In Which Desire Takes An Object
The end of class brought with it two paradoxical desires: the desire to get my coat back on, get indoors, and maybe even get under my blankets… and the desire to grab Steff, go somewhere just out of sight, and get naked.
I hated to say it but it was no contest, I needed to get warmed up… but upon reflection, there was no real reason I couldn’t satisfy the essential nature of both desires at once.
At least, no intrinsic reason… I had to remember that Steff had other demands on her time.
“When do you have to go for your date?” I asked her as we left the field.
“Too soon,” she said. She grabbed my hand and pulled me off balance sideways, then moved around to catch me by the other hand, ending up with her holding me by the wrists with my arms crossed behind me. “Much too soon, I’m afraid.”
“So… we don’t even have time to…”
“Oh, hon, we don’t have time to do half of what I’d want to, after that,” Steff said. “There’s no way I could be satisfied with a quick ravishing… I’d much rather go for a long, drawn-out ravaging while I imagine doing that whole thing over again, only with a spear. A great, big magic spear, like Pala the tiny giant has… actually, what I want to do is watch her do it.” She giggled. “Can you just imagine if she had a dick, how much damage she could do to someone?”
“I, uh, that’s not the kind of thing I think about,” I said. I could just feel her poking me in the back, through the padding of my coat. “With you it’s… well, it’s a known quantity now. I can’t picture most girls as anything but normal… well, you know what I mean.”
“She’d rip people in two… and now I’m imagining her and a full giant. A roomful of full giants,” Steff said. She let go of my wrists, only to reach around me and pull me in closer against her. “No wonder she’s so uptight. Imagine when she goes home and loses her cherry? You know it’s going to happen, if it hasn’t already…”
“And now your imagination’s run away from me,” I said, disengaging from her arms and turning around to face her.
“Oh, you’re there, too,” Steff said. “Your invulnerability would be too fun to leave out of the mix.”
“Yeah, I really don’t want to hear how that would factor in,” I said, blushing under my hood.
“Think of it as a variation on an irresistible force meeting an immovable object,” Steff said.
“Isn’t it enough to think about the two of us together?” I asked.
“I spent a whole day in bed,” Steff said. “I’ve kind of exhausted all the more obvious possibilities.”
“And after all that, you don’t want to even run off and have some quick fun?” I said.
“Hey… you’re still bleeding,” she said, leaning in to try to kiss my mouth. I pulled back. “Now who doesn’t want to have fun?”
“My blood is not for fun,” I said, hiding my mouth behind my hand. “Want to walk me to the healing center?”
“There’s nowhere I’d rather walk you less,” Steff said. “Come back with me to Harlowe so I can get some quick glam repair done. Then we can spend more time together before I go.”
“Why didn’t you just get glammed up after classes?”
“Then we’d have even less time,” she said.
“The thing is, I don’t think Callahan is looking for ‘pretty’ from you,” I said.
“Did you ever think that maybe I wanted to look good for myself?”
“Oh!” I said. “Sorry, Steff, I… sorry.”
“Oh, no, it was totally for her,” Steff said. “If I’m trying to impress myself, I just imagine it.”
“I think you’d impress Callahan more if you came in leather pants or something,” I said. “I really don’t think she’s into girls.”
“She’s into me,” Steff said.
I didn’t press the point. Chances were Steff wasn’t that oblivious… or at least, she wasn’t oblivious about that. She knew that presenting herself as female aggravated Callahan, and that’s what she was going for. I thought any chance she had of skewing Callahan’s interest in her a sexual direction was going to be undermined by this approach, but then, I didn’t really care if she succeeded.
If anything, I’d prefer that she failed. My issues with the class aside, Callahan was gross.
“Are you going to be up when I get home?” Steff asked, cutting into my thoughts.
“When are you going to get home?” I asked
“Dunno,” she said. “Possibly tomorrow.”
“And you expect me to be waiting up for you?”
“What, did you learn to masturbate when I wasn’t watching?” she said, reaching out and poking me in the sides. I shrank back.
“I do have other partners,” I said.
“But you’re hot for me,” she said. “Am I supposed to believe that Amaranth could give you what you need from me?”
“You know I…” I started to say, but she held her finger up to my lips to shush me, glaring down the length of her arm at me with a very severe look on her face. I was in the midst of wondering what I’d done wrong, exactly, when she pulled her finger back, smeared with my bright blood, and stuck it in her mouth like a lollipop.
I felt something lurching forward inside me… three somethings, in fact: in my stomach, in my nether regions, and in my mouth. Steff coated in blood… sex dipped in candy, candy dipped in sex. Steff, oblivious… or perhaps all too aware, popped her finger out of her mouth with an audible smack.
“Steff!” I gasped.
Absent another trigger, the taste of my own blood in my mouth was nothing to me… just me. But when Steff had been goading me on, physically, out on the field, or when she presented me with an image of… well, yumminess…
“What?” she smiled way too innocently. “You taste good.”
“Did you forget about… about the inn room?” I asked.
“No! But… that was virgin human blood,” she said. “Not yours. Neither of us are virgins, and we’re only half-human. Anyways, it’s way different. There’s no victim here.”
“Not yet… it’s still blood,” I said. “And we’re a full human between us. I shouldn’t be around you when there’s blood… I need to go get healed.”
“Okay,” she said. She sighed. “Someday I hope you’ll let me strap you down and suck a pint and a half or so out of you.”
“Steff, that’s seriously gross,” I said.
“I can’t help it,” she said. “Normally, with blood play, it’s just like… ooh, blood. It’s the idea. I mean, Viktor’s blood sure isn’t anything you’d drizzle over a cake, you know? But yours… you’ve got something going on. It’s subtle, but… it kind of grows on you.”
So it wasn’t just the mermaids who could get hooked on me… wonderful. Would I have to spend the rest of my life trying to make sure that random people and creatures didn’t get a taste of me?
I had a random flash of memory: Mercy’s description of the end of her first half-demon breeding experiment.
“I figured nature would take its course, you know? It did… just the wrong half of it.”
She apparently had no problems leaving the two male slaves alone together, but the one time she’d left them with a female half-demon… a half-demon girl… they’d done something horrible enough to her to strike Mercy as hilarious. If I’d had to guess how a pair of half-demon men who were treated as animals would act, I would have guessed they’d end up fighting each other over the woman.
I couldn’t decide if it would be better to alert Mercy to this possibility or not… if there was anything to it, her knowing it could be the difference between life or death for her next half-demon acquisition.
That left the question of which outcome would be preferable, both for the girl in question and for the world. The fact that I could still potentially end up being that girl didn’t simplify things.
“Mack, hon… stay with me,” Steff said. “You’re not about to pass out from a little split lip, are you?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Just… lost in thought.”
“Usually when you do that, you turn redder, not paler.”
“You got me thinking,” I said. “I think my… um… taste might be addictive, or something.”
“Well, I did say it grew on me, but I don’t know if I’m, you know, representative,” Steff said. “I’m a little bit weird, if you haven’t noticed.”
I giggled, in spite of everything.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I just… putting it together with something Mercy said, I’m wondering if it’s not something about half-demons. Half-demon girls. I’m wondering if it would be better to tell her so she doesn’t accidentally kill the next half-demon slave she gets, or let her figure it out for herself.”
“That sounds like the sort of thing people would know about, if it were true,” Steff said. “People like her, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How often would it come up, in lore? I mean, if two demonbloods get into a fight and one eats the other, wouldn’t most people assume it’s just demons being horrible to each other?”
“How could you be sure it isn’t?” Steff said.
“You’re not the only person who’s had a… craving,” I said.
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” she said. “You taste nice. It might just be the sexual attraction… I don’t know. ”
“Okay, so I taste nice to you, when blood usually doesn’t,” I said. “And to people with more of a taste for that kind of thing, I taste real good, apparently.”
“Like who?”
“I’d rather not get into it,” I said. I sighed. “I probably should find a way to tell Mercy, so she can figure out a way to test the theory if she does get another half-demon to breed.”
“Oh, that’s a brilliant idea,” Steff said, rolling her eyes.
“What?”
“Breeding half-demons is just her hobby… have you forgotten what she does for a living?” Steff asked. “If you tell her you think you have addictively-good meat on your skinny little bones, she is never going to give up on snaring you… and when she gets you, I think you can give up any dreams you’ve been harboring about being her pampered little poodle.”
“I haven’t actually harbored any dreams,” I said, a little irritated at the thought. I was turned on by some messed up shit, and I’d had some pretty fucked up dreams… but any dreams involving Mercy had been anything but idyllic. “That’s all her idea.”
“When she realizes she can bleed you or cut off bits of you for real gourmands, she’ll get another idea,” Steff said. “As much as the whole puppy play thing appeals to her, she’s a businesswoman.”
“What does it really change, though?” I said. “It’s not like I was going to come happily to her call before and now I’m all conflicted.”
“It’s one more reason to be careful,” Steff said. She leaned forward… I thought she was going to nip at my lip or something, but she kissed me on the cheek with surprising tenderness. “And on that note, you should probably find Amaranth and make sure everything’s on track for Saturday. I love Caron bunches, but she’d sell me for a lot less than Mercy would give for you.”
“You might want to warn us about stuff like that,” I said.
“When did I say ‘this is my best friend Caron, you can trust her with all your heart’?” Steff asked.
“A specific warning still would have been nice.”
“‘Be careful shopping outside the market’ seemed obvious,” Steff said. “Anyway, it sounds like Caron warned you. If you didn’t listen to her, why would you have listened to me?”
“Because you’re my friend, maybe?” I said. I sighed. “It’s done, anyway… all I can do now is show up on Saturday and do my part, and I guess on that note I really should find Amaranth and make sure we’re ready. I’m going to run to the healer’s. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Wait up for me?”
“Two’s going to be asleep,” I said. “I don’t want to wake her up, and I’m not staying in the lounge all night.”
“You could wait in my room.”
“In Viktor’s room? No, thanks,” I said.
“Tomorrow then,” she said. “Tomorrow night, after the campus Veil party… I’m nailing your dirty little ass to the wall, no ifs, ands, and only your butt.”
I shuddered, wracked with squirmy feelings of pleasure deep down inside me. Even contemplating a future with Mercy, even with the taste of my own blood in my mouth, Steff could inflict so much desire on me with the tiniest inflection.
There really was no other word for it, except ‘inflict’. I felt such things for Amaranth… but Steff, in effect, felt things to me and on me. It was transitive desire… even in my own want for her, I was the object.
She bent forward for a kiss, and I almost put my lips to hers before turning and brushing them against her cheek, leaving a small smear of blood. Blushing madly, I turned to leave before she could compel more from me. Her whisper chased me down the path.
“Tomorrow night.”
How often could it come up in lore? Apparently it was common knowledge a few decades ago…
A. Shhh, that “hasn’t happened” yet.
B. There was significant research involved in that. Certainly not common knowledge.
They haven’t talked with Victor yet. He made a one time exemption for their date. Does Mack really want Steff to witness her punishment and does Steff really want to witness that punishment again? Mack already owes Victor a set of tongs.
I’m starting to dislike Steff nearly as much as I did Puddy early on. I dislike every interaction between her and Mack now.
I wonder what would happen if two half-demon girls were put together. If their extra-yumminess toward two-legged predators (or predators in general?) would drive them into a frenzy until one was left or there wasn’t any blood left at all, or… what.
Anthony, or someone else: PLEASE tell me that’s a detail I missed from an earlier chapter and not ANOTHER FREAKING SPOILER.
Spoiler. Anthony quite specifically keeps doing that. He seems to be kind of a dick.