‘And …’ She watched her hand as it moved – almost entirely on its own – up to his thigh. ‘It’s like I own you.’
‘Excuse me?’ Though his words could have been spoken in outrage, his voice was soft.
She shrugged. ‘Well, I can turn you in.’ Her fingernails grazed his hip. ‘Or you and I can play a little game for the rest of my holiday. I own you.’
He was looking at her, but she didn’t meet his gaze. Cinder wasn’t a ‘serious’ criminal – no assault charges or any kind of violent crimes, actually, despite the nature of his powers – but he was a very prolific thief, a notorious safe-cracker in dozens of bank heists and sole escapee of three hitherto ‘impenetrable’ prisons and many lesser institutions, in most cases without any apparent use of his powers. She had no doubt whatsoever that, if he had actually wanted to, he could have been dressed and out of her apartment before she’d even realised he was awake, and even less doubt that he could escape whatever holding cell the police might put him in. He didn’t have to be here, and she wasn’t really blackmailing him.
In short, they were already playing a game.
The thought made her breathing tight. She shifted on the edge of the bed and felt a telltale slickness between her legs. Her hand grazed over his cock, fingers running up and down the shaft in an unconscious rhythm.
‘All right.’ She was so wrapped up in the sensation that his voice almost made her jump. She looked up at him, finally. His eyes were half-closed, but she could see he knew what was going on as well. ‘What do you want me to do?’
A dozen ideas popped into her head – plans and half-formed fantasies that she’d entertained while cleaning up the mess in her kitchen and living room, waiting for him to wake up – but the way she felt right now, she wasn’t in the mood to prolong the anticipation. ‘This time,’ she said, her voice low, ‘nothing fancy.’
She stood and pulled off her T-shirt, tossed it to the floor and shook her hair back behind her head as she hooked her thumbs into her knickers and smiled, then slipped them down over her smooth hips.
She crawled up the bed, lowering her face and running her tongue up the underside of his cock, circling it around the head. She heard him groan, as he tried to reach for her, the move blocked by the leather straps, and smiled to herself. She took the head in her mouth, sucking hard, working on just the end with her lips and tongue until his breathing started to get ragged, then she sat up and straddled his abdomen, letting his cock lie against the crack of her ass and lowering her breasts to his mouth. He sucked roughly, like a starving prisoner finally given his daily water ration, and she heard her own moans and gasps. She moved back and forth, alternating breasts, then edged even further up his body, dragging her sex along his bare chest. She could feel her wetness against his smooth skin as she moved her pussy up to his mouth, grabbed the headboard and began riding his tongue. Unable to use his fingers as he had before, he thrashed her clit and lips, sucking at her, building a heat she didn’t think possible. Her hips rocked back and forth over his face, and he stabbed his tongue into her, fucking her with it, then sucked on her clit, building pressure as she hunched against him, hips jerking, barely breathing until she came, hard, gasping air like a drowning swimmer that finds the surface, before finally dropping back on to the bed.
‘Enough?’ His breathing, Jess was gratified to note, wasn’t much more even than hers.
‘Just –’ she flailed her hand around, trying to get her arm under her ‘– just fine.’
When her limbs were able to obey her again, she crawled up the length of him, bracing one hand against his shoulder and gripping his cock with the other. She slipped it into her and slid down on to it in a continuous motion that made him gasp. She moved over him with a slow steady rhythm for several minutes, watching his face, leaning down to nip at his lips and neck and whisper perversions in his ear. He arched his body upwards, groaning, pushing his hips up to meet her, trying to push into her as far as he could as she rocked, dragging her clit across the base of him with each downward thrust, as the pressure and heat built in both of them. She reached up to brace herself against the headboard, pushing down against him with each thrust, riding him, sweat gleaming, then dripping on to his chest as she came again, the tight shuddering grip of her slick pussy around his cock pushing him over the edge only a few seconds later. She rode him through it, rocking her hips, squeezing him with her core. Sweating. Smiling.
She hadn’t even used her powers. Not yet.
Jess returned to the bedroom, towelling her hair and smiling at Nathan, still sprawled underneath the duvet. It had been easily the best holiday break in history, in her opinion. The week had been a blur punctuated with food delivery and interrupted only once when the repairmen had come to fix the patio door. Otherwise, she’d turned down the volume on the answerphone and left the television off.
Now, she disappeared into the depths of her closet and pulled a pair of red slingbacks away from her shoe rack. The back wall swung open to reveal the rest of her closet, containing her uniform, accessories and the various ‘special situation’ tools of the trade that she’d been re-employing in various ways over the course of the last week. She sighed and pulled ‘the suit’ off its hanger.
‘Back to work?’ Nathan peered at her, muzzy and adorable, from the bed.
‘Duty calls.’ She didn’t look at him.
‘I suppose this means our little game is over, then.’ He watched her dress. She didn’t reply. ‘Jess?’
‘I was thinking,’ she said, still not looking at him. ‘I could say something on your behalf, maybe get them to give you a second chance.’
‘You really don’t have to do that,’ he said, after a pause. ‘It’s sweet, and I adore you for it, but it’s really not necessary.’
‘I want to,’ she interjected. ‘I’ll get the Major and Jasmine and Blue Brahma into a proper sit-down meeting and –’
‘Why’s he call himself that, anyway?’ Nathan interrupted. ‘Blue Brahma. He’s not even Indian.’
He was changing the subject. Letting her win, really, when he didn’t have to. She was just starting to understand him, and she didn’t want that to stop because of her stupid job. She walked towards the bed and sat down on the edge, her hands in her lap, his leg just touching her back. ‘You know, I asked him that once. Y’know what he told me?’
‘What?’
‘He said that, if he actually were Indian, he could never have called himself the Blue Brahma, because then it would have been disrespectful.’
Nathan searched her face, clearly hoping she was joking. ‘I find myself embarrassed for him, and I don’t even like him.’
‘Well, he did knock you through my patio door, so that’s understandable.’ She traced his jaw with a finger. ‘I’ll have to remember to thank him for that, someday.’
His eyes searched hers. ‘Don’t talk to them. Don’t bother.’
‘I want to.’
‘Jess –’
She covered his lips with her fingers, just as she had in the kitchen only a week earlier. ‘Don’t make me tie you up again.’
That made them both grin, and a few minutes later she had to flee the room before things went so far that she missed her first day back on the job.
Jess slid, literally, through the front doors of the Vindicator headquarters. It wasn’t the most glamorous way to get around – she intensely envied the metas who were able to fly – but, by using her powers, she could keep herself in perpetual motion along almost any surface using vibrations to control direction and speed. It wasn’t flashy or very fast, but there were upsides, not the least of which was popularity with the citizens of Mercury Bay, who saw her as a more approachable hero. There was even a group of ‘grrrls’, somewhere between a fan club and a well-meaning gang, who tried emulating her moves as much as possible using skateboards.
‘Timbre!’ Anna Davida waved as she crossed the lobby. ‘You’re back! You look great!’
Jess made a face. ‘Do
I? That’s funny. I didn’t really go anywhere.’
Anna’s eyebrows rose. ‘You didn’t?’
‘Timbre used her holiday to stay home.’ Blue Brahma stood just inside the doors to the main meeting hall. He sounded bemused and, somehow, disapproving.
‘Hi, Blue,’ Jess said, careful to use call signs inside the headquarters. It wasn’t a habit that had come easily. ‘Did I miss anything exciting, after you broke my patio door?’
Brahma frowned. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with that, Timbre, other than my brief stop to look for Cinder.’ Brahma’s tone went sour at the mention of Nathan’s public identity.
‘Sure.’ Jess smirked. ‘Did you ever find him?’
Brahma sighed. ‘Finally, yes. Just this morning.’
She stopped dead, only a few dozen feet into the meeting hall. Most of the Vindicators were present and milling about in clusters of various sizes, chatting before the actual meeting started up, but Jess could barely hear them over the roaring in her ears. ‘You caught him?’
‘Caught?’ Brahma shook his head. ‘Those days are over, I’m afraid.’ He nodded to Night Sparrow as the hero walked by. ‘No, he just showed up this morning, like a badly trained dog that finally remembered where the food was.’
‘Blue, that’s hardly fair.’ Jasmine appeared next to Brahma. ‘Hello, Timbre.’
‘Hi, Jas.’ Jess followed, stunned, as Jasmine turned and started walking towards one of the larger groups near the Major’s podium. ‘What do you mean, he just showed up? He surrendered?’
Jasmine smiled. ‘Of course n– Oh!’ She shook her head. ‘Of course, you were on vacation during his court hearing.’
‘Whose court hearing?’
‘That would be mine.’
She knew the voice – knew it better than anyone else in the room, she was quite sure – and still she couldn’t believe it. Cinder (in his full outfit, which Jess distinctly remembered stowing in her secret closet) slipped out of the knot of people near the podium and pulled himself to mock attention. ‘Hi. Don’t attack me. I’m one of the good guys.’
Jess gaped. ‘How? Who?’
‘Court order,’ Brahma explained. ‘The judge said, if I remember correctly, that any prison term would be shortened inexcusably by either probation or Cinder’s well-documented abilities, so he assigned community service instead.’ He looked down at Cinder with undisguised distaste. ‘Ten thousand hours of it, to be served as a provisional member of the Vindicators.’
‘That’s five years, give or take, if I don’t pull any overtime.’ Nathan grinned and swung a light punch at Brahma’s shoulder. ‘Big Blue here is my parole officer.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Right.’
‘But …’ Jess’s voice trailed off in silence.
‘All right, everyone, let’s get this started, moving and finished.’ The Major had stepped to the podium, calling the Vindicators to order as he always did. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
Conversations dwindled and died out as the heroes found their seats. Jess dropped into hers, stunned and numb. She jumped when Nathan leant forwards from the row behind her and whispered in her ear. ‘You OK?’
‘I …’ She shifted in the chair. ‘I’m just not sure what to do.’
‘No?’
She shook her head, eyes staring at nothing at all. ‘No.’
‘Hmm …’ Nathan murmured. ‘That’s interesting. You see –’ he leant in another inch closer. She could smell his hair. It smelt like her shampoo ‘– I was thinking that tonight, we could play a new game.’
The Shadow of Matthew Gwen Masters
Alison opened the bedroom door.
It was a simple thing, opening a door that she had opened a million times before. So why did the knob seem to burn in her hand, and why did the door open so slowly, like it was just as afraid of her as she was of it?
There were his jeans on the floor, his shoes right beside them. There was his book and that was on the floor, too. A bookmark held the place where he had stopped reading. A pair of glasses rested on the bedside table, in front of the little sound machine that mimicked ocean waves. The quilt was thrown back and the pillows were rumpled. There was an indentation where he had laid his head.
Alison flinched violently at the sight of that, as if an invisible hand had risen up to strike her.
She had expected the bed to be the worst. The bed where they had read books while lying in companionable silence, his hand occasionally brushing across her arm in a gesture of marital contentment. The bed where they had made love during long and lazy days and even longer nights. The bed where their whole marriage had been played out, in arguments or in lovemaking, in one way or another, for the last ten years.
Alison sat carefully on the edge of the bed, as if it might leap up and swallow her. She waited out the earthquake that didn’t come. Wind rattled the branches of the big oak tree against the windows. A cold front was coming through and, by the time night rolled around, it would be snowing. There would be four inches, maybe more, or so the forecast said. Matthew always loved winter. She remembered when they would lie in bed and watch the first snowflakes together.
This was nothing but a bed. This was nothing but their house.
Hers. Not theirs, not any more.
A month ago, her husband had gone for a walk in the fallen leaves. It was his favourite time of year, right before the first of the snow fell. It was his favourite time of day, right before the sun went down and the moon went up.
It was a simple walk down a simple road that no one ever travelled – but that day, someone did. Someone was travelling that road at a speed fuelled by one too many drinks, a kid who shouldn’t have been drinking and maybe shouldn’t even have been driving in the first place. And that kid certainly shouldn’t have been driving that big SUV, the one that was too big for her to keep under control.
The SUV wrapped itself around the tree, an old maple whose leaves were all but gone. Alison’s husband had seen it all. She could imagine the horror on his face, the paralysis of watching it happen, then the sudden break into a run, the determination to help.
During the time between life and death, Matthew had done everything he could do to save that girl. That’s why he was in the SUV with her when the engine caught fire, and that is why he stayed there too long.
It was just like him to do that, so many people had said to her at the visitation and at the funeral and in the days beyond, as if it was something that would bring her a measure of comfort. It was his nature, they said. It was just like him to give all of himself for someone else.
Alison’s husband died a hero.
But that didn’t change the fact that he had died.
Alison blinked at the sudden tears. Here it was, surely – here was the tsunami of pain. She held tight to the edge of the bed and focused all her energies on her heart, listened to it pound within her body, not going too fast, not yet …
If she didn’t fall apart, did that mean she didn’t care enough?
There across the hallway was the open door to the bathroom. Alison walked to the door and looked in. The light wasn’t on – Matthew was always good at conserving energy, it was one of the things he harped on until Alison wanted to tell him to shove it – and the winter sunlight came through the skylight, as if showcasing everything for her to see.
Matthew’s razor was right there on the edge of the sink. There were little black stubs of hair all over the white porcelain. She stared at them for a very long time.
His toothbrush was there. The bristles were dry. The toothpaste tube was squeezed out of shape in the middle, twisted into the shape of his hand. Another tube sat beside that one, neatly rolled from the bottom. Years of marriage had taught them that, while some things had possible compromise, other things were just best accepted.
But he had died on her. Where was the compromise in that?
‘Liar,’ she said out loud. Her voice echoed, the only answer she was going to get.
The fury rose up within her, two steps ahead of the guilt. How could she be angry with him? This was the man who had given the last measure of himself in an effort to save the life of someone else. He made the front page of the national newspapers. Complete strangers mourned him. How could she not see him the way everyone else saw him?
But he hadn’t left everyone else. He had left her.
Alison picked up the toothpaste tube. Her fingers almost fit in the places where his fingers had squeezed. She thought about his hands. He was obsessive about his nails. He kept them clean and clipped and tended with a nail buffer that was grey on one side and pink on the other. He made such a strange picture, his broad shoulders resting back in the chair, his strong hands wielding something so dainty and feminine.
She dropped the toothpaste tube into the trash can. There was nothing else in there, and it looked lonely at the bottom of the wicker basket. She picked up the straight razor, the one that frightened her when she watched him use it, but, sure enough, he never cut himself. Not once. Not a single drop of blood.
She dropped the razor into the trash can. It bounced once and landed neatly beside the toothpaste tube. The sunlight found it and dazzled in starbursts along the sharp edge.
She opened the medicine cabinet. There was the aspirin. She had never been able to take aspirin, but he took them three at a time, sometimes four. She often imagined his blood thinning out to nothing, growing lighter as it pumped through his veins, until there was nothing but the outline of cells in something as clear as water.
The aspirin rattled as she dropped the bottle into the trash.
The toothbrush, the one with the neon colours that looked so out of place. The soap he used, the sandalwood stuff that dried her skin, but made his feel smooth as silk. The shaving soap and the mug and the brush, the old-fashioned way he did things, it all went into the trash can, sometimes with a thud, sometimes with a crash.
She didn’t realise she was crying until her tears fell on the prescription bottle of Valium, the one that was out of date by five years, the one his doctor had given him after the death of his mother. Matthew had sworn he didn’t need them and there they had stayed in the cabinet, but when she looked at the bottle now she realised most of the Valium were missing.
Love on the Dark Side Page 13
