Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6

by V M Black

  His fingers slid sideways, between my folds. I made a strangled sound. He stroked me slowly, holding me against his hand as he dipped shallowly, teasingly into my entrance, coming up to rhythmically roll the root of my clit between his thumb and forefinger while I shuddered in his arms. He pushed me right to the edge of an orgasm, but he held me back, until my entire body felt so suffused that I thought I could stand it no longer.

  “Dorian,” I managed.

  I felt both his hands at one hip, then a sudden ripping noise, which he repeated on the other side. My panties dropped away—he had torn them from my body.

  Even in my befuddled state, I felt a surge of outrage. “What—?”

  “I’ll buy you more,” he said, his hands at his fly.

  That wasn’t the point, but I was in no position to argue it at that moment. A moment later, Dorian was holding me again, smothering whatever protest I might have managed with another kiss.

  His hand, still damp from stroking me, slid between the counter and my buttocks, then up, to my entrance again, where his fingers resumed the maddening rhythm that pushed me right to the edge again.

  My hands tightened into fists in his hair as I strained to reach climax.

  “Tell me how much you want it,” he said, his voice rough and low in my ear.

  “You know, dammit,” I said.

  He just gave his wicked laugh and looped his arms under my knees pulling my ankles up over his shoulders. Then, slipping his fingers inside of me, he hooked against that sensitive place, and with his thumb against my clitoris, he took me up and over.

  Without losing the rhythm, he withdrew his fingers and thrust himself deep inside me, and the first spasms of my orgasm were launched into something far more intense. His wet fingers worked my clitoris as he drove into me, the contractions wringing my body in time to his movements. His other arm held me against him even as my own arms loosened uselessly.

  I felt him shudder just at the last surge receded as his release came after mine. For a long moment, I just clung to him as he held me, feeling his heart beating through the thickness of our shirts, his breath in my hair, the strength of his arms around me.

  I realized I never wanted him to leave. And it scared me.

  With every ounce of will, I let go of him, my body protesting its reluctance with an almost physical pain.

  “I need you to go,” I said. “Before I ask you to stay.” Or before I asked him to take me back with him to that beautiful, dangerous house and the place that was made just for someone like me....

  He stepped back, his eyes hooded, and adjusted his pants. “You’ll find a way to be at peace in your own mind, Cora.”

  “Because I have to?” I asked.

  “Because you will want to,” he said.

  He pressed his lips against my cheek, and I closed my eyes, just breathing him for a long moment. And then he was gone.

  Chapter Twelve

  I let out a breath. The apartment seemed smaller and dingier, somehow, and I had to fight the urge to go running out half-naked after him.

  I shook myself. Get it together, Cora. I had my own life to live, things to do before school started.

  Such as? That foolish part of me dared to come up with anything as imperative as following Dorian home.

  If I felt like this now, what would I feel like in a month? A year? He would wear away everything I used to care about until all I wanted was to please him.

  There had to be some escape.

  I looked around the sparkling apartment. I’d planned to clean it because Lisette had been taking up my slack for the last two months. It was time for me to pull my own weight.

  But Dorian had already taken care of that.

  I washed up, got properly dressed, took out what little trash there was, including my shredded panties, which did little to help me in my goal of not obsessing over Dorian.

  Restlessly, I went downstairs to the mailboxes. In the half-lit lobby, I sorted my mail over the trash can—six credit card offers, a shiny grad school brochure, and yet another medical bill, this one with OVERDUE stamped on the outside. And, last, an envelope from the University of Chicago.

  A thick envelope.

  My hands shaking, I tore it open and scanned the contents:

  Dear Cora Shaw.... Thank you for your application.... It is with pleasure that we announce your acceptance into the Master of Science program in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.

  My whoop split the silent air, my heart pounding with joy and relief. I’d been so sick that I’d hardly managed to fill out my application, but I’d managed to drag myself through it with Lisette’s help.

  Chicago. My top choice, one of the most innovative and exclusive economics programs in the entire country.

  I read the letter again, and then a third time, making sure that I hadn’t misunderstood. There was no doubt. I really was accepted.

  My life had been derailed by cancer, all the plans I’d laid out meaningless in the face of my diagnosis. It was only mule-headed stubbornness that had made me apply to graduate school at all. But now I was cured—and I’d secured admission into my dream school.

  The same school Geoff had been accepted to.

  I had a sudden wish that I could call my Gramma and tell her that it had all turned out all right, that I was going to get everything she’d wished that she could give me. That all she’d done was worth it. Everything that had been taken away from me was in my grasp again.

  Or at least it would be—if it weren’t for the bond that kept me tied to Dorian.

  My stomach dropped as I remembered the conversation I’d had with him just an hour before. I was Dorian’s cognate. He might indulge my whims as long as I stayed close to him, but that was as far as his tolerance went.

  I looked at the letter again and the fat enrollment packet behind it, and my victory turned bitter in my mouth. I now had a door open to everything I had ever wanted. And it was still as impossible for me as it had been when I was dying.

  Slowly, I went back to the elevator. It opened at my touch, and I stared at the steel doors as it carried me up, back to my apartment.

  I’d won against the cancer, but at the cost of all my goals.

  Back in my dorm room, I put on my headset and tapped over to my favorite phone numbers to call Lisette. Dorian hadn’t taken my friendship with her away from me. At least, not yet.

  But no sooner had I gotten to the screen of favorite contacts than I frowned. There at the top was a new one—“<3 Clarissa.” I remembered a random snatch of Dorian’s conversation, something about the djinn being interrogated by Clarissa....

  I blinked at the phone. She’d picked it up when I’d dropped it, then, and she’d sent it back...with her phone number as some sort of cute joke?

  Gah. It didn’t matter. She was the last person I wanted to talk to right then. I tapped Lisette’s name decisively.

  “So, what have you been up to?” she asked finally after she’d spent an hour detailing her post-Christmas activities with the various member of the Bonner clan.

  “Just making sure the apartment’s clean.” Not quite a lie.

  “What, you’ve been cleaning since Christmas?” she asked skeptically.

  “Ha, ha. I went to see the oncologist on Friday,” I said, dodging her question and deliberately leaving out my visit to the Health Center to get a birth control prescription. “I should be able to check my results tomorrow.”

  “Awesome,” Lisette said. “I hope the news is good.”

  “I think I’m feeling too good for it not to be.” I took a deep breath. “And you know that CEO I was talking about?”

  “Uh-huh.” Lisette sounded deeply unimpressed.

  “Well, he kind of asked me out last night.” I cringed, waiting for her response.

  She was incredulous. “You didn’t go, though, did you?”

  “Maybe I did.”

  “Cora, what the heck is wrong with you?” she demanded. “How old is thi
s guy? Thirty? Forty?”

  “I don’t know his exact age, but he doesn’t look a day over twenty-five,” I said, leaning against the wall. I winced a little at my own reply. It was both honest and outrageously disingenuous.

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Lisette said. “He’s probably just using you. I mean, you’re young, you’re hot, you’re grateful....”

  “I don’t think it’s like that,” I said.

  I could almost hear her eye-roll. “So did he try to get you in bed?”

  “Lisette!” I said. There was no way in hell I was answering that. “I think he’s going for something more serious than a quick screw.”

  “Like, how serious?” Again, her voice dripped with suspicion.

  I pushed away from the wall and began pacing the room. “Like he gave me a necklace that’s worth more than my car.”

  “And you took it?” Now she was exasperated.

  “Sort of,” I said. The pendant was still in my pocket, digging slightly into my hip. I didn’t know why I’d taken it. “He had it specially made for me. He didn’t say so, but he kind of didn’t have to.”

  “Huh,” she said dubiously. “And are you ready for something more serious? I mean, you’re a senior in college. You’ve applied for grad school. You have plans.”

  “Yeah, I know. And I do,” I said.

  “Well, are you like boyfriend-girlfriend with this guy?” she asked. “What’s his name, anyway? I can’t just call him Mr. Moneybags.”

  “Dorian Thorne. And no, not boyfriend-girlfriend. Not quite.” More like vampire-consort. Oh, yeah, that would go over well.

  “What about Geoff?” she asked.

  I felt a pang of guilt, tinged with the slightest hint of panic.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Again, Geoff. I pushed my hair out of my face. I’d made promises to him, promises that I’d meant. Promises that I still meant? I didn’t know. I couldn’t think.

  “Well, I’m going to hit the Mall in Columbia tomorrow,” Lisette said. “Why don’t you and Geoff come along?”

  I snorted and swept my hair out of my face. “Because Geoff really wants to go clothes shopping with you.”

  “He’ll come to hang out with you, Cora,” Lisette said patiently.

  “He hasn’t called me over break,” I said evasively.

  “Have you called him?”

  “No,” I admitted. “We’ve messaged on Facebook. I told him the therapy’s working.”

  Lisette huffed into the phone. “He’s giving you space. Come on, Cora. Before you get in too deep with this Dorian Thorne, you should give Geoff a real try. You actually really know Geoff, and he’s a nice guy.”

  Too deep. Was that before or after Dorian sank his teeth into my throat? Before or after he took what passed for my innocence again and again? I thought of this morning. And again.

  “Sure thing,” I said aloud.

  “Meet you at three? By Marble Slab?”

  “Yeah, I’ll meet you there.”

  “Oops. Gotta go,” she said. “Mireille wants me to see some new awful viral video.”

  “Okay,” I said. Mireille was Lisette’s sister, a freshman in accounting. “See you.”

  “Bye. Make sure to get our bathroom really clean. I want to see it spotless when I come back.”

  “Uh-huh.” I smiled despite myself. “Nothing keeping you from driving over here and helping out.”

  “Oh, look, I think I’m having car trouble.” She laughed.

  “Riiight. Bye,” I said.

  “Bye.”

  I hung up and sagged onto the couch. Geoff. I had pretty much made him a promise at the end of the last semester—a promise that I wasn’t sure I could keep anymore.

  I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. And that thought scared me.

  As I grabbed some lunch, I realized that the interior of the fridge hadn’t been cleaned out. Finally, something to do.

  I thought about the problem with Geoff as I scrubbed it, or tried to think about him, anyway, because every time I had his face fixed in my mind’s eye, it would blur and Dorian’s would replace it—his warm hand on mine replaced by Dorian’s cooler, more stirring touch, his mouth with Dorian’s kiss. And I thought I could bear that, but far worse was the catalog of Dorian’s expressions in my mind’s eye, his amusement, his ineffable sadness, and the rare, brief moments of tenderness, as if he were remembering how to feel...

  I decided to wash my bedding, and I pulled everything off and shoved it into the washing machine, leaving the door to the laundry closet open so that I could perch on the counter and watch the blankets go round.

  My acceptance packet from the University of Chicago sat next to me. I couldn’t bear to go through it. Not with the knowledge that I was hardly more likely to attend it now than when I was dying.

  I remembered something Dorian had said to me the night before, something about how I’d made those dreams my reason to live. I wouldn’t have ever put it that way. I would have just called those things my life, my future. But he was right. They were an idea of a future, not a future itself. And I’d battled my way through classes, though the awful alemtuzumab injections, through everything by repeating to myself the list of all the things I wanted my life to be, all the things that would prove to Gramma that I was happy, successful—that she’d done a good job.

  Now that future was more than a dream. It was an actual acceptance letter that I could hold in my hand. Something I’d earned, I’d won myself. Why, then, did Chicago suddenly seem less brilliant next to the image of Dorian’s white house?

  By the time the sheets and blankets were dry and back on my bed, it was dusk. I flipped on the lights and paced the apartment, hunting vainly for some other spot that Dorian’s staff had missed in their cleaning.

  Finally, I pulled up Hulu on my laptop and watched the Christmas specials I’d missed as I cleaned out my binders and backpack, making a stack of the books I planned to sell back the next day. I took a shower and curled up in bed with a hot chocolate and my laptop.

  And I thought about him. Dorian. Constantly. Obsessively.

  Eating lunch, I had thought of him. Folding laundry, my mind was full of him. Throwing out last semester’s notes, I couldn’t get him out of my head.

  It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t healthy. And I couldn’t help it. Knowing that I would see him on Wednesday made me feel far better than it should. If I could just accept this bond—whatever it was—I felt certain that my spinning mind would have some relief, and I could wait until New Year’s Eve with some degree of calm. Fighting his claim on me only seemed to make it worse.

  But as much as I wanted him, and as much as I missed him, it wasn’t enough to get in trade for all of me. Whatever promises he made to not deliberately reshape my mind, I knew he would if it was important enough, and I had a bone-deep conviction that his influence would change me unconsciously no matter what.

  It was, as he said, what he was. And what I had become.

  But I had my own life. I had my own will, my own direction, my own plans and friends. And I wasn’t willing to give them up without a fight.

  ***

  I woke up early Monday morning to emptiness. An empty apartment, an empty building, an empty campus, an empty life.

  I ate breakfast haunted by Dorian’s presence. A memory of his voice, his touch, his expression would come over me, and I would freeze in its intensity and the sharp loss of it when it was gone.

  I threaded the blood-drop pendant onto one of my own necklaces and put it on. It was a stupid gesture, since I couldn’t accept the bond that it represented. But I felt slightly better with it against my skin.

  Shaking myself out of my strange fugue, I checked my test results online for my newest lymphocyte count. Fifteen thousand. Still higher than normal, but less than a fifteenth of what it had been at my last test.

  I stared the number, stark black on white. It took the last, lingering shadows of doubt away. I truly had been healed
.

  By him.

  Well, then. I guess I really do have to get ready for my last semester of classes.

  I washed my bowl, shoved my textbooks in my backpack, and headed to the university bookstore. After dropping my old books off at the sale desk, I headed to the textbooks section, my schedule in my hand.

  Using my phone, I crosschecked the store’s prices online. It dragged out the entire process into an hour-long ordeal, but it was worth it for the savings. But the total was still too high because I didn’t have money for any of it.

  I should get another job. I wasn’t sick anymore, and the real world came with real costs—ones I couldn’t pay right now. I’d had a healthy bank balance after my summer internship, giving me the confidence to agree to move out of the dorms and into the campus apartment with Lisette, Christina, and Chelsea. But I’d counted on being able to keep my work-study gig and the front-desk job with a local moving truck rental franchise.

  Neither of those had panned out. Just one week into the semester, I’d been so tired I’d had to give up the rental company job, and a month later, I couldn’t keep up the work-study. Rent, food, car insurance, and my cell phone bill had destroyed my summer savings, and I had fifteen hundred dollars of unpaid out-of-pocket health expenses.

  I was trying very hard not to raid the very small balance left in my Gramma’s bank account. Until her house sold, I needed to pay utilities and taxes on it. But unless I got a job—and fast—I didn’t see how else I’d get through the next semester.

  Dorian will give you all the money you need, a small voice whispered.

  I didn’t listen to it.

  I finished my online purchases, wincing at the balance. I took the two books I was buying in the store and headed to the checkout. Those would almost be covered by the credit I got from selling my old books back, at least. I’d also have to go to the print shop for the professor-produced materials for art history. On credit, but I’d deal with that later.