COED DEMON SLUTS: POG
Jennifer Stevenson
www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café 2017
Copyright © 2017 Jennifer Stevenson
For my babe, Rich
POG
“You have to eat something,” I pleaded. Good grief, Jee looked awful. She was beyond pudge. “C’mon. Just have a little? You’ll lose twenty pounds, boom.”
“I feel fine,” Jee said. My once lethally svelte roomie looked around two hundred pounds. We used to trade clothes. I went with the slutty blonde newscaster look, she went with the hot Indonesian supermodel look. Since she was now keeping her red-brown succubus body about eighteen inches shorter than usual, this was unattractive.
I said so. “Girl, nobody wants to fuck a fat girl.” This was not technically true. I’d been a fat girl selling it for eight years and found plenty of people to fuck me. Although they were not, as a rule, nice about it. In her current emotional state, Jee would have a hard time with the not-nice part. And then she’d be screaming in her sleep again.
My name is Pog and I’m a succubus for hell. At this point, I’d been doing it about two years. Jee and I started at the same time—being succubi that is. I started in the trade at age nineteen. She started at age five. Hers is a horrible story. Slavers from Thailand picked her up on the beach in Sumatra after the tsunami flattened it, and they took her back to Bangkok for seven years. She was recruited out of there by the same demon who recruited me. She’s convinced they were about to kill her anyway. She’d been getting angry. Not a survival trait for a child sex slave.
It was a great survival trait once she got to Chicago. Anger had been my roomie’s greatest defense, until now.
Now she had Reg. Our onsite manager-slash-houseboy. His own story was even worse, in a way, since he was twenty-three when Jee rescued him from his abusive mother—she used to beat the soles of his feet with a switch until he couldn’t walk, among other things. Ish recruited Reg, and then Jee subjected Reg neatly in three swift, economical moves, and that worked okay for a little while.
Then something happened. Jee started waking up screaming, and Reg grew a pair of cojones somehow, and now, between wall-banging fights and head-banging sex, the two of them had been hiding in her perfumed bower twenty-four/seven, nurturing their fucking sensitivity, while proper succubus life went on around them.
Jee herself had not immediately adjusted well to being told she couldn’t work. We were no prudes, but we drew the line there. She had revealed to Reg that she was actually only fifteen, including her two years working with me for the Regional Office before Ish set up our team.
This was after she asked Amanda for a cone of silence so she wouldn’t wake us up when she had a night terror and screamed the ceiling tiles down.
We told her, You can come trolling for scores with us when you stop waking up screaming. Reg backed us up on that, and for a miracle she accepted it.
This did not mean she liked being told No by her houseboy. Jee was also pissed because, first, Reg’s mom had a stroke and he was over at the hospital a lot, and then she died, so Reg kept going back to his mom’s house, winding up the old bat’s ha-ha estate.
“I’m in a good place,” she said as I stood over her with the frittata skillet. “I still get a lot of flashback, but Reg is there to see me through it. And when he gets flashback, I’m there for him. I don’t want to work. We don’t need money.” We. We used to be Jee and me. Now Jee had a new we.
“It’s my cooking, isn’t it?” The thought was a dagger in my heart. I don’t have much to call my own, but part of me is a hell of a cook. “If I fed you something you really liked—”
“Oh, Pog, you know that’s not it. I love your cooking.”
Then why aren’t you eating any of it? No point calling her a liar. I wailed, “You’ll outgrow all your clothes! You look disgusting!”
“That’s a horrible thing to say.” Beth sailed into the kitchen wearing sweats, looking like a cheerleader captain. This wasn’t a good sign. It meant that she intended to help me clean up. “Jee, honey, I’m sure she doesn’t mean that.” She sent me a mom look. “Pog, you know Jee is in a fragile condition. Do you want me to take that plate?” she cooed to Jee.
Jee hunched a shoulder. Sometimes she’ll take momming from Beth, sometimes not. “Reg will be back in a minute,” she said as if Reg had gone to Antarctica for anchovies. In fact, Reg was running the vacuum cleaner in the hall. “I’m still nibbling.”
She was. She’d had barely a thousand calories for breakfast, which is usually our biggest meal of the day because we sleep seven to ten hours without food.
“You’ll never get your forty-five hundred calories down the hatch this way,” I pointed out. We succubi can shape our bodies into any form we like, but we have to keep them fed. A lot. Or else they get fat. Hence the shape Jee was in now.
“I’m not really hungry,” Jee said. She pushed her five-cheese frittata away, and Beth swooped in and carried the plate to the sink.
“Hey,” I said sharply. “I am not cooking to have it thrown down the disposal.”
But Beth was already shoveling the last of Jee’s frittata into her own face. Then she chucked the empty paper plate in the garbage and put the fork in the dishwasher.
The door opened. “I’m done, Mistress,” Reg said breathlessly. “I vacced the hall too.”
Jee sent him a sappy smile.
“Are you getting to the bathroom today?” I asked waspishly.
Reg looked up from murmuring over Jee. “Right away. As soon as she starts her nap.” He tenderly led Jee out of the room and across the hall to her bedroom, in the princess spot right next door to the bathroom. Jee murmured back, and Beth and I got a view of them nuzzling revoltingly until her door shut.
A waste of a good succubus.
I guess I said it out loud.
Beth said from the dishwasher, where she was loading dirty flatware and aluminum skillets, “She doesn’t need the money, you know. Even I have enough to retire on, and I’ve only been doing this for one summer.”
I took a skillet out of her hands and started scrubbing. Dammit anyway. Reg should be doing this. Okay, he was keeping our Jee, currently fragile, always a fucking diva, contented and quiet, which is also a full-time job. But our team had grown. I was cooking for seven, not four.
I snarled, “It’s not the money. It’s the principle of the thing.”
She just cocked an eyebrow at me. Beth being tactful is ten times more annoying than Beth being a pushy, nosy ex-North Shore socialite and mom.
I corrected that. “Okay, it’s our ethos. We were a team. We knew what men were for and we used them.”
“She uses Reg now.”
“She’s not using Reg,” I said bitterly. “They’re in looove. It’s disgusting. She’s won’t eat anything I cook for her—” That hurt so much I couldn’t say more.
“Maybe—maybe feeling safe has made her lose her appetite,” Beth said.
“I can see that!” To my horror I realized that tears were running down my face.
Beth put the scrubby sponge down and put her arms around me from behind. “She’s healing, Pog honey. I’m so happy she’s got Reg to see her through it. And he’s healing too.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I snorted through my tears, grateful for her cuddle, though I would die rather than admit it. “I don’t get it,” I added before she could scold me again. “They were both underfed for years as kids. His mom chained him up in the basement and fed him generic mac’n’cheese. Why won’t he eat now?”
I returned to scrubbing angrily at the pan until it slipped out of my hand and fell clanking into the sink.
Beth hugged me tighter. “They’re not eating to bury their emotions any more. They’re feeling them. That takes immense courage.”
“Like you know!” I struggled out of her embrace and glared at her. “You don’t know anything about food and fat people. What do you do, read the psychology articles in th
e magazines in the check-out line?”
“I only meant—”
“Let me tell you something about fat and food.” I clenched my wet fists in my apron. “When I was thirteen, I started gaining weight. I got every diet, every pill, every fancy fat camp and clinic-slash-spa. I got psychotherapy. I got shock therapy. I got a personal trainer, and when I gained weight while I was working with her, my parents fired her and hired another personal trainer. They caught the cook sneaking me food and they fired her. Broke my fucking heart. She’d been teaching me how to cook.”
I had to swallow. “We would go to a restaurant and they would get forty-five-day aged steaks and duchesse potatoes at a hundred dollars a plate, and I’d get five spinach leaves. Eventually they noticed that even the waiters were looking at us. Want to know their solution? They left me home.”
Beth made a noise in her throat.
I settled my skinny succubus butt against the edge of the sink. “So when they ate out, I stayed home and cooked—oh how I cooked! As soon as the car disappeared down the driveway, I would sneak off to the store and buy food and take it home. I made fabulous things—souffles, Chateaubriand, Beef Wellington, bagna cauda, sopa avgolemono, anything. As long as I thought I could cook it and eat it and clean up the kitchen before they got home.”
“Honey—”
“When they started taking vacations without me, I really went to town. I had time to make dishes that took days to prepare. I took control of being fat.”
Beth blinked. “But you’re not fat now.”
“Being fat was just the beginning, Beth. After I left home, I turned tricks for eight years. I was homeless almost the whole time. Sometimes I’d share a room with another girl, but that never lasted. Roommates stole my food and my money. They hit me. Their pimps hit me. Their boyfriends hit me. Mostly I lived on the street, where everybody hit me. If I got mad enough I could fight them off. If it was just one at a time,” I added bleakly. I jerked my shoulder at memory. “But I couldn’t stay mad. You get hungry and scared and so, so dirty, and there’s no end to it. And nobody cares, because you’re fat. I turned invisible.”
In the silence that followed, I pulled myself together. “I don’t want that to happen to Jee.”
“It won’t.” Beth seemed to accept this change of subject. “I’m so happy those two have each other. They’re doing it the right way.”
I made a sniffly sound.
She reached out and squeezed my hand. “Be happy for them. I know you and Jee have been close a long time.”
Beth, being tactful. Since she arrived, Beth had been angling for position of team leader’s best friend. I doubted that she had any plan to shove Jee over. She wasn’t mean. But she seemed to be getting clingier and clingier toward me. Nor was she lezzie, like Amanda and Cricket. She had this Doyle guy on the side. I think it was the cheerleader in her. The Girl Most Likely To Wear Pink Her Whole Life. If you were the team leader, she just automatically sucked up to you.
She whispered now, “It’s going to be all right. She’ll come out of it.”
I sighed. In spite of myself I started to relax. “I hope to hell.”
ISH
“Puh-promote me, sir?” Ish Qbybbl stammered. “Are you sure?”
The double Duke of Hell seated across the desk from him—or, rather, Senior Executive Vice President of the Regional Office—glared back at Ish. This was not a Congratulations conversation. It was more of a Boy, you really screwed up conversation.
Buughdybogh, Senior VP of Anger and Lust, Fifth and Second Circles of the Inferno respectively, leaned forward. His immense eyebrows rose higher than his purple-chrome-colored bald head and then lowered into a thundercloud frown. “I hope you’re not gunning for my job,” he rumbled.
Buugh had ruled two dukedoms of the Regional Office ever since the VP of Lust had abdicated and gone off-grid in the nineteen-twenties. Ish was fully aware of how much Buugh, the VP of Anger-Lust, loved his hyphen.
“What? No!” Ish made frantic jazz hands. “No, no, no, I wouldn’t think of it! No, sir! Not at all!”
“Good. Mind, if you want my boss’s job, I’d be happy to help you.” The eyebrows came up and quivered suggestively. “It would be a pleasure.”
Buugh didn’t have a boss, unless you counted the Regional CEO—the big kahuna, the original rebel, the first fallen angel. He was so fancy, Ish had never set eyes on him. Only the dukes of hell’s nine circles, er, Senior Executive Vice Presidents of the Regional Office got to meet him.
None of these guys took note of small fry like Ish. And that was fine with Ish. Guys like Buughdybogh didn’t work for the Regional Office. They had careers. Ish had never, ever wanted a career. He just wanted to be left alone.
“But if you plan to steal my job first, I don’t have to tell you what I think of that idea,” Buugh added unnecessarily.
Ish shook his head violently. “No, sir.”
“So if you didn’t want to get promoted, what was the big idea behind winning the Intermural All-Circles Basketball Tournament? That’s what this is about, you know.”
“I know.” Ish sweated. “It was one of my field ops. She’s a jock, crazy about sports. Always wanted to form a competitive team. Her squadmates agreed, and I guess they’d been practicing up—”
“Are you telling me a woman is behind this insurgence?” Buugh growled. “Does she realize we don’t promote women in this organization?”
“I dunno. She always seemed kind of dumb to me,” Ish admitted.
“They always do, right up until they stab you in the back,” Buugh said. “I thought you had a male onsite manager with that squad.”
“I did. I do. He’s actually on the basketball team, too. It’s coed.”
Buugh shook his head. “Maybe this is all his idea,” he suggested. “Maybe he’s the one who wants my job. And you let him do this.”
Ish realized there was no way he could placate Buugh. He’d have to go somewhere and lie low until this blew over. When a few months had passed, and Ish had clearly not come after the chair of Executive VP Lust, Buugh would forget all about it. Fortunately, internecine strife among the big pots in the Regional Office was so constant that a new drama unfurled its batwings every few weeks.
In Ish’s opinion, this felt like the dance band on the Titanic arguing with management about overtime. Which was why he’d always treasured his dull, uneventful niche in Lust, the Second Circle, the deadest of hell’s dead ends.
Until Pog’s slut team came up with this freakin’ basketball thing. He’d let Pog twist his arm and he’d posted the tournament invitation on an obscure bulletin board in the bowels of hell. Nobody was more surprised than Ish when the thing came off. He’d been proud when their team burned through the early heats of the tournament. Go, girls. Then they made it into the semifinals and brought down that amazing picnic basket, which he, as their supervisor, was entitled to share. That was a win. When they made the finals he sent them a congratulatory email. And finally, they beat those monster commando demons from Anger and won the cup. Big whoop. It felt nice at the time, but who really cared?
Somebody, apparently. Now the bastards down below wanted to promote him.
People were noticing him. He was visible.
He would simply have to get out of the office for a while.
The very thought made hairs prickle up and down his back.
Buugh now looked down at the paper file on his desk. “So where are you getting these people? They don’t seem to have very long histories with the RO. Most of these records go back less than five years, except for this instigator you mentioned.”
Ish felt a pang of guilt for bringing the girls to Buugh’s notice. One of the luxuries he’d been able to afford, hiding out in his cubicle in the deserted halls of Second Circle, was sympathy for his underlings. He’d better unlearn that shit in a hurry.
Buugh was looking at him from under those eyebrows.
“What? Uh, well, sir, most of them are from off-grid. Fir
st time recruits. Originally mostly mortals. All,” he amended, sweating. “All mortals. My onsite manager answered an ad on the internet. The women are mostly referrals.” He knew he was babbling. He couldn’t tell anyone too much about how his group worked. But those eyes bored into him, the eyebrows like semaphores signalling stormy, stormier, and tornado.
Nevertheless he babbled on. “You know how dangerous the field is to anyone who’s spent much time down here, sir. We lost a hundred field ops earlier this summer, all at once.” Oops, don’t talk about that, don’t mention that! “Women don’t stay in the job long, sir. You have to pay them more to have sex. The men were perfectly happy to be incubi indefinitely.” —Until they fell in love and quit to get married, holy shit I don’t dare let that out, I have to get out of here before anything else comes out of my mouth—
Buugh watched him squirm and seemed to decide something.
Ish stopped breathing. His sweat turned cold. Dread put his heart on pause.
“You upset a lot of people with this basketball thing. That’s not good. People don’t like change. People are going to think you’re not a team player.”
“I know, sir, I know it’s irregular, I don’t know what got into them. I’ll investigate immediately, sir. Immediately.”
That’s what he’d do. He’d go to Chicago. He’d actually pack a bag and leave the Regional Office and move in with the sluts. He’d hide out.
In the field.
Creepy-crawly terror marched over his skin.
“You do that,” Buugh recommended. He flipped the file folder shut and shoved it with one finger. Ish watched the folder slide across the acreage of Buugh’s desk until it teetered on the edge, only just not falling off and into the wastebasket.
Ish shuddered.
He was going to have to go into the field.
POG
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 84
