direct stimulation after her first orgasm. John considerately made a few more shallow thrusts to help her draw out her pleasure as he came hot inside her.
“That’s my pet dragon,” she said in reward, rubbing his neck under the collar.
She slithered out from under him to crawl over to the curtain that separated the back of the tent from the platform. Everyone kept towels under the platform for sweat. It would work just as well for other fluids, but she didn’t want anyone on the other side of the platform to see the curtain open or her naked body.
Thank goodness for the fact that most patrons rarely lingered in front of a tent when an oddity wasn’t there. A few die-hard fans sometimes came especially for one or two oddities or performances, but Valorie wasn’t the sort to have as many fans as the more arcane oddities in the circus. Actually, that wasn’t true. She had her share of male fans, but when they had Lady Sasha to gape at when Valorie wasn’t around, they weren’t likely to linger when they knew they could come back later.
“Here,” she said, carefully closing the curtain behind her. She handed John one of the towels.
As he cleaned off his cock and the rest of him as best as he could with a small towel alone, Valorie checked his back. The places she’d scratched were a raw red, but where she’d drawn blood, it had already dried. She traced them and let her fingers trail down to his darkened ass. She liked it when he twitched.
“You do realize you’ll have to go out with leather over this,” Valorie said, smiling. “And the scratches on your back bare too.”
“I guess I’ll have to be careful not to sit down,” John said evenly. “And if anyone asks, just act mysterious. They’ll fill in the blanks. It doesn’t matter if there are no blanks to fill in or not. They do it anyway.”
“Normals are good at that,” Valorie said. “Silence leaves room for so many lies.”
“Speaking of silence, can I ask you a question?” John winced as he pulled on his leather trousers.
Valorie rested on her knees, sitting on her heels. She held her towel between her legs to catch his cum as it seeped out of her. She was comfortable staying naked. In a past life, she might have been concerned about the fact that anyone could come through the door in the back and anyone could come through the curtain behind her. It had taken her a while to realize that most people respected the borders set for them, even when there weren’t locks.
However, she’d learned at the same time that she didn’t usually need to care about the ones who crossed those borders. Arcanium had its own enforcement, and it could be much uglier than the kind on the outside. Valorie sometimes thought it was more just, though.
“Sure,” Valorie replied. “I might not answer.”
“You sound like him again,” John said. “I just… Are you human?”
“What?”
Of all the questions she might have expected, that wasn’t one of them.
John rubbed his hand over his scars. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be an ignorant lo
ser. I’m just confused. There are times when you talk about the demons as though they’re not like you, and other times I…I wonder. As demons go, the ones here seem all right. They’re not all whips and chains and hellfire, I mean. But I hear about a lot of you girls being with them, and you don’t sound like you’re afraid. You talk about Bell as though…as though you’re not afraid of him either. Aside from your contortion tricks, though, you don’t seem to be very demon-y. Your eyes and teeth are normal. Bell’s eyes and teeth are normal too, though, so that’s not—”
“You’re rambling,” Valorie interrupted.
“Yeah, I am. That’s what I do when start chewing on my toes. Did I stick my foot in my mouth here or—”
“Was it my lovely disposition or the fact that Bell gave you to me to punish?” Valorie asked.
“Um. Both.”
Valorie finished cleaning up between her legs, bunched the towel up and took care of the rest to try to hide how her body seemed to have gone light and weak. She wasn’t even sure why. Or if she was, that part of her was hiding.
“They tell kids that Grandma or Auntie June become angels when they die,” Valorie said. “It’s bullshit. Angels are born angels. Jinn are born jinn. Nothing short of a wish would make me not human, and I’ve used all my wishes. Sometimes I think things would be easier if I were jinn, but I’m human as you. I’ve just been here longer.”
“Kitty’s been here a long time too. She looks stranger than you, but I never wondered if maybe she wasn’t human,” John said. He tried to appear casual, but there was tension in his face, shoulders and spine.
“Kitty was a voluntary from the very beginning,” Valorie said. “And she’s Kitty. I’m me. I ended up choosing this place, but I lost friends and family too. Choosing made it easier to handle when I decided to let them go. When I fell in with Bell. When I decided to become the best contortionist this circus has ever seen and leave my mark. The only thing that would have made it even easier would have been to lose my soul. I still got that one with me, even if you think I’m soulless.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Yeah, you did. You might have heard the rumors that I can be worse than this. I can. Most of what you see and hear from me, it’s illusion. We get good at illusion around here. I tell you that so you don’t go thinking you really are a dragon or something.”
“I don’t think it’s all as much of an illusion as you think it is,” John said. “Believe me, you’ve got emotions. And I’m not the best at reading them in women, but you don’t seem to be happy. The only other guy I see looking your kind of unhappy is Bale, when he’s following Lady Sasha around. And he’s demon. So I know demons have emotions. And pasts. I just didn’t know a person could own another person around here. Like, I thought it might be against the rules, reserved for demons only. That’s all.”
“That’s all,” she muttered. She turned around to pull on her pants and start tying her halter back up. “I don’t know where you got that I was a demon, I really don’t. Did someone tell you that?”
“No one tells me anything,” John replied. “I don’t get close enough to eavesdrop—most of the time anyway. I just see what you do. You always hang around Bell and that tumbler demon guy, the one you’re mad at. You talk about Ciàran and Moss…”
“Newsflash, wood-fire grill, most of us girls have had Ciàran and Moss. It’s practically a rite of passage,” Valorie said.
John literally stopped moving halfway to his feet. “Really?” he finally asked.
“Really. And Maya’s Bell’s lover, but I’ll bet you think she’s human.”
“I see her talking with other humans,” John said. “With Kitty. With the twins. Not you. You’ll talk with them at breakfast because you eat at the same table, and you work with Victor, but what do you do when you’re not hanging out with demons or playing with me or doing your contortion thing?”
“Sometimes I choreograph,” Valorie said. “Equal opportunity services.”
The obvious thing she wasn’t saying was that she’d barely noticed that, aside from John, whose relationship with her now was decidedly unbalanced, she didn’t much hang out with other souls in Arcanium. She’d been forced to live alongside Maya until Valorie had split with Bell. She got along with Kitty and was comfortable with her because of their shared longevity. She got along with the twins. She got along just fine. She’d been a social butterfly once, and she still used those skills in performance and instruction. But friends? Had she ever had friends?
The closest she thought she’d gotten to friendship was Troy. They’d talked while he’d inked, and their sex had been…friendly. He was a nice guy.
“I think it’s time to not talk about this and go back to work,” Valorie said.
“I’m sorry if I hit a nerve—”
The slap filled the close, warm air of the tent. It wasn’t a hard hit, but a blow across the mouth got her message across just fine.
“This discussion is over. Go outside and do your job,” she said. She tried not to snap. She tried to sound controlled. She thought she mostly succeeded.
John folded the towel and left it on the floor. He seemed to consider saying something, but wisely shut his mouth and ducked out before she could silence him again.
Chapter Six
November slipped into December. The golems had made everyone a Thanksgiving feast for the sake of tradition, and the costumes had shifted from an autumn palette to winter. It wasn’t a dramatic change. Springs and summers saw brown leather, autumn and winter black. The colors that they took on now leaned cool instead of warm—purples, indigos, blues and greens. However, Arcanium always had room for red.
In addition, some of the costumes transitioned into cream or white. Lady Sasha appeared almost naked in her cream-colored leather bikini set if a person wasn’t looking at her directly—which almost always caused a person to look at her directly for quite a while, just to make sure.
Most of the men stuck with black, the unimaginative morons, but Seth and Lars went adventurous in ivory leather that almost blended in with Seth’s complexion and sharply contrasted with Lars’. Under their usual blue light during performances, the change was actually quite striking. It had been Valorie’s suggestion years back, and the two men had learned to trust her judgment on what would make their performances shine.
Valorie embraced the white and cream tactic herself, but Kitty had edged it up with black lace, thread and other accents. She limited color to her face paint, makeup and hair. The face art still leaned toward the creepy, but less explicitly so. Fewer bleeding mouths and skeleton faces, more rhinestones.
John blushed at Valorie’s request for him—tight red leather trousers and sometimes a red and brown leather jacket, less polished than the Ringmaster’s regalia. For the patrons, he took on the persona of a wild dragon, tamed and bound to human form. Valorie made sure to walk him over the grounds every day for everyone to see him leashed to her. She’d command him to perform and gave her own performances on John’s back whenever she made him get on his hands and knees for her. It was steadier than the nights she did her routine on Jason or Lily in their lion or tiger forms.
Bell approved of the direction, and although John still remained on the outskirts of the cast when the circus wasn’t in session, at least some of the tension between the rest of the cast and John thawed as the weather turned colder. Seeing him regularly speak with Bell on circus matters may have had something to do with that.
Bell spread his magic across Arcanium. There had always been plenty of lights to illuminate the evening, but during the winter months, those lights multiplied across the booths and the tents, even the big top. Some of them were ordinary white or multicolored Christmas lights, but they were there merely to accent the bluish white icicle lights that were strung all through Arcanium. The circus wasn’t a stranger to generators, but there would have been some real surprised outcries if someone were to follow the light cords to where they weren’t plugged into anything.
The transition occurred seamlessly from one location to another. Valorie didn’t even check where they were turning up anymore except to ask Kitty what the weather was going to be like so that she’d know what to wear outside the circus during the week. Rehearsals took up most of the weekdays until Friday, but voluntaries got to leave the grounds if they wanted to. Valorie mostly didn’t. However, it was nice to get away from the cuckoo family now and then and eat at a restaurant by herself without people gaping at her. Kitty did most of the outside plugging for Arcanium because short of wearing the niqab, Kitty couldn’t hide what she was. Valorie could blend in more, and although most of the voluntaries left in one vehicle, they usually spent their time alone—with the exception of Kitty and Maya, who seemed to take other people’s nasty comments toward them as a personal challenge.
Valorie, on the other hand, didn’t leave Arcanium only to let it follow her. Normal was overrated, but in moderation, it was nice not to be on all the time. Performing could be exhilarating, but it could also be exhausting, which was why she was glad that most of the time they only performed three times a week.
When she was out, she wore some of her leather and still wouldn’t wear a bra, but she was more covered and included some cotton in the mix. The people around her thought she was maybe a tattoo artist or stylist on her lunch break. She was rarely recognized as part of the circus when she was alone on the outside.
When Valorie came back—and she always came back, since even the voluntaries had to come back by Friday morning at the latest—she joined the rest of the performers rehearsing in the big top tent. During the times she wasn’t practicing her own routine, she consulted with the others to help them add new elements to old routines or develop whole new acts. Arcanium liked to keep its performances fresh. Not only did it keep the cast from getting too bored, but it gave people a reason to come back to Arcanium. Some even followed it around the country like groupies, just to see how they changed things up.
Contortion Page 12
