by Selena Scott
“You don’t exactly think of the whole tall, dark and evil thing Arturo has going on,” Thea agreed.
“Well, what would he be if not her boyfriend?” Caroline inquired. “He’s by her side every second he can be. He looks at her like she’s the one who invented sunrises. He dotes on her. He cuddles her, for God’s sake! B-O-Y-F-R-I-E-N-D, if you ask me.”
“And don’t forget the sex,” Martine added. She’d always wanted to be part of a group of women with whom she could talk about this kind of thing. And the best part was that she had details that she could contribute! She actually sort of knew what she was talking about!
“Yes,” Celia said, with a gossipy glint in her eye. “Do tell about the sex.”
***
“They’re up to something,” Tre said, peering in through the sliding glass door that led to the kitchen. The women were slouched around the kitchen table in a tableau of hilarity. They were either leaning back or leaning forward in hysterical laughter, their eyes closed and mouths wide open. There was a variety of empty glasses and half-eaten snacks on the table, the scattered remnants of a card game long forgotten strewn about.
Thea leaned hard on Caroline as the two of them gasped for breath through their laughter. Celia covered her face with her hands and Martine’s mouth moved a mile a minute, apparently telling a story that had them all in hysterics.
Arturo pushed past the other men to get a good look, hardly able to believe what he was seeing. Martine was front and center right now, goofing around, talking loud and, from what he could tell, quite drunkenly. She was playing. With friends.
A large bubble of joy rose up in Arturo’s chest, pressing hard against his heart and lungs. The other men couldn’t know what it meant to see her acting so normally. Punctuating his joy was this humongous, cosmic clock that was counting down to whatever showdown they were bound to have with the demon. He wanted Martine to have every human experience possible before the moment when she would be blinked out of existence. To see her having a girls’ night filled him with a wild relief.
“They’re not up to anything other than having themselves a party without us,” Jack said, shouldering the other men aside and stepping into the kitchen. They were sweaty and dirty from their shifter practice and shrank the room by half when they all piled in.
“Hey, drunky,” Tre said, leaning down to accept a rather sloppy kiss from Caroline.
“I’m not drunk,” Caroline insisted, her words all sliding one into the next. “I’m simply a little bit looser than normal.” She punctuated that with an unholy hiccup that took her damn near two inches off her chair.
That sent Thea into more hysterics. Jack watched her in amazement. He’d seen her drunk before but never quite like this. Thea had an overarching coolness, a very outrider-esque reserve that pervaded her every action. Now, though? Now she was attempting to catch a piece of popcorn in her mouth and failing catastrophically.
Celia, on the other hand, was showing signs of turning into a philosophical drunk. She tugged her sweaty man down and slid into his lap, curling into him despite the rather pungent scent coming off of him. What did she care? That’s how he smelled right after he’d worked them both into ecstasy. She loved it. She sighed as he stroked the hair back from her forehead and watched her friends. She whispered something up to Jean Luc who whispered back indulgently, kissing her nose.
Arturo leaned over Martine, eyeing her quite closely. “You’re drunk as a skunk, Wings.”
“Is that why I feel like dancing?” she asked him, leaning back far enough that he quickly braced a hand between her shoulders to keep her safely in her chair.
“Ooh!” Caroline shouted, loud enough to have Tre wincing and jamming a finger in one ear. “Dancing! That’s exactly what we need right now!”
She leapt up, with the floppy gracelessness of the recently inebriated, and flicked buttons on the stereo system that lived in the living room. Seconds later, the familiar intro to a Prince song surrounded them.
As if it were a magical spell that had been cast over all of the women, they simultaneously leapt from their chairs, swaying and laughing and running to the living room to dance it off.
“Looks like we’ve got some catching up to do, boys,” Jack drawled.
The men got cleaned up and caught up on drinks. The lighting outside went quietly that night—there was no grand sunset, no sky on fire. The mashed-up house burned like a firework in the heavy weight of darkness outside.
Arturo hadn’t danced since he was a mortal and then music had been quite different. But he found that the pleasures afforded were quite similar. He felt the familiar buzzy heat of just enough drink in his veins and the pliant warmth of a woman in his arms. The music was loud and infectious and he let it guide his body against Martine’s.
The rest of the group was whooping and laughing but Arturo didn’t let his woman go. She had her fingers locked together at the nape of his neck and her perfect green eyes laughed up at him. Her happiness was strong enough he could taste it on the air. Oh, what he wouldn’t give to be able to gift her this forever. Friends and drinks and cards and dancing and yes, even the hangover in the morning.
He wanted her to have a dog or a cat. He wanted to buy her a shiny new washer and dryer. “I want you to think about the grocery list while you drive across town,” he told her. Maybe he was a little drunker than he’d thought.
She twirled in his arms and smiled hugely up at him. Apparently, she didn’t need a translator for his thoughts. Maybe she’d been thinking something along those lines. “I want you to plant a vegetable garden and weed it on the weekends.”
He laughed because even if he were to become a mortal he could never picture himself crawling in the dirt. Not his style. “I want you to be seriously disappointed when you stain your favorite sweater.” Ah, to have the luxury of such mundane tragedies.
She laughed at that one. “I want you to buy me a house with big windows and too much sun in the mornings.”
“I want you to make me wash the parts of the windows you can’t reach.” And there they suddenly were, in this fantasy, living together in their perfectly ordinary life. Perfectly happy to have such pedestrian problems.
“I want you to drop the kids off at school in the morning,” she said, her smile even brighter.
Kids. The word dunked through his body like one of the shots he’d taken earlier. It was a hot burn that he wasn’t sure felt good or bad. Kids had never occurred to him before. Either for himself or for Martine. And certainly not for him and Martine. For a moment, he let himself picture it. Him in the driver’s seat of some SUV, two kids buckled in the back, bickering with one another. He pictured their brick elementary school like the one he’d seen in town. He pictured kissing them goodbye and not having to worry about a demon eating their souls. Then his brain rewound to what it would be like to make those children with Martine. To fill her up from the inside out. To watch her belly grow with his child. To suck on her sweetness while she was making their family. God.
He twirled her again and danced them to a slightly more secluded area of the room. When he spoke, his voice was a betrayal, wildly coarse. “Are you having a good time?”
The buoyant happiness in her eyes came down to earth just a bit. There was a bit of reality mixed in with her happiness, just a hint of sadness. But in her opinion, that only made it better. It was like salted chocolate. The complication only elevated the experience.
“The best,” she responded, and meant it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
When the evening had devolved into some sort of drunken game that involved cards and shots and lots of hooting and hollering, Martine led Arturo away from the group and across the house to their quiet bedroom.
They were still buzzy and cocooned from the alcohol, but not drunk anymore. She closed their door and immediately started stripping his clothes off of him. When he was naked and she was naked, he reached for her, but she danced away from him.
“Stay,” sh
e told him, pointing her finger in a very bossy way.
Arturo frowned but stayed where he was, across the room as she went back to kneel on the bed.
“I want to touch you,” he growled, the shadows slicing down the tributary paths of his muscles, his cock growing heavy and tight between his legs, his eyes two dark slashes on his face.
She trembled just for looking at him. “I want to try something,” she told him.
He wanted to drown in her. Her talk of children had shaken something loose within Arturo and he badly wanted to burn alive with lust. He wanted her to make him forget this shaky feeling. He wanted to swan dive into sex and then sleep. “No games tonight.”
But he didn’t move either, he continued standing where she’d told him to.
“It’s not a game. I promise. It’s just something I want to try.” As he watched, her golden energy appeared on her skin, and then slowly, curled off of her in a sort of lazy, searching twist. He stiffened as he realized that she was targeting him, coming toward him with her energy.
She was sending it out to him. He shifted on his feet, waiting to feel it cover over his body, wondering if he could handle that much zing all at once.
But her energy hesitated three or four feet from him. He waited, and nothing.
“Meet me,” she whispered.
He stepped forward but her voice stopped him.
“No. Not with your body. With your energy.”
He frowned. “I can’t. I can’t control it like that.”
“Try. Let mine call to yours. Let mine pull yours out. Just try.”
Only for her would Arturo have done this. He hated the out-of-control helplessness of allowing his energy out of his body. For him, it was much more comfortable to instantly release his energy. Quick bursts, like an arrow or a bullet. But to stretch out his energy while retaining a hold on the other end, it was all sorts of uncomfortable.
But he’d already been over and over his compulsion to give her anything and everything that he could. He found himself incapable of denying her.
Slamming his eyes closed, Arturo slowly called up his energy from within himself. He felt it rise, he felt it attempt to get away from him, to ricochet toward her. He didn’t let it. He held tight and felt the strange, elastic stretch of it as his blue stretched toward her gold.
Almost there, he held his breath, almost couldn’t hold on to it. He gasped and his eyes flung open when he felt their energies mix from across the room.
Her eyes were pinned to the mixing point as well. He’d never felt anything like this in his life. This was touching without touching. The energies petted across one another, almost like tongues. When they started to actually mix, Arturo’s body tightened, his cock thwapped against his stomach and his eyes rolled back.
The feeling of their energies mixing—even without their physical bodies touching—was just about as close to orgasmic as a feeling could get. He could feel each and every one of his cells vibrating with heat and pleasure as their energies slipped and slid and mixed. He could see her through foggy eyes. She’d fallen to her back on the bed. Her feet planted and her back arching, her eyes on his.
She was clearly experiencing the exact same ecstasy that he was. She tangled her hands in her hair, stretched her arms out over top of her as her pink-tipped breasts tightened and called out to his hands. She spread her legs and gave him a gorgeous shot of glistening pink pussy, begging for his mouth.
His breath was ragged and shallow, his hands in fists. He wouldn’t move until she told him, he could give her this. He forced his energy further into hers and even more mixed. She cried out on the bed, her thighs trembling. She spread her legs even further, her eyes locked on his.
Then finally, finally, she reached her hand out toward him.
“I need you,” she whispered.
He was across the room in two large steps, their combined energy rushing with him. Arturo’s hands came to Martine’s knees. One he pushed all the way down to the bed, the other he turned and clasped around his waist.
One of his knees on the bed, he slid her hips up and slammed his way home, her slick-hot pussy greeting and gripping him to the hilt.
“Yes!” she screamed, her hands taking great fistfuls of the sheets.
Their energy buzzed and whirled, heightening all the feelings. It was not slow and sensuous. Arturo was soul-deep inside her and pulled out just enough to jack himself back in. She was coming by his third rough stroke and he was coming by his tenth.
He jutted forward and grunted into her mouth, needling her lip with his teeth and grabbing her ass hard as he pressed them together.
“Jesus,” he gasped into her hair. “Jesus.”
Her arms gripped his back but slid down when she found she simply didn’t have the strength for that right at that moment. He pushed them up the bed so that he could collapse over her, but he didn’t disconnect them. He would have slept inside her if he could have.
He petted her hair and whispered nonsense words in her ear. He couldn’t believe what had just happened, could barely understand it. He hadn’t known, couldn’t possibly have anticipated what it would feel like to be so seen. To have one soul mix with his.
“I wasn’t even sure if I still had a soul before you.”
“I was sure,” she whispered back. “I’ve—” She cut herself off and suddenly there was an intensity in her eyes.
She was searching him for something and he hoped to God he possessed it.
“Do you remember when you told me that you would give me anything?”
“Of course.”
“Do you still feel that way?”
“Wings, how could you ask me that? All of this,” he gestured at himself, at his heart, at the air behind them, at what had just happened. “All of this is for you. I’ll give you anything.”
“I want love,” she told him immediately, unabashedly.
He grunted, like she’d just hit him with a gut shot. If he hadn’t been sure he’d had a soul, then he’d been even less sure that he’d had love to give. It wasn’t that he was scared of giving it, it was that he simply wasn’t sure he could give it. He got the sudden image of himself walking a thousand miles to meet her in the desert and then realizing he’d forgotten to bring the water.
He slammed his eyes closed. For just a moment, he pretended that the demon had never taken him. That he’d never served him. That the last four hundred years had never happened. That he was mortal Arturo, pulsing inside a woman he’d just made love to. He opened his eyes and saw her there, light freckles on the bridge of her nose, strawberry hair in a glossy tangle, big green eyes waiting patiently for an answer.
And he found that it wasn’t really so hard. Not after all. He found that he had the answer. It was inside him, he’d just had to remember how to find his way there.
“It’s yours,” he replied, his mouth dropping down to sip from hers. “All the love that I have to give, it’s yours.”
“No,” she shook her head, her eyes glistening with happy tears. “Not all of it. I don’t want all of it. Save some of it for other people, too.”
“I’ll try. But no promises. All my love seems to flow straight toward you.”
There was an anxious racing in him, like an upended jug of wine emptying itself out onto the floor.
“I love you,” she whispered.
The racing within him stopped. She’d corked the wine.
He took a deep breath. “Say it again.”
“I love you.”
“I love you,” he replied so quickly they laughed.
She gasped as she felt him growing hard within her. “Oh.”
“Say it again.”
“I love you,” she whispered and gasped again as he pushed into her.
This time it was slow, but not lazy. Martine felt every microscopic slide of his skin against hers. Their energy wasn’t mixing, at least not as intensely as before, but that didn’t seem to matter. She could simply sense his focus, his attention to her eve
ry breath and expression, every sound she made. His hands were tangled in her hair as he braced his weight on his elbows and loved her hard. They kissed for a moment but then that was too much and their faces rolled.
Their cheeks jammed together as he rolled himself into her, each thrust rounder than the last. He was creating a rhythmic, sliding roll that touched every single pleasure point she had.
Martine was vaguely aware that her nails were scoring his back and that her thighs were trembling at his hips. “More,” she told him. “Give me more of your weight.”
He followed her request immediately, pressing her hard into the mattress and giving her everything he had to give. His thrusts weren’t sharp. They were still rolling and fluid, but he was deeper than he’d ever been before.
When Martine came, it was from deep within and it had no clear beginning, and all she knew was that she’d never felt pleasure that acute in her life. She was tight and trembling beneath him. When she fell back from him, it was to the realization that she’d bitten the hell out of his shoulder. He didn’t seem to mind.
She reached up to his face, drew his eyes to hers and had the immense pleasure and privilege of watching him fall over the edge. His eyes dilated hard and fast, pure black, his mouth somehow slackened and tightened all at once. He was seeing her and loving her and exploding inside her all at once.
Her energy stayed within her and his stayed within him. This connection that the two of them felt, as he fell over her again and pressed his racing heart to hers, wasn’t supernatural. It was human.
***
“Come for a walk with me.”
Her eyes had barely fluttered open yet. The sunrise was just peeking its head over the edge of the cliffs out back. Her body was loose and sated and sore and perfect.
“Hmm?” she stretched and rolled into the warmth of his body.
“Come for a walk with me,” he repeated.
“Now? It’s barely five.”
“We’ll bring coffee. Just come with me.”
Just as he wanted to give her anything she asked for, she didn’t particularly have a strong immunity toward giving him whatever he wanted either. And he was asking so sweetly and kissing so nicely along her neck. She couldn’t deny him.
