by Jean Roberta
Except that line of thought could get her in trouble because she’d start thinking about Lily in pajamas, then smaller pajamas, then slinky small pajamas…and her thoughts went down the gutter from there.
“How’s it going?” Lily trilled, hauling all that light in from the hallway, but warming it up like natural sunshine. It crackled off Kyra’s monitors, bleaching and flattening her game model. “Big Bubba’s tonight, y’all. Tell me you don’t yearn for BBQ.”
“Just potato salad for me. Biggest vat of the stuff, please.”
“Chopped beef, no pickles no onions no sauce no bread.”
Leave it to Dave and Zach, respectively, to be totally unaffected by Lily’s innuendo. Or maybe her words weren’t really innuendo-laden.
Maybe that was just Kyra’s sleep-deprived brain supplying the breathy tone, the secret flirt. She liked how Lily had used the initials, not sounding out “barbie-que” and instead leaving some uncertainty there. BBQ…bright beveled quark? Big boobie queen? Bodacious buxom…oh, quit.
Lily leaned back against Kyra’s desk and slid a menu onto it.
Kyra tried not to notice the shallow impression the Formica edge pressed into Lily’s skirt-covered ass.
“What can I get you, Ky?” See? There it was again, the breathy. The sexy. Only now Kyra could smell her, too. Not perfume, not even scented deodorant. Lily smelled like…lilies. Like walking in a garden right after the rain. That smell clanged so hard against the reality of Kyra’s cave-like office that she almost got choked up.
She wetted her lips and tried to scan the folded paper menu.
“Smoked turkey’s good,” Lily said. “That’s what I’m having. And lots and lots of sauce.”
Kyra felt her face get hot. Damn, she couldn’t even summon the social acumen to order crappy crunch food. Was the job killing her, or had she always been this pathetic? She nodded and tried to say, “Yeah, sure, same for me,” but it came out grunty.
She expected Lily, with her orders in hand, to rush off in her usual pixie scamper and start fetching things. Instead, Lily turned, faced the computer screen, and flattened her palms on Kyra’s desk.
LED light turned her face into a play of blues and deep pinks. “She’s hot, kind of in a domme way. I dig the leather flail.” Lily was looking hard at the screen, but Kyra had clean forgotten what she was even working on. Or where she was. Lily’s elbow brushed Kyra’s shoulder, and sparks settled all over that side of her body.
“Yeah. Figured a fae wouldn’t use a metal weapon, right?”
“Mmhmm. But…” Lily caught her bottom lip between her teeth for a second, and she turned to look straight at Kyra. Holy shit. Kyra couldn’t even breathe. Her nipples peaked, and her toes scrunched up against the rubber of her flip-flops. “…you shouldn’t make her wings red.” Lily leaned in until her mouth was close, too close to Kyra’s ear, and she whispered, “Fae wings only get red during orgasm. Blood flow and all that.”
And then Lily was straightening up, retrieving the menus, reciting everybody’s orders, and breezing back out into the hall. The door closed behind her, cocooning the game makers—two programmers, one tech artist—into their own dank little hell. Kyra almost convinced herself that she’d imagined that last part. Hallucinated it, really. After all, David and Zach were back to work like nothing even a little bit strange had happened.
But then she sucked in a breath, and the smell of flowers shoved her right back into that imaginary garden, and she knew that it had been real. Lily had literally, really, whispered into her ear.
Took Kyra about a minute to remember the contents of that whisper, and when she did, she decided she needed a smoke break.
Right now. Didn’t even matter that she didn’t smoke.
•
Kyra was the only person on the fourth floor who used the ladies’ bathroom. She knew this because once, just as an experiment, she’d held off telling anybody when the toilet paper ran out, and had just brought in little tissue packets for her own use. Three weeks went by before anybody thought to re-stock the ladies’ room. She’d decided against performing a similar experiment that time when the overhead light went out. She wasn’t hung up on her looks or anything, but every once in a while she needed to check her hair.
Lily must use the upstairs facilities. Made sense. Kevin’s office was on five, right next to the super-secret executive board room. Lily probably had a desk up there, someplace.
At the sink, Kyra shoved her hands under a stream of cold water, got them good and wet, and then palmed her face. She felt hot, burning up, but buzzing like she’d just downed a half dozen Starbucks ventis. The faucet water didn’t even begin to cool her down.
Her hands slid down, wrapping her throat, feeling the pulse push hard against her fingertips.
Thing was, even if she hadn’t been deprived of sleep and real company—Zach and David didn’t count—for almost two months, she still would have wanted to fuck Lily. This wasn’t some cracked fantasy she’d thought up to dull the craziness of her work schedule.
In fact, that first day last summer when Kevin had introduced her to his assistant, Kyra’s mouth had flooded with wet, pooling up behind her teeth, and she’d wanted nothing more than to run her tongue all over Lily’s body, to inhale and consume. It’d been all Kyra could manage to just half-smile and say hey.
And even then Lily’s look had been knowing.
Could she? Could she really tell that Kyra lusted after her, and how hard? It wasn’t the first thing on most women’s minds when they met each other. Not that Kyra went around propositioning every succulent female who walked through her world—that would lead to heartbreak real fast—but she’d had enough romantic experience to be patient and make sure the other person was totally open to same-sex intimacy before she said anything remotely flirtatious. Most women, even those who’d been out a long time, approached relationships carefully. Kyra never wanted to offend.
But Lily had never let something like politeness hold her back. She’d been out of her bikini top before sundown at the company picnic. Granted, she was an equal-opportunity enticer, and could be bi, or even totally straight. After all, most guys were just as worked up about her as Kyra was. Only difference was that they could talk about it amongst themselves. They didn’t feel a need to frig off in the bathroom, fantasizing about their co-worker. Or maybe they did. Kyra didn’t really give a fuck.
Through drop-lidded eyes, she saw her reflection in the mirror. Her hair was coming out of its ponytail one strand at a time. It licked her forehead and neck, fringed her ears. Her face looked flushed, and she could see her nipples pushing hard through her bra and tee-shirt, just begging for someone to touch them. Kyra kept one hand around her throat, feeling the heat of her skin burn through her palm. The other hand crept south, over her tee-shirt, roving her bra, pinching one nipple, harder, and pulling it until she mewled.
She imagined Lily touching her like this.
She narrowed her eyes at her reflection, seeing herself as Lily would see her, and the background blurred. The dusky pink wall behind her closed in, embracing her, framing her. Fantasy gave that frame a shape: dark pink fairy wings, deepening to red.
Blood flow and all that, was it?
Kyra reached with both hands and grabbed her breasts, kneading, rolling her nipples until they burned. She needed more, needed other hands than hers, but this was all she had. She yanked her tee-shirt up and unbuttoned her jeans, flaying them over her sharp hip bones, exposing her trim, white panties. One hand dipped in. She saw the point of her knuckle and felt the fingernail graze her lips, her clit. She sucked in a breath and clutched the faux marble vanity with the other hand to keep herself upright.
Her middle finger slipped along the seam of wet, seeking the depths of her cunt, but the jeans still limited her access somewhat.
Never mind, she could get off just rubbing her clit. And watching.
And imagining that Lily was also watching. And touching. And coming, watching her. Kyra�
�s hips tilted, driving into her fingers. She pressed her clit so hard that, were it another body part, she’d be leaving bruises for sure.
She climbed closer to release, so close, so hard that for a half breath she didn’t register the vibration against her thigh. And then, even when she realized that her phone was humming, her first thought was that, hey, that might feel good on her clit, shuddering her fairy wings to crimson. She just needed… Kyra let go of the vanity and pushed at the phone—still inside her jeans pocket—cramming it in toward her pussy, clamping her teeth as it grated over her hip bone. Fuckity-fuck: the pocket just wasn’t wide enough. She yanked the phone out. Her fingers were already aiming it down her panties when she peeked at the illuminated screen.
A message from Kevin: Kyra, 2 my office plz.
Fuck.
•
Kevin’s door was open. It was always open. That was his policy.
Sometimes the old farts tried too hard to be cool. Kyra rapped her knuckles on the door frame.
Some butterflies had set up shop in her belly, even though there was no way Kevin could know how she’d been spending her smoke break. If he knew, after all, that meant cameras in the bathroom, which was legally not cool. But Kevin wasn’t the peeper type. Or was he? It hit Kyra all at once that maybe she wasn’t the only person around here keeping secrets.
“Hey? You needed to see me?”
Kevin had his flip-flop-shod feet up on his desk and a tablet balanced on his thigh. When he looked up and saw Kyra in his doorway, he gestured for her to come in. “Have a seat, Ky. You already have dinner?”
“Um, no. Lily just now came around taking orders. I figure food’s about half an hour off.”
Kevin reached out with an unnaturally long arm and slid a dish along the desk. It was piled with cut fruit, and the waft hit Kyra’s nose full force. Her mouth watered, and suddenly she was horribly, starkly, gut-churningly hungry. She sat down opposite Kevin and grabbed a mango wedge from the dish.
But eating one bite just made her hungrier. She shoved a second into her mouth, swiped the back of her hand across her lips, and forced herself to keep from reaching for more food.
Despite some disturbing noises coming from her belly, she really didn’t need to gorge right here in her boss’s office.
“Better?” Kevin closed the tablet case and set it on a side table.
Kyra nodded.
“How’s the level boss coming?”
Gotta change the wings. “Nearly done. I’ll send you a composite before I leave tonight. I can put together some mockups for marketing tomorrow, if they need something.”
Kevin’s eyebrows may have twitched slightly, but hell, they were so thick Kyra couldn’t be sure. “Lily told me you were having some palette issues.”
Lily what? A surge of panic nearly had Kyra out of her chair before she settled herself. No, no, Lily probably said something about colors, but no way had she told Kevin exactly what she’d said. Kyra looked down at her hands, picked a loose thread on her tee-shirt hem. “Nothing I can’t handle. I’m surprised she mentioned it.”
Kevin took his sweet time replying, and Kyra didn’t dare look up. Finally, he drawled, “She’s interested in you getting this world right, Kyra. I am, too.”
“Sorry,” Kyra mumbled. How had this conversation become a treatise on her lack of vision? She was still on edge, jumped up from her bathroom break, and her defenses were down. Bitterness spiked. She had half a thought of telling Kevin off—of telling him that if he was so determined to stamp his own vision on this game, he could fucking well go down to her cramped, dark little office and knock himself out for fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. She didn’t need his shit. She needed…to calm down. Damn, damn, where was her usual control?
She heard his chair squawk as he shifted. “Can I show you something?”
Kyra looked up before she could stop herself. Kevin was standing, holding out a hand. For some reason, she had this weird Matrix flash: red pill, blue pill, rabbit hole. Kevin looked weird, out of time and place, something magical.
And that’s when my brain goes pop. “Sure.”
Kyra followed her boss out of his very normal-looking office, down the hall to the next door, and then into a horribly normal-looking board room. Kind of cramped, though. Not what she’d expected from the super-secret executive meeting room, the holy of holies, where all the money guys got together to discuss the future of the studio’s projects. Kevin didn’t stop at the black lacquer table. He went right to the overhead projector, reached below it, and fiddled with something there.
The projection screen hummed back into the wall, leaving a giant floor-to-ceiling gap. A secret passage on the fifth floor, downtown. Holy crap. Kyra blinked, but the doorway was still there.
“If you’re very still, sometimes you can hear them from here, but the sound quality is loads better if you actually, you know, go inside.”
He didn’t need to push. Kyra could almost hear…music. Well, rhythm. She could feel it beneath the soles of her flip-flops. She could feel it in her bones. And there, pitched pretty high, a tinkle of laughter. Or a song? It was like ear-bleeding technojunk had mated with Disney to produce this gorgeous whorl of sound. Kyra wanted to hear it louder, wanted to dance inside it. Not even caring whether Kevin came in behind her, she stepped through the gap in the wall.
And everything she knew about the world and physics and reality exploded.
Fifth floor? Office building? Try Palladian whorehouse disco heaven. Blurs on the air that were kind of like clouds bore trays of fruit a lot like the one back on Kevin’s desk. A fountain off to the right gurgled with blue stuff, and the closer Kyra got to it, the more it smelled like cotton candy. In every space, dancers writhed to the music, blurring bodies. She tried to concentrate on seeing just one dancer, but such focus proved impossible in this mosh. A few of those bodies were clothed. Most mouths were full, of food or bubbles or blue liquor or someone else’s body. Contortions of touch blew away everything a teenaged Kyra had once learned from the Kama Sutra. Nothing, not even gravity, limited these people.
As her gaze panned the room, she came to the middle of the palace temple chamber, and her attention snagged on a dais. Vines of glowing blue stuff reached up from the misty floor, forming drapery around a platform that looked like it was made of pearl.
Kyra blinked again, and the flashes of glitter on the air—things she’d assumed on first glance were bugs or confetti—resolved into tiny people with wings. Fairies. A least a dozen of them. Their wings were made of flickering light, all pulsing in rhythm with the music.
“This is the world we’re trying to share with the mortals,” said a voice from behind her left shoulder. Took Kyra a minute to connect that voice with Kevin. He sounded different here—different timbre. And then she realized that he didn’t sound at all. Her ears were still full of the throbbing, piercing music, so full she couldn’t possibly hear a plain, old human voice. Instead, Kevin seemed to be speaking directly into her mind. The sensation of voice was accompanied by a lick of heat along her spine. Sensory overload?
“Keep going. You’re almost there.”
Kyra did as instructed, rounding a pillar as she approached the pearl-topped dais and the edge of the vine canopy. And then she saw.
Slim foot, toenails varnished black. Round of calf, bent knee. And another leg, dangling over the far side of the platform. Kyra put her hand out and grasped the column for support, but she couldn’t force her mouth shut as she looked her fill.
Lily, atop a mound of that blur-cloud stuff, her hair rioting over the pearl, her wrists bound by those slender blue vines. A fairy latched onto one breast, suckling it, whirring the air with the flutter of his—her? —wings. And as Kyra watched, another fairy flew in, attached itself to Lily’s other nipple. Two more joined, nibbling, stroking with their tiny hands. For all the furious flutter, those wings also kept time with the music. Kyra wasn’t even sure how it happened—she didn’t know much about music
, honestly—but hell, if gravity here was optional, maybe syncopation was, as well.
“She’s fucking gorgeous,” Kyra murmured.
“She’s their queen.”
The white of the pearl glimmered, mottled, and Kyra saw a flash of blue snake through it. On the dais, Lily opened her mouth and spread her legs wide open. Three fairies ducked into the lee between her thighs. Kyra tried for a better angle to see, but she could guess what they were doing. Her own clit thrummed in time. Clothes felt like bandages, bindings, shackles.
“It’s okay. You can take them off.”
Kyra forced herself to look away from the sumptuous display Lily was offering, but Kevin wasn’t behind her anymore. She wasn’t sure where he’d gone, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t feel abandoned. She didn’t worry about getting back to the board room. Honestly, she didn’t worry about anything. The music had invaded her blood, and the waft of cotton candy now carried an under-whiff of something dark and molten, patchouli and cannabis and…lilies. Well, of course, right? Dark lilies, though. Blossoming in sighs from the queen on the dais, rising as her chest rose with breath, unfurling from between her dew-damp thighs.
Kyra didn’t remember taking her clothes off, but when she reached down to stroke her nipples, no tee-shirt got in the way. Thank God.
“Come up here. With me.” The voice in her head wasn’t Kevin anymore. It was Lily. “Come up here and show me what you’re doing, Ky. Let me feast my eyes.”
Kyra mounted the dais and found herself surrounded by fairies. They moved too fast for her to discern their sex, but things like gender identity seemed as bendable as physics here. No male/female, just bodies moving together, pleasuring and being pleasured in one mass of delight. Kyra had sworn off dick a long time back, but if one had slipped in from behind in that moment, she wouldn’t have minded. Her whole body was electrified, ablaze and needing. In this place, she wasn’t alone, the only girl, the only gay girl, the only anything. She was part of the greater whole. Part of the faerie queen.
