“In a strictly literal sense, you did, yeah,” Ian said. “But that wasn’t really a blowjob.”

“What the hell was it, then?” I asked.

“That was you putting your mouth on my dick and sucking a bit until I sort of came,” Ian said.

I gave him what I hoped was an incredulous enough look.

“That’s what a blowjob is, isn’t it?” I asked.

“A blowjob involves all those things, but it’s a lot more than that,” Ian said. “It’s… it’s…”

“It’s what?” I prompted.

“Okay, maybe this’ll sound a little weird, saying it out loud… but I can’t think of a better way of making you understand the difference. A blowjob is about the most awesomely incredible thing you can physically experience,” he said. “Or they’re supposed to be, anyway. If blowjobs really were like what you just did, then there’d be no reason anybody would want one… they’d just jerk off instead. They sure as hell wouldn’t go around talking about them the way they do.”

“You know, you might as well admit you never had one before,” I said. If I’d had any doubts before, the way he went kind of misty-eyed when he talked about what they were supposed to be like… emphasis on “supposed to be.”

Ian wasn’t about to take this observation sitting down, though… he got up, pulling his boxers and jeans up. His dick still looked a little hard, and was covered in spit and his stuff, but apparently he didn’t care. I don’t know how he couldn’t.

“I’m a musician, Mackenzie!” he said, his face reddening with what I think was maybe half anger. “Do you know how much action a guy with a lute can get in high school?”

“A guy with a lute is sexy,” I said, my voice scathing. “A dork with a lute is still a dork. Face it, Ian, you’re still the same loser you’ve always been… you probably go around all day terrified that somebody will call you on it.”

“Are you talking about me here?” Ian asked. “Or yourself?”

“Get out,” I seethed, pointing at the door. “Just get the fuck out of my room.”

“Fine,” he said, stooping to grab his shoes off the floor. “But here’s one for you… a girl with a dick in her mouth is sexy, but a dyke with a dick in her mouth is still a dyke!”

He could have said anything else, and I would have just been pissed off… well, pissed off or turned on… but…

Amaranth had said she could handle anything as long as I didn’t yell at her. I felt like, on some level, I could handle anything as long as I wasn’t a lesbian. Nothing against lesbians. Really. Hell, the way things had been going I could probably end up dating one without being too surprised.

I just couldn’t be one.

“Ian, wait!” I said. “Don’t leave… please.”

I had to force the last word out.

“You’ve been nothing but a bitch to me since I got up here,” he said, turning around slowly “Why should I stay?”

Bitch.

The word caught me completely off my guard. It had made me feel cheap and small when Puddy had called me her bitch… or worse, one of her bitches. Of course, when she’d said it, it had been at least something of a term of endearment, in a messed up sort of way. Ian was using it in a different context entirely, in which it was nothing but an insult, a vehicle for conveying contempt.

Probably I should have been more concerned at that point that the first guy–the only guy–I was halfway comfortable talking to hated me enough to call me a bitch to my face… but I guess I was too busy going weak and wobbly over it.

I wasn’t, as Steff had put it, “horny as fuck”… but maybe horny as hell.

Part of me… a small but vocal minority of me… wanted to see if I could get him pissed enough to say it again, without making him leave.

Why did Amaranth think I needed to have oral sex? I was already fucked in the head.

“See, and you don’t even have anything to say to that,” Ian said.

Of course I did. I’d just tell him I was more turned on by him calling me a bitch than by anything else he’d said or done… yeah, that would work out great.

“It’s true,” I said, with some difficulty. “I have been acting like… like a bitch.”

I had to repress the urge to shudder, to shiver with the word coming from my own mouth.

“It’s just that… okay, so, maybe it wasn’t your first time,” I said.

“‘Maybe‘?” he retorted.

“I didn’t mean it like that!” I said quickly. “The thing is, it was my first time… and so maybe I didn’t do it just exactly right. I don’t think that makes me a lesbian.”

“Okay, fine, you’re not,” Ian said. “That’s still no reason for me to stick around, is it?”

“Then… let me give you a reason,” I said, fumbling behind my back to undo my bra.

This normally wouldn’t have been that hard a task, but my fingers were shaking pretty badly.

Oh, and in case there’s any doubt, I was fully aware how horribly cheesy the last thing I had said was. It was exactly the sort of thing somebody would have said in one of those terrible “erotic” stories I mentioned. Like Amaranth had said, I could be a slow learner… but then, I didn’t really have anything else to work with.

Regardless, it got Ian’s attention… or at least he stared at me while I did it. Maybe it was like watching a coach wreck. I don’t know. I got my bra off. As soon as it hit the floor, the realization of what I had done hit me, with compound interest from when I’d taken off my shirt. If I’d been anywhere but my own room, I probably would have left. If I’d had anywhere to run to… I would have, in a heartbeat.

Speaking of heartbeats, exactly when had mine become audibly loud?

I was already in my room, with the door shut and locked. I didn’t have anywhere else to run to. I kicked off my shoes. I’m sure I looked like an idiot struggling out of my too-fucking-tight jeans, which ended up kind of rolling themselves up on the way down my legs. Ian said nothing. I was standing there, in my panties… my little red thong underwear, with the waistband all twisted and the front kind of off-center… and my tiny little tits hanging there for him to see… and Ian said nothing.

What the fuck was he going to say to that?

“Well?” I said, repressing the urge to turn away and bury my face in my hands, or cover anything else up with them.

“Acting like a slut now isn’t going to prove anything,” he said.

I closed my eyes.

“Say that again,” I breathed, not thinking.

“Say what?” he asked. “You mean… you want me to call you a slut?”

He didn’t say as much, but the implication was there… that was sick.

That was wrong.

That was so fucking hot.

I moved forward. He didn’t move back. He let me take his shoes and drop them. I put my hands on his shoulder, and stood on my toes.

“Mackenzie,” he said, both a question and a warning.

“Put your hands on my ass,” I said. I swallowed. “Please.”

His eyes showed he was confused as hell, but he did… his hands once again squeezing and clenching and feeling, this time having the run of my bare ass, skin on skin. They were surprisingly strong hands, as I’d remembered, and the fingers were rough… maybe he wasn’t just a dork with a lute. Maybe he was serious about his music.

There was no music now, but I leaned into him and swayed, let his hands pull me in even closer… and felt his dick stirring, pressing the fabric of his jeans against my bare skin. I’d always thought men needed a longer recharge between times… I had expected to have to work harder for that.

“Let me do this,” I said. “Please.”

The pleases were killing a bit of me, each and every time, but it was a pleasant sort of agony.

“I don’t care if you think you’re a lesbian or not,” he said.

“Please,” I said again. “Please.”

He closed his eyes.

“Okay,” he said.

He let me undo his pants, and pull them down his legs. He stepped out of them with a little help, and then we repeated the experience with his underwear. He sat down again.

A lot of the wetness must have come off on the inside of his boxers, but what was left was not attractive. I picked up his shorts and rubbed them against the end of his dick, wiping it off.

“Careful!” he said, drawing a sharp breath. “It’s a bit sensitive.”

He might not have liked the attention, but it seemed like his whole body wasn’t in agreement there… the thing lurched and visibly swelled.

“Fucking hell,” I said, noting the reaction. “Is there anything your dick doesn’t respond to?”

“Mackenzie,” Ian said. There was that something in his voice again, that odd quality that went right through me like a magic knife. He waited until I looked up at him to finish the thought. “Shut up, okay?”

“No, I’m serious, is there…” I began, but he cut me off.

“So am I,” he said. “Just shut the fuck up. Do it or not, I don’t really care at this point… but I’m not going to listen to you bitch about it the whole time.”

I would have loved to argue with this, to tell him off… but, I really didn’t want him to go.

Also, his voice was still changed, and I could almost feel it on my skin. Was it just horniness? Was hearing arousal in his voice what aroused me in turn? Also, even though he didn’t lay any special emphasis on the word, hearing “bitch” from his lips, even as a verb… it still did something to me. For me. It carried an association somehow, now.

I knelt between his legs, staring at his dick… it seemed bigger now, thicker. Fuller. More intimidating. I don’t know if that was my imagination or not. I remembered how shocked I’d been when Amaranth had told me that there’s some “give” to it.

“Look, if you’re not going to do it, quit fucking around and say so,” he said.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said quietly, looking up at him.

He gave me a look that was both pitying and scornful. It softened and then disappeared… but I’d seen it, anyway.

Do I even have to tell you what that did for me?

“Lick my balls,” he said. That made two more times than I’d ever expected to hear that phrase directed at me, and the suggestion didn’t sound any more pleasant the second time.

I did it, anyway.

I closed my eyes… opened them, leaned in way close and then closed them again… and then stuck out my tongue. Really, it was more poking with my tongue than licking. I could still taste the sweaty tang of his skin, stronger than on his dick. Different, too. I couldn’t describe how. Maybe somebody, somewhere has come up with a whole lexicon for precisely describing the taste, aroma, and bouquet of sex parts… but I was hardly a connoisseur.

I could feel the hair. It wasn’t as thick or as rough as I’d thought it would be, but I could taste and feel it, and that more than anything threatened to send me screaming from the room. Not the fact that I was tonguing someone’s balls, but the fact that they had hair on them and it might get in my mouth.

“Keep going,” Ian said, and I didn’t know if he meant I should lick some more, or move on to something else… but since I didn’t know what might come next, anyway, I kept doing what I was doing. I did it more. I stuck my tongue out as far as I could… which really didn’t feel like it was that much further than my lips, and did more than just run the edge of it against his skin.

I licked.

I lapped.

I tasted.

When he let out a little moan, I pressed my mouth against the sack–gently–so I could get more contact with the surface of my tongue.

He thinks I’m a slut… he thinks I’m a bitch… he thinks I’m a lesbian, I thought. I just kissed his balls.

“Now… the shaft,” he said, his voice hoarse and strained.

I lifted my head, put a hand under his dick, and raised it… slowly, gently. I had no idea how flexible the thing was and what would or wouldn’t hurt him. I mean, you can bend somebody’s finger backwards but it doesn’t necessarily feel good. I opened my mouth, moving down towards it.

“No,” he said. I froze in place, my mouth still open, less than an inch away. I raised my eyes. “Lick it, first.”

I hoped he didn’t mean the front, where the slit was. I had very few illusions about what I was doing, but… pee came out of there.

“Lick the length of it, from the base up,” he said.

I froze. The top? The side? All around? The top didn’t seem like it would work… I’d be headbutting him in the stomach. If I asked him what he meant, would he take that as more “bitching”?

“Do you want to do this, or what?” he asked, some of the hungry edge leaving his voice. He was getting irritated again.

That made up my mind… well, not in the sense that I made any sort of conscious decision, but it got me moving, which was all it took. There was really no better way to do it than to get down beneath him, lift his thing up some more, and run my tongue from the base, just above his nuts (can you really think of them as “nuts” when you’re sexually involved with them? Not that “balls” smacked of maturity.) all the way up to the tip.

Or almost. I was still wary of the hole, so I stopped my tongue at the kind of ridge before the… head part.

I really needed to improve my vocabulary.

Ian didn’t seem to mind my choice of stopping point. He–that is to say, his dick–jumped and jerked a bit against my hand.

“Do that again,” he said, and I did, and when he said “again,” I did it another time… and then, without invitation or command, I was just kind of licking all over, not really paying any attention to what I was doing or following any particular plan, even going so far as to circle my head around the swollen tip of his thing and, totally without thinking about it or meaning to, flicking my tongue lightly across the opening.

I was surprised but not shocked to find it was oozing… I don’t know if the stuff it oozed was the same stuff that comes out at the end, but either it was slightly less salty or it just seemed that way because the saltiness wasn’t a shock.

Oddly, now that I wasn’t expecting it to be sweet, it kind of almost was, a little bit.

“Do it,” Ian breathed, and this time I didn’t have to ask what he meant.

I took him in my hand again… I still felt that, in spite of everything, it would be easier to get going with my eyes closed, and that would be a lot simpler when I could both feel where my target was and guide it into my mouth. My mouth circled around just below the head… my teeth just brushed his skin before I remembered. He gave a weird little sigh but didn’t complain. I curled my lips back around, and then opened my eyes.

His dick’s in my mouth. My mouth’s on his dick.

My cheeks burned. I burned. What would Steff say if she could see me now?

I began to move. I remembered how he’d tried to get me to take more of the thing into my mouth, and so I worked my way downwards.

It was… kind of rough. I didn’t know how much pressure I could exert before it would bug him, so I kind of opened my mouth and moved down, or forward, or whatever, and then closed around him again.

But, I couldn’t really suck while I was doing that, and I was sure that, no matter what Ian had said, sucking must necessarily be an integral part of dick sucking, so after the first few “gulps”, I tried moving further down by sliding my lips over his length.

Again, I found my tongue wanting to curl up and explore the intruder, and this time I let it do so. The flavor and scent of him… of his skin, of his sweat, of his sex, of his dick… was already inside my mouth, filling me. What could a little bit more of a taste do?

Plenty, for both of us, it turned out… it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to manage my tongue while I was working on taking more in, and sucking, and not accidentally biting… but the reaction it got from him, and the reaction that created in me, was worth it.

I couldn’t get all the way down… his dick hit the back of my mouth, the opening to my throat, and there was just no way to get past that. When I stopped, he kind of pushed forward, but I backed off… the pressure on my throat would make me gag, and probably bring up whatever was left of my too-big breakfast. I didn’t get irritated, or pull my head up. He just must not have realized we’d reached the end of the line.

Anyway, he really responded to the sudden backwards movement, so I went back down and up again, and then a few more times. It was almost like he enjoyed that as much or more than he did the sucking, the licking, the fact of a girl’s warm lips wrapped around the shaft of his dick.

So, I did it some more… after a few tries, I fell into a rhythm that he seemed to really like, to the point that he got into it, too, thrusting forward and up to meet my downward movement, pushing again against the opening of my throat. I adjusted my position every time he did that, but it didn’t seem to throw us off any.

Then, something clicked in my mind: face fucking. Yeah, I was slow, but I got it now. Oral sex wasn’t just some dirty party trick, it wasn’t just putting your mouth on somebody’s happy parts… it was sex… it was fucking, it was bodies coming together with friction and thrusting and twisting and desire.

The realization that I was having sex might have freaked me out, but the big fat dick in my mouth was pretty distracting.

Once I understood exactly what it was that we were doing, I think I got a little better at it. It was actually almost kind of fun… I could give my boyfriend–or you know, Ian–sex without ever having to take off my underwear, without having to involve in any way the disgustingness between my legs.

Anyway, considering that a pussy doesn’t have a tongue and can’t suck, the mouth could hardly be called the inferior substitute…and most guys I’d overheard talking about it seemed plenty aware that there was something inherently nasty, if not outright wrong, about a girl’s pussy.

It was no wonder they were so into getting head.

When he finished, which seemed to go on for longer than when he’d just spurted on my face, I swallowed almost without thinking about it. I know that’s supposed to be gross, but… it was already inside my mouth. It was sticky, and mixed up with my spit, and it probably would have taken more than one try or some serious effort to spit it all out, and I’d pretty much be keeping it in my mouth as I walked over to the trash can.

Honestly, I would have just been more embarrassed to spit it out than to swallow. I don’t even like blowing my nose. I don’t know why, or what the one has to do with the other, but it was the same impulse in my mind, somehow.

Once again, we were left with nothing really to talk about, me sitting back between his legs, and him sitting above me in the chair.

Once again, I was the first one to speak… and once again, it was on the same subject.

“So… not a lesbian,” I said, feeling an odd warmth throughout my body that had nothing to do with that comforting revelation. In fact, at that moment I hardly cared about being a lesbian or not. Somehow, what should have been one of the main points of the exercise had been lost beside the weird sense of accomplishment, of enjoyment I’d taken away from it.

“No,” he agreed, “but… if it’s all the same to you,” he said, slumping backwards, out of breath. I don’t know why, when I’d done most of the work. “When I tell my friends back home about this, can I tell them that you are?”

I gave him the look he deserved, and he laughed.

After a moment, I did, too.

I was kind of worried about that bit, too… was I supposed to do it? Undo his pants, pull them down, that whole thing? It was like the goodnight kiss that hadn’t happened. I just didn’t know what was expected of me. He ended up taking off his pants and underwear himself, and all at once.

He was already hard.

The only other time I’d seen a man in this state, live and up close, it had been Rorick, the faun. Amaranth had said he was just a little bit bigger than average. That’s the only way I knew on sight that Ian’s equipment was appreciably fatter than the typical gear.

Fatter?

That didn’t sound right. I mean, it’s an accurate description, but “fat dick” didn’t really have a ring to it. It was wider, thicker… I was really glad he wasn’t getting anywhere but my mouth with it.

I’ve always been bad at eyeball measurements, and I couldn’t have said if he was longer or shorter than Rorick, not without seeing them side by side, which didn’t seem likely. I guess that meant he was probably within spitting distance of average.

I’d only seen two penises in real life, and I was comparing them. What did that say about me?

He started to head towards my bed, but I guided him instead to the desk chair, turned around to face the room. He spread his legs and put his hand on his dick, kind of circling the base. He squeezed it a little. Why? I was going to blow him. Why did he need to play with himself? It seemed pointless, completely redundant.

I swallowed my questions… no sense making my ignorance any more obvious… and knelt down in front of him.

“Take off your shirt,” Ian said. I was surprised at his voice. It was softer than normal, but also… can I say this with a straight face? Manlier. I don’t know. It was kind of husky. It was nothing like Steff’s magic sex voice, or Amaranth’s voice of command… but it still pinched something deep inside me.

It still set me off, got me going.

Of course, none of that changed the fact that there was no way in hell I was taking my shirt off.

“No,” I said, very simply.

“Why not?” he asked. Okay, that was still husky, but also a little whiny.

“My mouth is right here,” I said, pointing. “There’s no reason for me to get undressed.”

“You get to see me naked,” he said. Half-naked, actually, but considering the half, I wasn’t going to argue the point.

“And you get to have your thing sucked,” I said. “You’re not going to see my boobies on top of that.”

Boobies? Who the fuck said boobies?

“Okay, whatever,” Ian said. “Just… get it over with, then.”

Shit, why was he being so pissy about it? He was the one about to be pleasured.

I closed my eyes and lowered my head slowly… then felt my nose brushing against the side of his tip. Oops. There was a little hitch in his breathing. I didn’t think I’d hurt him… had he liked that? I’d never heard anything about guys liking it when you touched their special place with your nose, but I guess a touch is a touch, right?

I pulled back a little bit and tried again, eyes wide open. Mouth wide open, too. I kind of angled myself down so my mouth was around the head of his shaft, open wide enough that I wasn’t actually touching it. It wasn’t very easy to do, and I felt silly as I did it… I’d have to touch it sooner or later, and I thought I might as well get it over with.

Slowly, very slowly, I closed my mouth… wrapping my lips around it… then immediately opened my mouth, yelping and jumping up and back. Ian gave a shriek at the same time.

“Shit, did I hurt you?” I asked, though I had no idea how I could have done so.

“No,” he said.

“Then why’d you yell?” I asked.

“I yelled because you yelled,” he said. “Why did you yell?”

“I… I thought it would taste bad,” I said, blushing madly. That wasn’t much of an explanation, I realized. “It didn’t, though.” Yeah, that was so much more of an explanation.

“You yelled because it didn’t taste bad?” he asked.

“Let me try again,” I said, as much to keep from answering as anything else. I got back into position, closed my eyes… remembered that this didn’t work, and opened them again.

I lowered my face towards his dick… lowered myself, and opened my mouth to encompass the girth of that fat appendage. I closed my mouth, sealing my lips around the end of it, just past the ridge of the head. My tongue kind of reflexively curled up, the tip dragging on… well, his tip… as it slid into my mouth.

It seemed like by rights, some disgusting, sour male taste should have been filling my nose and mouth until I gagged on it, but it didn’t.

It really didn’t taste bad. I hadn’t really gone through life putting my mouth on other people’s bodies, but it was definitely distinctly different from the taste of my own finger in my mouth, for instance. It was a little sweaty, but it didn’t taste like sweat. It tasted a little earthy, but not of dirt… and it was a little meaty, but not meat.

People talk about “male musk” sometimes, and I’m going to be honest: I have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about. All I can usually figure out is that men smell really bad when they sweat but some people find that attractive. With my face in Ian’s crotch, so close to his dark brown pubic hair…which, if nothing else, was an easier shade to name than the stuff up top was… there was a definite scent of what I can only call musk, if only because I didn’t have any other name for it.

It wasn’t a bad smell, any more than his dick had a bad taste.

Fucking gross, I thought, regardless… you just licked a guy’s dick. You’re smelling his crotch.

I wasn’t about to freak out about it, or anything… I mean, my mouth was on his dick anyway. But, the point of the exercise was to suck it… there was no need getting familiar with it beyond that.

“Do that tongue thing again,” Ian said, breathily. I ignored him… except for an attempt to roll my eyes up and glare at him which I don’t think he noticed… and then set to work.

I didn’t know if I was supposed to be sucking hard or soft, so I started out kind of in-between. I could pay attention to Ian and look for cues. That’s what lovers are supposed to do, right? Or sex partners. Maybe that was the better term. Anyway, he’d probably tell me if I needed to suck differently.

My tongue still wanted to come up and touch the thing it knew was inside my mouth, to taste it or draw it in further or whatever. I resisted.

A couple inches was plenty.

I knelt there, the end of his dick in my mouth, and me sucking away, for at least a minute before Ian spoke.

“You’re… oh… you’re not doing it right,” he said, which would have been far more credible a statement without that little moan of pleasure in there.

I did not disengage while waiting for him to elaborate. Was I sucking too hard? Not hard enough? He’d tell me. I’d be responsive. To my surprise, he actually put his hands on my head and pushed me backwards. He gave another gasp of obvious pleasure as my mouth came away with a wet popping sound.

Okay, so guys apparently liked it when you stopped sucking their dick… was there anything you could do down there that they didn’t respond to?

“I know you’ve never done this before,” Ian said. “But… have you ever seen anybody doing it?”

“I must have skipped that day in class… but it’s called ‘sucking dick’,” I said. “It seems pretty self-explanatory. I was sucking. What more do you want?”

“The sucking’s good, but… don’t just suck,” he said. “You need to move around more.”

“What, like, around the room?” I asked sarcastically. “Or just sort of fidget in place?”

“No, I mean, like, up and down,” he said. “On the shaft.” He opened his mouth and made a little back-and-forth bobbing motion to demonstrate, then appeared to realize what he was demonstrating and stopped, looking a little sheepish. I wasn’t feeling sympathetic.

“Look, I only said I’d suck your dick,” I reminded him. “Not a bunch of extra stuff.”

“You said you wanted to,” he countered. “If this is what you want, you could… you know… put some effort into it. I’ve had lots of blowjobs, and what you’ve been doing isn’t a blowjob.”

“Okay, fine,” I said, though I had some doubts as to the extent of his first hand experience with sex… or rather, his experience with sex going beyond his first hand. “What else?”

“You could do more with your tongue,” he said. “Not just on the shaft, either. You could, you know… lick my balls a bit?”

Lick his balls? What the fuck? I thought I was weird for having enjoyed it when Amaranth licked my ass… but I hadn’t requested that.

“How am I supposed to do that while my mouth is around your dick?” I asked.

“No, I mean before… or kind of alternating,” he said. “Like, switch it up a little.”

“I said I wanted to suck your dick,” I said acidly. “I’m not going anywhere near your balls.” Well, no nearer than necessary, I thought, though I didn’t say this aloud.

“Okay, whatever,” he said. “Let’s just try it again, with a bit of movement.”

“Fine, whatever,” I said.

I opened my mouth again and worked myself down to about the middle of his dick. I couldn’t quite manage this without actually using my hand to re-position it, to change the angle and guide it to my mouth as much as I guided my mouth onto it. Ian didn’t seem to mind. The thing kind of jerked and throbbed under my fingers when I touched it, even, and the slit in the tip began to ooze, just as Rorick’s had when he’d propositioned Amaranth in the hall. Seeing that made me hesitate, but of course, once I got my mouth in place I no longer had to look at it.

With more of his dick in my mouth, I had room to slide back and forth, my lips trailing over the space from about the middle of his dick to just below the tip, or head, or whatever.

“Teeth!” Ian said. “Watch the teeth!”

What a wuss. My teeth may have been the equivalent of enchanted weapons for the purpose of negating invulnerability, but it wasn’t like they were sharp, and I wasn’t biting down. If he didn’t like the feel of them dragging along his skin, he shouldn’t have insisted I move.

Nevertheless, I tried to open my jaw a bit wider and still push down with my lips. In the end, I curled them back a little to try to cushion my teeth.

That seemed to improve things a bit. Ian gave another little moan, anyway.

“More,” he said. More what? More suction? More speed? “Take more… take the whole thing…”

He was so fucking pushy. I had enough inside my mouth to move around a bit, like he’d asked. I had plenty.

Ian, apparently, did not agree. He actually put his hands around in back of my head and tried to push my head downward, while kind of thrusting forward.

Okay, that was not going to stand.

I whipped my head back to ask if he wanted to trade places, if he was such an oral sexpert… but something about the swiftness of my withdrawal, my lower lip and teeth trailing along the skin of his shaft and catching on the ridge of his tip, the upward motion as I jerked my own head up a little prematurely, the pop as his dick came free of my mouth… something in there must have really set him off, because Ian gave a shrill little cry that I could only deduce was of pleasure by dint of the fact that it sounded nothing like fear, anger, or pain… and his dick spasmed, squirting out his seed.

It didn’t take me completely by surprise. I had felt an odd jerky shuddering as I pulled myself off, and I had my mouth closed on instinct as soon as I was free of the thing.

I had never seen a guy ejaculate, even in pictures. I knew such pictures were out there, but I’d never cared to look for them. My main sources of information on the subject had been the clinical description of the act in health class, which basically just said that the male ejaculates… the rather flowery prose of the romance novels in my school library, which talked about the spilling of seed and unburdening of loins… and some really epic-level bad fiction on the ethernet.

To clarify, I’d never really gone gazing for sex stories. It’s just an inescapable facet of certain communities I’d belonged to since I was a kid, like the Mecknights fan fiction community.

Among those who love the animated adventures of the Mecknights, some of us had naturally tried our hands at creating our own version, in prose. I hadn’t done anything like that for years, but I like to think that I had been one of the better ones. Maybe if I looked at it today, I’d be surprised by how far I’ve come, but I like to think I was pretty good for my age.

At the very least, any changes I made to the canon were improvements done for legitimate story purposes, and I hadn’t felt the need to force the characters into improbable sex situations.

Ninety percent of the fan community had felt exactly that need, though. I’d started reading those kinds of stories at first because I had no idea what it was all about, and then I’d kind of go through spurts–or maybe I should say phases–of morbid curiosity, when I couldn’t not look at that kind of stuff.

I had eventually got the impression that a lot of the authors weren’t much older than I was, and that they didn’t know much more about sex than I did.

In fact, I thought it was likely that a lot of them were simply repeating things that they’d read in other people’s stories. There certainly wasn’t a lot of detail. “And then he fucked her so hard” didn’t really tell you much, if you didn’t know what “fucking so hard” was… even “shoving his dick in her pussy” didn’t really convey any nuance beyond what I learned in sex ed, anyway. There was a lot of talking about pumping and thrusting that didn’t really say anything, either.

The descriptions of the end product of sex were often a bit more luridly detailed than the actual act itself was, as that often formed the climax–so to speak–of the story… but they were still hardly an informative primer on the subject.

I mean, the first time I read a story where Sky Knight shot a “steaming load” on Annie’s face, I thought it was talking about… well, never mind what I thought it was talking about. I was like twelve, though, and already knew that sex was the absolute grossest thing in the world, even without knowing what sex was… I could have believed it was just about anything.

I figured out my mistake pretty quickly, though. The thing is, I saw that phrase a lot: “steaming load”, or “steaming cum”, or “hot, white cum”… or even “white hot cum”… as if the stuff didn’t just happen to be white and happen to be hot, but it was actually so hot that it was white from the heat.

Sometimes, it actually sizzled.

Coming back to the present… the stuff that came out of Ian and hit me on the upper lip didn’t sizzle. It didn’t steam. It simply wasn’t that hot. I mean, maybe my body was running a little bit hotter than normal, but it wasn’t even hot the way another person’s body was against mine.

It wasn’t as hot as hot breath against my skin.

His dick in my mouth had been warmer than this was.

I don’t know if it was actually cold, but it certainly felt cold compared to what I had been expecting… and when you combined that perceived coldness with the fact that it was wet and sticky, it made it seem slimy, like my face had collided with a nasty damp wall and come away with a bit of something that had been growing there.

Another word I saw thrown around a lot in those stories was “sweet”. Well, I didn’t exactly lick my lips, but I got a taste of it, and “sweet” wouldn’t be the first adjective I’d use to describe it.

You ever have a really runny nose catch you by surprise, and before you know it you’ve got a stream of watery mucous that’s gone down across your lips? And it shocks you not just because hey… snot on my mouth… but also because you can’t help catching a little taste of it and you totally weren’t expecting it to be as salty as it is?

Because, I mean, you never see those two words together: “salty snot.”

Or maybe that doesn’t really happen to other people very often… I think you pretty much have to be bawling your eyes out to have your nose running that quickly, and to not notice it before it’s dripped down over your mouth. Maybe most people are done with that kind of crying by the time they’re old enough to remember the taste and feel of it. There had been an occasion within my memory when I had, though, and honestly, the longer I dwelled on it, the more the entire sensation reminded me of it.

So, yeah, that was my first impression of having a guy come on my lips: it was like a really bad crying jag, compressed into a tiny sticky, runny ball.

Oh, and that’s the other thing… when you read about it, it sounds like guys can just produce streams and streams of the stuff, like they could fill a bucket with it. They make it sound like “swallowing an entire load” is the kind of feat that deserves heroic recognition.

Ian’s “entire load”, simply put, wasn’t that big.

Though, when I reflexively reached up and brushed it off my face, it seemed to multiply a bit… instead of getting it off my mouth and on to the back of my hand, I ended up with it on my mouth, my chin, my hand… and a bit on my shirt. Fuck. Why hadn’t I taken it off? I pulled it off in a hurry, doing my best to wipe my face and hand with it along the way. It was already dirty, after all.

I didn’t register that I was disrobing in front of Ian… and after the main event was over, even… until I’d done it and tossed the shirt aside. I’d sat back, but was still essentially down before him, between his legs, and now in my bra. He was sitting in front of me, spread-legged, pantless, and with the end of his now kind of sad and half-depleted-looking dick glistening with my spit. There was a little strand of stuff hanging off the head that I didn’t think was spit.

I suppose you can’t normally talk about somebody’s sex parts as “glistening” without making it sound, well, sexy… but this was just gross. His own… residue… aside, it wasn’t even gross in the “eww, sex… gross!” way. Mundane gross. It looked like something that had been inside somebody’s mouth and then spit out, uneaten.

What an astounding coincidence, huh?

Ian was staring at me, but it kind of felt like he wasn’t seeing me. I just sat there. Being topless, and having just sucked his dick and had his junk on my face, I felt like the floor was the right place for me. I’d let him talk first, make the next move first. I was inside my safe little submissive space.

That made me think of Amaranth, and Steff… I had expected either or both of them to be in the forefront of my mind when it came time to do the deed, but I hadn’t really been focused on anything except the subject at hand.

Or at mouth.

The whole thing had been a kind of unimpressive non-event… for me, at least. Ian had got off, so he had nothing to complain about. I sort of wondered if it would even be worth telling Steff about it. I mean, she’d know about it from Amaranth, but I couldn’t really imagine any way I could describe the encounter to Steff that would make it sound even remotely sexy or romantic. She could probably take whatever I did say and turn around and make it sound sexy, but I would have liked to have something to give her that she could work with.

When a few minutes had passed and it became apparent that Ian wasn’t going to say something first, I spoke up.

“Well,” I said, “at least I know I’m not a lesbian now.”

“Um… are you sure about that?” he asked.

It was a slow race, like one of those ones where people compete to be the last person to get a bicycle around a track without stopping or falling off… but it was still a race, damn it!

Ian had just said something. Oh, right. That meant it was my turn to say something.

Conversation.

Dialogue.

That kind of thing.

“Your room?” I managed to ask.

“Okay,” Ian said. “Yeah. Wait… um… you know what? The guy across the hall’s a volunteer in the KhKhKh. His door’s all covered with holy symbols.”

“How many is ‘all covered with’?” I asked.

Ian thought about it.

“Well, maybe just one real one, actually,” he said. “The rest are just like images on posters and shit.”

I considered. If I didn’t actually have to open the door, or touch it, then the unattended symbol shouldn’t bother me… but that meant there was at least one devout Khersian on his floor. If he wore a symbol of his faith openly, that could lead to awkward reactions even if he didn’t recognize me for what I was.

“Let’s go to my room,” I said.

“In… Harlowe?” Ian asked.

“If you want, but I actually meant my private office in the administrative building,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Of course in Harlowe. What’s the big deal? You made it out alive last time, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but… um… okay.”

“I’m kind of between roommates at the moment, anyway,” I said.

I took his hand and led him towards Harlowe. I couldn’t tell if he was still reluctant or if I was just walking too quickly, but either way I had to keep slowing down. I was eager to… to what? To get out of public view? To get it over with? To actually do it?

Ian hesitated at the threshold between the outer lobby and the first floor hallway of Harlowe Hall, as if there was a mystic barrier.

“Come on,” I said, exasperated. He gave his head a little shake and then stepped through.

I took the steps two and three at a time. We passed a few other students in the stairwell, but I didn’t give them a glance. I couldn’t have met their faces if I tried. I was starting to feel like I had writing on my face again… writing that somehow neatly and concisely conveyed at a glance exactly what it was that I was about to do, and why. I wanted sooo badly to be in my room, where nobody could see me.

Well, except for Ian. If there had been any possibility of somehow blowing him without him being present, though, I would have jumped on it.

Reaching the fifth floor only heightened my need to get out of sight, with Puddy, Sooni, and Belinda all on the same floor… and even Barley still officially claiming it as her residence. Even a chance meeting with Celia could prove disastrous, or at least embarrassing. I fervently hoped that we would run into nothing worse than catcalling.

Of course, I got my wish almost literally, in the form of a shout of “You new girlfriend ugly!” from the open door of the nekos’ room. I tugged Ian’s hand when he stopped and peered in.

“That’s Suzi,” I said. “We’re so proud of her… she can insult people in one and a half languages.”

“I think I’ve seen her before,” Ian said. “She came to the healing center when I was getting my hand fixed.”

“Her turn to drag Kai there, no doubt,” I said, pulling Ian towards my door and fumbling in my pocket for my key. The tiny, flat piece of metal was a bitch and a half to get out of the tight pocket. “It’s disgusting the way they treat her.”

“No, she was being dragged,” Ian said. “Her leg was broken, or something.”

That took me by surprise. Was Sooni more equal-opportunity in her wrath than I’d assumed? Maybe in a roundabout way, Amaranth was right and I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

“Who’s Kai?” Ian asked.

“Long story,” I said. I’d finally extracted the key and got the door open. “Or maybe not so long, but… not something I want to get into now.”

“Okay,” Ian said, though he kept looking back towards Suzi and Maliko’s room. I gave him a semi-playful shove on the butt, ushering him inside my room and closing the door.

“So,” I said, locking the door and leaning against it, as if I thought he’d try to escape… though honestly, I just wanted the support. “This is my room.”

“It’s very… utilitarian,” he said.

“Well, it is a dorm room,” I said, a little testily. The flush of irritation steadied my legs enough for me to come forward a bit, though I knew exactly what he meant. With the fridge gone, there wasn’t a single furnishing that wasn’t standard issue. The only real decorations had been Puddy’s elven centerfolds, and she’d taken them with her, as well.

“I guess,” he said, his eyes going all around the bare walls as if he thought a blank off-white poster was hiding somewhere on them. He half-consciously backed towards the other bed–Puddy’s–and almost sat down on it.

“Don’t touch that!” I said. He jumped like I’d bitten him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“It’s… not mine,” I said.

“You said you don’t have a roommate,” he reminded me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, it’s not official.”

I took him by the hands and tried to lead him over to my bed. No sense putting it off, right?

Except, he didn’t want to be led, and I didn’t want to rip his arms out of the sockets.

“What, you want to do it standing?” I asked, trying to make it sound like a joke. Did it work standing? I knew you could have sex-sex standing up, and it was an urban myth that you couldn’t get pregnant that way. Or maybe the fact that people actually had sex standing up was the myth. It seemed to me like they’d just push each other apart. I couldn’t see why oral wouldn’t… but… fuck. I really didn’t know.

“This feels weird,” he said. “You blowing me like this.”

“Well, you can try blowing me if you think it’ll be easier,” I said.

“I mean–and I am not judging you here–but it would be less weird if you were doing this because you wanted to do it for me,” Ian said.

“I did,” I said. “Kind of. Amaranth only ordered me to after I told her that.”

“That’s real… um… sweet?” he said.

“I think it’s as sweet as we’re going to get,” I said, laughing. “Under the circumstances.”

“It’s just… you did say you’d do it no matter what, since Amaranth ordered you to,” Ian said. “So wouldn’t you go down on anybody, then?”

“But that’s just it,” I said. “She ordered me to go do it to you, not anybody.”

“What if it was somebody else, though?” Ian asked.

“She wouldn’t have ordered me to, then,” I said, with absolute certainty that had faded to absolutely nothing by the end of the sentence. “I think,” I added, in the spirit of honesty.

You know, since the spirit of honesty had always served me so fucking well.

“But what if she did?” Ian asked.

“She wouldn’t,” I said, my conviction returning tenfold in the face of his skepticism. So this is what religion feels like, I thought.

“Okay, but hypothetically, if she did…”

“She wouldn’t,” I insisted.

“Fine, I believe you,” Ian said. “But, let’s just forget about the Amaranth you know for a moment, okay? Then, bear with me here… imagine… just imagine… that we have a dictionary and I look up the word ‘hypothetical’ and show you what it means…”

“Okay, hypothetically,” I said grudgingly, “if she did order me to mess around with a guy I didn’t know, then… I’d… I would…”

“You’d what?” Ian asked, a little too smugly. “What would you do, Mackenzie?”

“I’d find out what I would do when it happened,” I said. “Which it won’t.”

“You make it sound like you’ve got a choice,” he said.

“Well, yeah,” I said. Really, I did… with the lists and the safeword and all. It felt weird to say it, though. I wondered if I could tell him that maybe I sort of did, but it was rude to point it out? “Kind of.”

“If you’re just going to do what you want anyway, then why all this owner/slave shit?”

“I’m not a slave, I’m a toy,” I said. I know I sounded petulant, but I hated the word “slave”… I hated the very concept. I loathed it.

“Fine, whatever,” he said. “But why the pretense?”

“It isn’t pretense!” I shouted. Fuck. I was going to have to watch that. Rules aside, I didn’t want the whole floor knowing my business. At least, not any more than they already did. “I belong to Amaranth,” I said, a little more quietly. “I gave myself to her. She owns me. That’s real.”

“I’m sorry, I’m… just trying to understand,” Ian said.

“Do you understand the part where you get to put your thing in my mouth?” I asked, irritably… in no small part because I didn’t really understand it either. But, then, it was my life, wasn’t it? It didn’t matter if anybody else understood it.

“I don’t understand how you’re going to manage to do it if you have such a hard time even saying it,” Ian said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “I just did.”

“You said my ‘thing’,” Ian countered.

“You want me to say ‘dick’?” I said. “Dick, dick, dick! Happy?”

“Of course,” he said, with a bitter little laugh. “What in the world could I have to be unhappy with?”

“Considering you’re about to get your thing sucked, I’d say nothing,” I said.

“You did it again.”

“Dick!” I yelled. “Dick dick dick dick DICK DICK!”

“Yeah, you can scream it ’til you’re blue in the face,” Ian said. “But can you look me in the eye and tell me you want to do it?”

Fucking prick… what the hell was he playing at? We’d gone through this already outside. I’d told him a dozen times already that I wanted to suck his dick. Well, I’d tell him a hundred more times… maybe he just needed the ego boost. Maybe he couldn’t get over the fact that a girl actually wanted to do it.

Whatever.

I looked him square in the eye and said, “I want to suck your thing.”

“See?” he said. “You can’t do it.”

‘Fuck you! I just did,” I said.

“Say you want to suck my dick,” he said.

“Yeah, I want to,” I said.

“Say it,” he said. “Or I’m gone, and you have to find a new game to play.”

“I did,” I said, with a growing sense of urgency. What did he want from me? What was I doing wrong? His voice was calm. His face was composed. He was serious… he’d walk out on me in a minute. He was alone in my room with me and knew I wanted to blow him, and he was going to walk away from that. “I want to. I want to do it. I want to… I want to go down on you.”

“Tell me you want to suck my dick,” he repeated. “In those words. “

My urgency, my desperation… my anger… all melded together in a single flush of rising heat as it finally clicked. Oh, yeah. Six little words… I, want, to, suck, your, and dick. I could say any of them. I could say all of them. It was just a matter of putting them together.

A very simple matter.

A very simple matter that I would work my way through, eventually.

Ian wasn’t going to wait, though. He blew a derisive puff of air out his nostrils, shaking his head.

“That’s what I thought,” he said, and turned for the door.

He didn’t understand. I did want to… I just… he was making it too hard, he wasn’t giving me enough time. I meant to stretch out a hand to stop him, but in my desperation, both hands reached out and grabbed his shirt.

He turned around, slowly.

My mouth moved almost imperceptibly.

Sound came out, in theory.

“What was that?” he asked.

I repeated it. Six words. Six short, simple words.

“What?” he asked again.

I honestly don’t know if he was being difficult, playing coy with me… or if he really couldn’t tell what I said. I forced myself to be louder, clearer… and paid for the effort by blushing even harder. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t look near him.

“I… want… to suck your… dick,” I said.

“You can’t even look at me when you say that,” he said, not bothering to hide the scorn in his voice. It blew through me like a hot wind. Yeah, that was the word for it: hot. His scorn was hot As if I needed another sign I was completely fucked up… he’d seriously thought I was “better than this”? Boy, had he been wrong.

I forced my gaze over and then up by painful degrees, until I was staring at his stomach, and then his chest, and his neck, and then his face, and then finally my eyes met his… his damned fucking hazel eyes, so serious, so intense. I was almost hyperventilating. My stomach flip-flopped… why had today been the first time in almost a decade that I’d eaten a full breakfast?

I thought of Amaranth, who’d been so insistent that this would “fix everything”… and so sure I could manage it. Could I go back to her and tell her I’d failed? I was already certainly due the studded side of the paddle for my lapses of temper. What would I get for having told her I’d do something and then not delivering on it?

Or, would she simply slip back into the despondent spell she’d been in? That would be worse than any punishment… but all I had to do to prevent it was get Ian’s dick in my mouth. If I couldn’t do that much, I didn’t deserve to be a nymph’s toy.

I forced my eyes to meet his. I held my gaze as steady as I could, though the rest of my body shook all the more for it. I imagined Steff’s voice in my ear, whispering encouragements. Well… not exactly encouragements… but things that I found encouraging, all the same.

My face itched. Why? I don’t fucking know. It just did.

My throat felt very dry.

I swallowed.

“I want to suck your dick.”

Throughout the class, there were periodic eruptions of flame as some students managed to bring forth the fire from their logs. When that happened, there was a brief disruption as everybody “oohed” and “aahed”… though less with each progressive success… and Professor Bohd rewarded the student with a set of smaller samples to try to replicate the effect with.

Ian was still sticking with the verbal approach, though he’d gone from “Here, fire, fire!” to scrunching his eyes up really tight and chanting “fire, fire, fire,” under his breath. He didn’t seem to be getting much farther with this method. Each time somebody else managed to bring the flame, his face visibly darkened and he redoubled his efforts, though without any effect.

If determination alone could do magic, he would have had it. As it was, I wondered why he didn’t try a different approach. I also wondered if he just didn’t have the knack for it… but he was an elemental major. Why would he choose a subject like that if he didn’t know he had an aptitude for it?

I realized how little I really knew about Ian. The dancing had been pretty intimate, but we had never really talked. Even my mental image of him had been kind of sketchy. He was filed away in my brain in the folder marked “Some Boy”.

I was starting to notice him as him now, though. Like his hair, his dark blond hair. Wait, is there such a thing as dark blond? Or is that oxymoronic? Somehow, “light brown” didn’t sound right, either. Tan hair? Can somebody have tan hair? No… just… no.

Okay, so he had light brown hair. I guess his eyes were hazel. Is that what you call it when somebody’s got brown eyes but they’re not just brown? It’s like one of those things that you see in writing all the time, but my mind never knows quite how to picture it. Well, I’ll say hazel. I’m just going to say light brown hair and hazel eyes. If that’s not right, fuck it.

I might have said his hair was a little unruly, if I didn’t have my own hair to contend with every day. Next to mine, his was merely high-spirited. It wasn’t long enough to call it “long”, but just long enough that I could picture some matronly aunt of his constantly asking him when he’d get a haircut.

He wasn’t going to be knocking down doors with his shoulders any time soon, but he was taller, broader, and generally more solid-built than I was, for all that was worth.

He was tall enough that his dick poked my stomach when we danced.

I wouldn’t have expected covertly watching Ian to help me in my own invocation attempts, but by the end of the class, my periodic attempts to raise water from within earth had actually visibly darkened the surface of the soil.

If Ian had made any progress with his wood, I couldn’t see it.

I fell in beside him as he left the classroom. He seemed more relieved than surprised.

“Do you… uh… would you like to get a bite to eat?” he asked.

I giggled and thought about answering, “I do not would like to get a bite.”, but of course he wouldn’t have got it. The thought of having an in-joke with Two made me giggle harder… then I wondered if I was more laughing with her, or at her. That killed the giggles.

Ian, of course, was mystified by my giggle-fit. He chose to ignore it. Or… maybe he thought I was laughing at him? If so, he deserved major points for soldiering on.

“Or, were you going to eat with your friends?” he asked. “Because… that’s cool… too.”

“Actually, I thought I’d skip lunch today,” I said.

“You’re not hungry?”

“Not exactly,” I said, blushing madly… which must have confused the hell out of him.

“Oh, that’s right!” he said. “Dummy me. I keep forgetting, you look so hu… um. Sorry.”

It was his turn to look embarrassed. I felt sorry for him. What the hell was a guy supposed to say to a girl like me? I would have loved to actually be fully human, but humanocentric chauvinism pissed me off.

“Let’s just go over there and sit,” I said, taking him by the hand and guiding him over towards the fountain.

I liked holding hands. With Amaranth or Two, it was comforting… a little bit of a known quantity to cling to in a big unknown world. Of course, there were other emotions at work there… with Amaranth, it was the tangible reminder that I was owned, that she was in control. With Two, it was knowing that my hand made her feel safe. In either case, there was a reciprocity of feelings.

It pleased me to please them… was that so different from what I was about to propose to Ian? It seemed like it should be.

On the subject of hand-holding, Ian was still unknown, but he was goofy enough and sort-of-nice enough to be mostly safe. Also, I’d lit him on fire. I hadn’t enjoyed it, and I was far from proud of the act, but it was hard to be intimidated by somebody after that.

For whatever reason, though, I did enjoy holding hands. I giggled again… I’d just imagined myself putting it on my white list: “Spanking. Biting. Licking. Hand-holding.”

Or better yet, “Hardcore hand-holding.”

“Hardcore, elven-style, uncensored amateur hand-holding.”

I had no idea what “elven-style” hand-holding would even be, but it was hilarious.

“Um, are you okay?” Ian asked.

“You had to be there,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the fountain and pulling myself together.

“I was there,” he said, taking a seat beside me. I swung my legs up and folded them in front of me, so I was facing him. “There was here. What’s up with you today?”

“Well,” I said, “there’s… kind of something I have to ask you. Or an offer to make you, I guess you might call it.”

“Uh, I did tell you I’m not a virgin, remember?” Ian asked.

“Yeah, the information managed to stick one of the eleven hundred times you said that,” I said. “Look, this isn’t about me feeding…” I blushed again, naturally “…exactly.”

“What is it about, then?” Ian asked. There was a note of curiosity in his voice… maybe even excitement. Was it the blush? Or something else in my manner?

“Um… you remember, the first class we had together… what you said to me?” I asked.

“That you had a pretty name?”

“After that,” I said. When he didn’t say anything, I prompted him further. “You know… when you found out I was in Harlowe?”

I saw from the guilty, nervous look on his face that he did remember, though he had the decency to look like he wished he didn’t. I gave him a pointed stare and gestured for him to spit it out.

“Um… that you… probably take it in the ass?” he ventured.

“Before that,” I said, giving him the glare that he deserved.

“I… think I said a couple of different things,” he said, cautiously.

Fuck. Was he going to make me say it? My whole plan had been to lead him around to bringing it up, so that I could sort of agree to it without having to actually say it myself.

“Do you remember asking me if I wanted to go somewhere?” I asked. “In case, as you put it, I wanted to… suck your… dick?”

“Uh… maybe,” he said. “Yeah, I think I did say something like that.”

“Well,” I said. “I… I want to go somewhere. Now.”

He gaped at me.

“I’m serious,” I said.

He gaped some more.

“You’re… serious?” he asked.

“Uh, generally, that’s what people mean when they say ‘I’m serious.’,” I said, rolling my eyes and affecting a superior attitude I didn’t even begin to feel.

“After you pitched a fit over the thought of touching the hand you believed I’d jerked off with?” Ian asked.

“One, I did not ‘pitch a fit’,” I said. “Two, I think even married women who’ve had sex with the same man for years might have a little ‘Eww!’ moment if they accidentally put their hand on some of his… stuff… when they weren’t expecting it.”

“That wasn’t a ‘little moment’,” Ian said. “That was an episode… hell, it was the season one boxed set with cast commentary, the unaired pilot, and the ‘making of’ featurette.”

“Well, we’re not a married couple and I’ve never had sex,” I said, irritated. “But… remember how I also freaked out the first time you went hard? And then the second time, at the dance, you were actually, you know, rubbing up against me with it and it didn’t bother me.” I blushed and looked away. I wanted to say, “I kind of liked it,” but I didn’t.

He went crimson.

“I… didn’t think you’d noticed,” he said.

“You’ve clearly never slow-danced with a highly aroused boy,” I said, and we both laughed nervously.

“Not highly aroused, no,” he joked.

“But see, it’s all about context… during what I had imagined would be a nice, innocent walk with my boyfr… boy from class who was taking me on a date, I, you know, objected to an intrusive element. But at the dance… at that time, in that place, with your hands on my… self, it was different.”

“So… what about here, and now?” he asked.

“Well,” I said. “Here and now, I’m offering… actually, I’m offering any time and any place, as long as it’s not public and doesn’t interfere with my classes. Though, now… if not exactly here… would be good. Just, not limited to now… it’s as often as you want it, actually.”

I know I tripped over some of the words, but he was staring at me as if I were speaking some wholly incomprehensible language.

Actually, he stared as if I were a small flowering cactus that was speaking some wholly incomprehensible language.

Or as if I were a small flowering cactus that he understood was offering no-strings-attached oral sex as often as he wanted despite the fact that it was speaking some wholly incomprehensible language.

Okay, that sounds painful… so the metaphor kind of falls apart there.

“This is a joke,” he said, finally. His mouth said “joke”… his eyes said “trap”, though. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch,” I said. “I will… you know, go down on you… on demand, as often as you like.”

“This isn’t some kind of de…”

“It’s got nothing to do with my heritage or my feeding habits,” I said, guessing where he was going. “I told you what I need to feed on, and it isn’t… that.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess… I guess I can buy that you might have been willing to mess around a little at the dance, if I hadn’t fucked things up, but this… you started off being pissed off at the suggestion that non-human girls were all sl…ightly easier going than humans, and now you’re trying to tell me that you’ve decided to… well, pretty much do what you were so pissed off at me for suggesting you do in the first place.”

“It’s not something I just decided on,” I said. I’d hoped he wouldn’t actually need persuading, but it seemed like he’d at least require an explanation. “It’s… Amaranth, my… my owner. She thinks it’s a good idea. She… um… she ordered me to.”

“That’s… that’s kind of fucked up,” he said, now staring at me as if the flowering cactus was line dancing in place. “Actually, it’s really fucked up.”

“I notice your dick doesn’t share your moral objections,” I said sourly, gesturing very vaguely in the general direction of his crotch. Even a glance was enough to tell he was turned on.

“Well, it might be fucked up but it’s still hot,” he said. “You can’t come after me with a plot straight out of porn and not expect my body to respond to it.”

“So respond to it,” I said. “You want it, I want it… let’s go… um… do… something about it?”

I was aiming for sexy, but I didn’t just miss… I think I killed three innocent bystanders.

“You’re a nice girl, Mackenzie,” he said. “Uh, sort of occasionally, intermittently nice, anyway… and I kind of like you… but… the thing is, you don’t just have issues. You’ve got like, the special limited edition first issue with all four variant illusionary covers signed and bagged.”

I stared, dumbstruck.

“What?” he asked.

“You read comics?” I asked. “You actually read comics?”

He must have mistaken the enthusiasm in my response for some other vehement emotion, because he became defensive.

“I read graphic novels,” he said, snippily. “Or sequential art, if you will.”

“Do you read Sci-Force Five?” I asked.

“Ugh, why is it that every time somebody mentions that they read graphic novels, everybody always assumes they’re talking about kiddy stuff?” Ian asked. “There’s some serious work out there, being done by serious artists… it’s not all badly drawn characters rehashing the same six lame plots they’ve been using for the past thirty years.”

“I like Sci-Force,” I said icily.

“Yeah, well… issues,” he said, forcing a chuckle.

“Look, forget comics,” I said. “Do you want to go somewhere, or not?”

“I just trashed your favorite comic, and you still want to do this?”

“I still want to do it,” I said. I wasn’t going to comment on the “favorite comic” thing. The official Mecknights comics were reviled even by most fans of the show. I didn’t need to know what Ian thought of them.

“Because Amaranth said so,” he asked.

“Because Amaranth said so.”

“So… I could like, beat you up and take your lunch money, and you’d still want to suck my dick?” he asked.

“You couldn’t beat me up, I don’t have any lunch money… but in theory, yes, yes I would still do it,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what you say or… how you treat me. I have been told to do this, by the woman I’ve chosen to give myself to, and so… I will.”

I’d expected to feel embarrassed saying that, but instead I felt a swell of unexpected pleasure and pride. I will… because Amaranth said so.

I bit back a gasp when I felt… well, I’d been physically aroused before, but never in jeans as tight as I was wearing.

Yeah. Bit of an interesting sensation. I’m pretty sure guys usually know about getting hard before it happens, but if you’re a girl nobody tells you to expect things like that. I mean, all that “flower opening” shit… nobody ever writes about what happens when skintight denim is holding the flower down and getting in its way. I couldn’t imagine what it would have felt like without my panties in between… well, maybe I could a little bit.

And what had so turned me on? The thought of going down on somebody who’d just hypothetically mugged me, to please the woman I called my owner. Yeah, “fucked up” about covered it.

I guess I couldn’t really argue with Ian… except for, you know… all the arguing I was doing… with him.

“You can barely bring yourself to say it,” he said bluntly. “But you’re telling me you’re willing to do it.”

I closed my eyes and nodded.

“Khersis, I feel like I’ve fallen into some bizarre chaos plane, where cute girls… cute, possibly lesbian girls are ordered by their naked sex goddess girlfriends to perform wanton carnal acts upon me, or whatever, but… maybe I belong in this plane, because here’s me saying no,” he said.

“Why?” I asked. I sounded a little desperate. Okay, I sounded a little whiny… but this was supposed to be the easy part. Me offering had been a little difficult… actually delivering would be next to impossible… but… guy… free blowjob… blowjobs, even. Plural! It seemed like it should have been automatic. “Isn’t this, like, every guy’s dream? I know I’m not the hottest person in the world…”

“It’s not that… it’s nothing like that,” Ian said. “And honestly, it is… if not every guy’s fantasy, then at least it’s one of mine… but… the thing is, I’m better than this. I can get girls without having somebody tell them to throw themselves at me. I know it. Even though there’s totally a voice in the back of my head going ‘Dude, no, you totally aren’t better! Take her! Take her!’, I’ve still got to say no, because not only am I better than this, but so are you,” he said. “I don’t understand a lot about what’s going on in your life… but I understand that this is wrong, and if you can’t manage to put a stop to it, then I will. No, Mackenzie. I’m not going to take advantage of you.”

He was so earnest.

I wanted to hit him.

“Well… fuck you,” I said instead, sliding sideways off the side of the fountain and getting to my feet.

Fact: it doesn’t matter how tenuous, how nebulous, how vaporous, how other-adjective-ous your beliefs are, nothing on Mama Khaele’s mostly bluish world will make them crystallize into adamantine hardness faster than having somebody looking down on you for them. If Steff had been there, I know she would have had some artful, articulate, well-thought-out… uh… word type thing to say… but she wasn’t there, and I hadn’t spent years thinking about my sexuality or what love was or what choice meant.

I didn’t honestly have much going on besides my anger.

There were some words I could manage, though, artful or not.

“Fuck you,” I repeated. “Fuck you, if you think I’m going to let you sit there and judge me.”

“What do you mean, judge…”

“You’re not going to ‘take advantage of me’?” I repeated. “If I had managed to offer at the dance, or I came up to your room to watch you fuck around with your lute, or got drunk at a party and came on to you, you’d let me do whatever I was willing without a second thought, and you know it.

“Yeah, maybe,” Ian said. “Probably… okay, definitely. But this isn’t ‘willing’.”

“Why not? Nobody’s holding a knife to my throat,” I said. “Nobody’s charmed my mind. The only difference is that I gave my consent to Amaranth instead of to you.”

“It isn’t supposed to work like that,” he said.

“How is it supposed to work?” I asked. “Am I supposed to be so damned overcome by your fucking gentlemanly nature and concern for my Khersis-forsaken virtue that I fall to my knees and blow you anyway in appreciation?”

“Well, no,” Ian said quickly, though there was something in his eyes that told me he had, on some level, been expecting to get some kind of bonus points for “doing the right thing.” Well, fuck that. “But, you know, if you did, at least you’d be doing it for the right reason.”

“Says who?” I demanded.

Up until this point, I’d kept my voice pretty level, pretty much under control. Now the volume was raising. Part of me realized I would be drawing attention… making a scene, even… but I didn’t let myself think about that. I forced the world to shrink until it was just Ian and me.

“Society!”

“Well, maybe I’ve chosen a different standard to apply,” I said.

“You didn’t pick your standard, you let somebody hand it to you,” he said.

“And you came up with yours all on your own, I suppose?” I asked. “Why isn’t it okay for me to do this to make somebody else happy? It’s a fucking blowjob! You wouldn’t have any objection to getting off on it yourself, I imagine, so what’s wrong with sharing the fun? What’s so wrong about me getting off a little on the thought that she’s getting off on you getting off, or whatever?”

“It’s weird,” Ian said. “It’s not supposed to work like that.”

“Who the fuck says?” I demanded. I was practically screaming at him now… the floodgates had been opened. There was the thought in the back of my head, I’m going to need major punishment after this. I didn’t exactly ignore it. I actually sort of clung to it, but in a way that kept it in the back. “Who is it that gets to decide which desires are okay to have and which ones aren’t?”

“You’re embarrassing yourself, Mackenzie,” Ian said.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “If I was embarrassed, I’d be turned on more.” That wasn’t the sort of thing I had an easy time admitting, of course, but anger made the words come easier. I said it to shock, and from the look on Ian’s face, it worked. “Yeah, humiliation does it for me, apparently… one of the many things I’ve learned since coming here. Isn’t university life so marvelously broadening?” I laughed. I’m sure I sounded batshit insane, but I was pretty sure I’d just inadvertently quoted Amaranth. “In fact, if I blew you right now, the fact that I was being forced to pleasure somebody I was so fucking pissed at would probably make me enjoy it even more. You want to tell me how messed up that sounds? Maybe that’ll do something for me, too.”

“You know how messed up it sounds.”

“I’d say ‘last chance’, except… it’s not,” I said. “Until Amaranth says otherwise, I’m available… my mouth is available… whenever you want it. Room 417, by the way, if you need to look me up. It’s on the top floor.”

I turned and started to walk away. I tried to put a little extra sway into my hips, to make what Steff called my “cute boy butt”–not that I really thought Ian would be interested in anything that could be described as a “boy butt”–wiggle a little. I suppose I probably really looked like I’d injured myself somehow.

I didn’t have to waddle far.

“Mackenzie, wait!” he said.

I turned around. Slowly. I didn’t bother trying to figure out how the hell one turns sexily. Slowly was good enough.

“Okay,” he said. “I mean… um… do you still want to do it, after all that?”

I gave him a dirty look. Hadn’t he been listening?

“Right,” he said. He took a deep breath. “Okay… let’s… let’s do this then.”

He’d agreed.

He had agreed.

Shit.

What the fuck was I supposed to do now?

Two was coming out of her room at about the same time I did, dressed in the fuzzy white sweater with matching bow that had touched off Amaranth’s interest in dressing her up cutely.

“Hi, Mack,” she said. “Ready for breakfast?”

“Hi, Two… I’m not going today,” I said.

“You are supposed to eat,” Two said, her eyes widening. “Amaranth said so. Your owner said so.”

“I’m out of punches,” I said. “And I don’t have any money, so…”

“You’re supposed to eat. We’re both supposed to eat,” she said, with the same fierce, earnest insistence of one preschooler telling another that they’re not a’posed to cross the street. “Go to the lounge. I will make us breakfast.”

I stared at her. Two was telling me what to do?

“Go!” she repeated, pointing.

I went.

Feejee was sitting on the couch with the human (or human-looking, anyway) guy I’d seen her with at the dance. They were talking quietly together, their heads bowed in low, as I came in. Feejee was wearing a studded leather jacket that I assumed was the boy’s. With her legs and other lower parts in their scaly form, she would have fit the human definition of decency, if the jacket was zipped up. She seemed to have toned down the sheer amount of sunken treasure that she wore at one time, too, though I noticed that she’d had her nipples done with little gold barbells. Her boyfriend gave me a weird look… I guess I’d stared a little too long at the new additions.

“Hi, Mack,” Feejee said, in a fairly neutral way. The guy’s eyes went a little wide. “This is Rick.”

“Uh, hi,” I said. I sat down on the chair. “Nice to meet you.”

“Hey,” he replied.

The TV was on, showing the morning news. Some self-proclaimed expert was talking about the supposedly looming peak loot crisis and how it wasn’t really as bad as everybody said. The sound was down really low. I don’t think Feejee and Rick had really been watching it.

It hit me that it was a little bit early for visiting and wondered if he’d spent the night… and where Celia had been, if that was the case. It was against the rules for boys to be in the girls’ dorms after hours, but I wasn’t so incredibly naive as to think that particular rule was never broken. I mean, I was pretty sure Steff spent most of her nights on the boys’ side.

Of course, it was always possible that the administration just didn’t care what the “Harlowe Harlots” got up to at night.

Rick kissed Feejee, in a kind of lingering way, though with out a lot of pressure or contact. It was kind of interesting. I wasn’t any kind of an expert on such things, but I’d kind of divided kissing into two categories, one with quick pecks and lip-brushes, and the other, full-on making out like what I’d done with Amaranth. This wasn’t really either. It was both intimate and sweet… and I was staring again… or still… and Rick caught me at it again.

“Fuck you gawkin’ at?” he demanded, starting to rise up off the couch.

“Oh, leave her,” Feejee said, tugging on his sleeve. “I don’t think she gets out much. Let’s go get breakfast, okay?”

“Fine,” he said. “You plan on covering your tits?”

“No… I like my tits.”

They bickered about this as they went away down the hall. I felt bad… they’d looked pretty cozy before I walked in. I wondered if Rick had given Feejee his jacket just to get her to cover up. I guess dating a mermaid “in the natural state” must be a pretty common male fantasy, but the reality of having a lover whose hidden treasures were constantly on display was probably grating.

That made me think of Ian. I suppose if he told his friends he was dating what he might describe as a “bisexual bloodthirsty demoness”, they’d all have a picture of me that looked a lot more like I had at the dance than my everyday attire… with bonus points if he mentioned my apparent S&M tendencies or the fact that I was the “sex toy” of a nymph.

That might lead to a lot of high-fives and congratulations… but was he actually comfortable with any of it? I mean, I wasn’t comfortable with a lot of it myself.

Two arrived in a bit, with a basket from which she produced a pair of skillets, a carton of eggs, some little cartons of milk, along with salt, pepper, and some other seasonings.

“How do you like your eggs?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I hadn’t had anything cooked to order for years… and in the intervening time, most of what I’d eaten had been snacks and treats. Regular food prepared for meals hadn’t been high on my priority list for a couple reasons, including limited opportunity. Then, I had a flash of memory… my mother, sliding a fried egg on her own plate, and spooning scrambled eggs on mine. “Scrambled. I like them scrambled.”

“Do you like pepper?” she asked.

“I really don’t know,” I said. The image in my head was little fluffy yellow clouds, without any bits or spots on them… but I really didn’t know if I would have preferred them with pepper, or if I would like them with pepper now.

“I will put pepper on some of them so you can try it and if you like it you can put pepper on the rest,” Two said. I noticed she had been smiling the whole time. Her smile had a kind of fixed quality about it, that on most people would probably have meant it was fake. It wasn’t a bad smile, for all that. A fixed smile was better than her normal default expression, the blank stare.

I shut off the TV and moved over to the table. Two bustled about the small counter and the stovetop. She radiated genuine happiness. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she started to sing. Actually, I would have been shocked as hell… but it would have fit somehow.

She pulled out a stick of butter and began cutting squares off of it to sizzle in the pan.

“You didn’t get all that at the corner store, did you?” I asked. I hadn’t gone in there yet, but my impression was that they carried mostly snack foods and instant meals… warmable burritos, noodle cups, and stuff like that.

“Just the milk,” Two replied. “The rest is from my room.”

“Why do you have eggs and butter in your room?” I asked.

“For baking,” she said. “For my classes.”

I felt a sudden shot of guilt.

“Won’t you need them for your class, then?” I asked.

“I will have money to buy more things when I start getting paid for working at White House in the evenings and on the weekends,” Two said.

“You got a job?” I asked.

“Yes,” Two said. “I work at White House in the evenings and on the weekends. I start next weekend.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, realizing as the words left my mouth that I was about to do a face plant smack in the middle of a terrible cliché.

“You didn’t ask,” Two replied, on cue.

“That really is awesome,” I said. “But… you know… if you try it and don’t like it, and have enough money to pay for what you need, quit.”

“Okay,” she said.

I watched her crack eggs into a bowl, add milk and some kind of little herbs, and whisk it around a bit with a fork before pouring it into the buttered-up skillet. As soon as the eggs were started, she pulled out a pack of bacon and began adding strips to the other skillet. She reached into the basket and then turned around to face me.

“This is for dessert,” she said, putting two yogurt cups on the table, one banana and one vanilla. She put them sort of in the middle, but I noticed that she put the banana one a lot farther from me. “You can have whichever one you like.”

“I’ll take the vanilla,” I said, reaching and pulling it closer. She’d already turned back to mind her skillets.

In no time at all, she’d served me up a plate with a single strip of bacon and a couple spoonfuls of scrambled eggs… one bit with pepper on it. I tried it. The taste was strong and strange to me… I passed on peppering up the rest. Whatever she’d used for seasoning was really good, though. I knew within a single bite that my mother hadn’t used it, but it was still good.

I finished the eggs pretty quickly. The bacon I had to eat more slowly. It was crispy and salty, with the flavor of the bacon itself strong beneath the salt. I liked it, but the salt was a bit much. I hadn’t actually intended on eating the yogurt… or not right then and there, anyway… but I opened it up anyway, to have another flavor to cut the taste.

“Hey!” an unfamiliar voice said from the direction of the door, though I hadn’t heard anybody approaching. I turned in my chair and craned my head around to see Honey and Hazel, the two burrow gnomes, coming into the lounge. One of them–I admit I didn’t really know which was which–was coming onward with comparatively long strides, an indignant look on her round, ruddy face. “Where do you get off makin’ that thing cook for you, then? She ain’t the bloomin’ maid, you know!”

“Leave it, Haze,” the other one–Honey, by process of elimination–said, grabbing hold of the back of her blouse and trying to actually physically restrain her.

“I didn’t… I mean…” I stammered, not actually frightened or intimidated by the diminutive girl’s show of bluster… but terrified that somebody could think I’d take advantage of Two’s subservience.

“I like making breakfast for my friends,” Two said very simply, dumping another small portion of eggs onto my plate along with a slice of bacon. The distraction had prevented me from refusing.

“Oh!” Hazel said, pulling out a chair beside me and climbing into it. “Well, that’s a different matter… you know, I’ve always considered myself a friend of every living thing, and the tallfolk in particular.”

“Haze…” Honey said warningly.

“I think it was very friendly of you to try to stick up for me,” Two said, handing her a plate with three strips of bacon and some eggs on it.

“How much did you cook?” I asked.

Two shrugged.

“I’ve always made large portions,” she said. “And I didn’t know how much you would want. I would not have liked to have too little.”

“Always a sensible attitude, that,” Hazel said. The table was not proportioned for someone of her height, and she held the plate over her lap as she ate. “Did you know this mad place only sets out three meals a day? We’ve been havin’ to lug ourselves downstairs for the spread they lay out and then hike over to the dinin’ hall just to keep body and soul together. You’d think they’d let you back in if you show up for lunch before and after a class, it allegedly bein’ all you can eat, and all… but they won’t even let you show your card twice for what they consider ‘the same meal.’ You pay cash, of course, and nobody minds, but that gets expensive.”

“It isn’t that far to the dining hall and a little exercise does you no harm, Hazel Willikins,” Honey said with a surprising amount of vehemence. It was the most words I’d ever heard out of her since she’d introduced herself on the first night, but I got the feeling that the only thing she found worth complaining about was complaints.

“Would you like some food?” Two asked her.

“I wouldn’t like to impose, thank you all the same,” Honey said.

“What’s the idea here, anyway?” Hazel asked. She jerked a thumb at me. “You after teachin’ her to eat people food so’s she won’t go around eatin’ people, then?”

“I don’t eat people,” I said.

“We are both learning how to be people,” Two said. “We teach each other.”

“That’s a bit like two people copyin’ off each other for a test, isn’t it?” Hazel asked.

“Miss Hazel!” Honey said, emphasizing each syllable in turn. “Honestly, you’re as bad as that giant girl… I will not stand here and listen to your rudeness any longer!”

“Pull up a chair, then,” Hazel said.

Honey harrumphed… I mean, she really, actually harrumphed in a way that I previously thought only dignified old matron characters on TV shows did… and then turned and stumped out, muttering loudly.

“Giant girl?” I asked Hazel, confused.

“You know, your lady… or your ex, or whatever,” she said. “Need a bloomin’ score card around here. It’s just like the stories on the telly. That Puddy… she’s part giant, or didn’t you know?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess I did,” I said. Giant blood was merely one of Puddy’s wild claims about her ancestry. Given that she was a few inches shorter than me, I had found this hard to credit… but I guess she was a bit more imposing, from the shirelings’ point of view.

Actually, on the subject of things that were incredible, it was hard to believe that Hazel and Honey were the same pair that had looked so petrified at the first floor meeting. Hazel had come out of her shell in a big way. Honey had, too… just with an odd sense of propriety intact.

But… I guess people can change in a week or so, can’t they?

“Well, thanks for the bit of tuck, Miss Two… Miss Mack,” Hazel said, lifting her plate up and setting it on the table, then clambering down off the chair and heading for the door. I found it interesting that she used the formal address, even with her otherwise relaxed manners. It seemed that though you could take the gnome out of the shire, you couldn’t take the shire out of the gnome.

“You’re welcome,” Two said, collecting the empty plate. I handed her mine, too, though it still had most of the eggs and half of the bacon. She dumped the contents of the plate along with most of the rest of the eggs into a small container, which had her name written on a strip of paper taped to the side. I noticed she spelled her name in runes, just as they appeared on her forehead. Having taken care of everybody else and put the dirty dishes in the sink, she got herself a plate of eggs and the remaining bacon and sat down.

“Did your maker call you Two because of how your runes looked?” I asked Two. Since meeting her, I’d actually been trying hard not to dwell on the significance of her name being a number, as it seemed a very dehumanizing thing and could have some troubling implications. This explanation seemed a little kinder, though.

“My maker didn’t call me anything,” she said, and that big static smile faltered. “But some of the other equipment had labels and I thought ‘Two’ was mine. I was mistaken… but then I needed a name, and it was the only one I had for myself.”

“Other equipment.” The contents of my stomach decided to start a no-holds-barred wrestling tournament. I pushed away dire thoughts of what Two’s life must have been like before she was freed and focused on the present.

“Do you w…ould like another name?” I asked. Okay, it wasn’t grammatically perfect, but it got the idea across while avoiding a certain four letter word.

She shook her head.

“No, I do not would like another name,” she said, with so much childlike seriousness that I almost laughed. I didn’t. I felt bad about wanting to, though.

“Okay,” I said. “Two it is.”

I stopped and thought. I was considering something that I had once thought to be completely out of bounds: talking to Two about my sex life. But, she’d given strangely insightful advice before… and it might be that she enjoyed being asked… and anyway, I had nobody else to talk to. I supposed I could try to ask about a more general situation…

“Two, can I ask you something?”

“Yes,” she said.

“If you’re told to do something…”

I stopped. Of course, if she were told to do something, she’d do it… and, assuming the action itself didn’t distress her, she’d be happy to have something to do.

“Yes?” she prompted, when I hadn’t said anything for a while.

“Well, it’s just… Amaranth has told me to do something…”

“Do it,” she said, quickly and without thought.

“Because she’s my owner?” I asked.

“Yes,” Two said. She blinked at me a couple times, and then added, “and because it makes you happy to please her.”

“Okay, yeah, I guess it does,” I said. “But… is that actually a good reason to do something? To make somebody else happy?”

I felt like an insensitive jerk as soon as I asked this, as I’d basically called into question Two’s entire existence… but she didn’t seem to take it that way.

“If it makes you happy to do so then I do not see why that is worse than any other way of making yourself happy,” she said.

“Aren’t I supposed to do things that make me happy for myself?” I asked.

I watched Two think about this, her face going through its cute little contortions for longer than usual. Finally, she said, “If you only want things for yourself because you are ‘supposed to’ only want things for yourself, then I do not see how that is any different or better than wanting to please somebody else.”

I sighed.

“That makes sense… kind of… but I don’t know if it applies to this specific situation,” I said.

“What is this specific situation?” Two asked.

“I’d… rather not talk about it with you,” I said.

“It’s a sex thing,” Two said, nodding knowingly.

I smiled.

“Okay, yeah, it is,” I said. “A sex thing. Amaranth told me to do a sex thing.”

“I think you have done sex things with her before,” Two said. I put my head down on the table. This was not a conversation I wanted to have… but I was having it. “My understanding of sex things is that they are frequently done for pleasing other people.”

“Well…” I said, lifting my head but not able to meet her gaze. “This… sex thing… isn’t with Amaranth.”

“Is it with Steff, who is a girl?” Two asked.

“No,” I said. “This boy… Ian.”

“Do you not would like to do sex things with him?” she asked.

Damn it… had I permanently quirked her vocabulary?

“I don’t know,” I said. “I almost did before… I think I probably would eventually, anyway.”

“But you don’t would like to now,” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said again. “It feels weird to be doing so because Amaranth told me to.” I stopped, and considered. “Actually, it mostly feels weird that it doesn’t feel weirder. It made sense when I agreed to it, but again, I feel like I’m supposed to want to do something like this for my own pleasure.”

“I think a lot of sex things are done for somebody else’s pleasure,” Two said.

“I think this particular ‘sex thing’ is only done for somebody else’s pleasure,” I said wryly. “But usually for the person it’s being done to.”

“Do you think Ian won’t enjoy it?” Two asked.

“I don’t know how crazy he’ll be about the idea,” I said. “But… I think he could learn to live with it.”

“I do not see the problem,” Two said. “If it pleases Amaranth and it pleases you and it pleases Ian…”

“It’ll probably please Steff, too,” I said, mostly to myself.

“She’s a girl,” Two said.

“Yeah… uh… I know,” I said.

“Do you like pleasing Steff?” she asked. Again, I blushed. She apparently took that as a yes. “So, you can do something that will please Amaranth, and Steff, and Ian, and it will please you to please Amaranth and Steff and very possibly it will please you to please Ian…”

“It’s not supposed to work that way, though,” I said. “I’d only be doing it because Amaranth ordered me to.”

“Which is something else that pleases you,” Two said, nodding.

“It’s not supposed to be like that,” I said.

“What’s it supposed to be like?” she asked.

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“I really don’t know,” I said. “But thanks for listening, anyway… and for breakfast.”

“Thank you for talking to me,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

She was already awake, and looking at me. I remembered her telling me before that she hardly ever slept. She’d made it sound like sleeping at night… especially in a bed with blankets and everything… was a terrific indulgence for her. I smiled. Hadn’t she said something about doing this once a week?

I thought of Amaranth telling me I had to ask for the things I wanted… advice that seemed sounder and saner the more time piled up between me and the incident wherein she’d first tried to instill it in me. Still, “I want…” seemed a little out of place in our peculiar relationship.

“I would like to kiss you,” I said.

Amaranth appeared to mull this over. She made a big show of tilting her head, rolling her eyes back and forth, and biting the corner of her lip… just like Two, except for the lip thing. That was pure Amaranth. She might not even have realized she was doing it, in the middle of her exaggerated show of thought. It was adorable.

“Okay,” she said, finally, and rolled over on top of me.

Amaranth was bigger than me in every dimension, but she was wonderfully soft, and of course she couldn’t have crushed me if she tried. I had only asked for a kiss… I would have been satisfied with just a kiss… but this was more. This was a marriage of lips and tongues and hearts and for a moment… for a few minutes, even… the fact that I was naked in bed with another girl who was also naked in bed with me seemed like the most natural thing in the world. The fact that my blood was filthy poison and she was the metaphorical daughter of a goddess? Didn’t matter… didn’t matter a tiny little bit.

We were two girls, kissing.

Two girls, in love.

Two girls, naked in bed together.

Two girls… naked… in bed… together.

“Well, that honestly lasted longer than I expected,” Amaranth said ruefully, after I abruptly broke away, jerked myself to the side and pretty much slammed my back against the wall in a–purely reflexive–attempt to put as much space between our bodies as I could. She sat up, heaving herself back out from beneath the blankets as she did so, her gloriously formed, immense breasts coming into view.

“Sorry,” I said, still cringing under the covers… not ready to expose my own nudity to the world at large, or even the portion thereof which existed inside my room.

“It’s okay, honey,” Amaranth cooed, coaxing me over to lay my head next to her thigh, where she began to stroke my hair as I snuggled in against her soothing warmth. “It’s okay. You’ve come really far just since last weekend. I’m… I’m proud of you. I want you to remember that, no matter what.”

There it was again. Her voice had turned sad. My blood went cold. With some effort, I stayed right where I was, my face against the side of her leg, and let her keep stroking my hair. Maybe she’d have an easier time talking about this, in this position… her maternally, protectively affectionate… me, submissive and seeking reassurance.

“Amaranth?” I said softly, making it a question.

“Hmm hmm?” she murmured.

“What are you so afraid of?” I asked her, trying to let her hear the confusion and fear I felt at her talk of “for now” and “no matter what.”

Her hand stopped moving, froze in place mid-stroke.

“Nothing, baby,” she said. Baby? I tried to remember if she’d ever called me that before. “Honey,” sure… everybody was “honey” to Amaranth, though. It must have been something about our respective positions. “Nothing. I just… I’ve… I did something really stupid, and I can’t see anyway out of it that’s not going to hurt… more than one person.”

This worried me. “Stupid” had practically become a dirty word to Amaranth in the wake of the Mechan incident, and she’d almost bent over backwards to get Two to say she was smarter than me… now to call herself, or even something she’d done, stupid… well, it worried me.

“What did you do?” I asked. “We can fix it, whatever it is.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I can’t see any way it can be fixed…”

“We can try, if I know what it is,” I said.

I heard her sigh. I felt her tense. I started to rise, but her hand gently pushed my head down. I meekly accepted the position. Whatever would help her come out and get it over with…

“Look, I’m just going to come out and say it,” she said. “The thing is, I think I could stand to lose you… I could stand almost anything… as long as you don’t yell at me again. So… when I’ve finished telling you, if you don’t want to be mine any more… if you never want to see me again, just… say so, and I’ll leave. Only, please don’t yell at me… I couldn’t bear it. If you feel like you have to yell, just… just… tell me to go, and I will.”

“I’d never…”

“You don’t know!” Amaranth said, and the desperate certainty in her voice caught me off guard. “Promise me, okay? Promise me no yelling… if you can’t stand to say anything else, just tell me… just… just say your safeword, and… that’ll be it. I’ll go.”

“Amaranth…” I said, imploringly.

“Promise!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said… those two words, between us, were a stronger promise than “I promise.”

“Okay,” she said, and took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said again, and then a third time. “Okay. Um… you know how you get freaked out over what you consider ‘real sex’? Well, yeah, I guess you do… anyway… um… there’s that, and then there’s how I think it’s cute when you do something really naive? None of that… none of that’s the stupid thing I did, but I want you to understand why… I mean, how things ended up this way. I honestly thought it would be for the best, you know? I thought it would be a fun surprise and maybe it would even help you get over a few things… but then… I thought I was being so clever, you know? And then I started to learn better… about sex out here in the real world, about how you take surprises… and dear goddess, this is just going to crush poor Steff…”

“What’s going to crush her?” I asked, alarmed.

“She just thinks you’re the most… I mean, I think she only got over the Mechan thing so quickly because she can’t help but think of you as a wonderfully accepting person,” Amaranth said. “When she finds out…”

“Finds out what?” I asked. I thought I was a pretty accepting person.

“And then, there she was at lunch yesterday… looking over your black list and looking for loop… holes… oh, sweet Mother!” she exclaimed, with an almost frightening amount of relief in her voice. “Why didn’t I think of this sooner?”

“What?” I asked. She’d changed direction so quickly I almost had whiplash. “What did you think of?”

She laughed.

“I know how to fix this!” she said.

“Fix what?” I asked.

“Never mind that, baby… in fact, forget eveything I just said, okay?” she said.

“But… you didn’t tell me anything,” I pointed out.

“I said never mind that,” she said. “Now, when you were making your black list, you laid it out so that nobody could penetrate your pussy or your butt, but you exempted your mouth.”

“Uh, yeah?” I said, not sure what the big deal was. I’d mainly been making sure I didn’t write myself out of making out. “Making out”… “horny”… it seemed like I was using all kinds of words these days that I’d never pictured myself using before.

“So… the door’s still open for blowjobs,” she said. She giggled. “So to speak.”

“Um… I suppose,” I said. “But… it’s just you and Steff, so…”

“And Ian,” she said. “You’re planning on still dating him, right?”

I lifted my head.

“Well, I guess. I mean, I actually was going to give him a… you know, a… blowjob,” I said, spitting out the word. “At the dance. Or try to. I don’t know if I could have gone through with it, but we were dancing… and he had his hands on me, and I could feel his… thing… up against me, and it was just, the heat of the moment, you know? Plus, Steff had let slip that you’d prefer it if I… did something… for him, and it was like, I wasn’t going to have sex-sex with him, but oral seemed like something I could handle. At the time, anyway.”

Amaranth stared down at me, an expression of wonder on her face.

“You were really going to?” she asked.

“I was going to try!” I said, wanting to make that distinction clear. I sat up, drawing my knees up in front of me. “But then I asked him if he was a virgin, and he freaked out, because…” I stopped. I hadn’t told Amaranth about my dietary needs, and didn’t plan on it. With Ian, it had seemed necessary to get him to accept me. Amaranth already accepted me. Why risk tampering with that? “Because he thought it had something to do with my feeding.” There. Truth. “So he kind of… flipped. We sorted things out, and had a nice evening, but the mood kind of shifted.”

“But… still… you really do owe that boy something for his trouble,” Amaranth said, and there was a desperate sort of insistence in her voice, as if she were trying to convince herself along with me. She got up off the bed and started to pace. “I mean, I’m given to understand that this is how dates normally work, in the modern age. You’ve got class with him this morning?”

I nodded and started to open my mouth, but she turned with lightning speed and cut me off with a shushing finger on my lips.

“Mack, listen carefully: I want you to offer Ian a blowjob,” she said. “In fact… in fact… offer to blow him whenever he wants! Well, not in class, obviously… and not in public. That takes care of your black list limitations, right?” I was still restrained from answering, but somehow, she didn’t seem to be entirely talking to me. She gave a nervous laugh. “The first time, it might be hard… well, ‘it’ should be hard every time, referring to his penis… but I mean, the act will get easier each time, and you’ll become comfortable and familiar with… well… and you can stop worrying about being a lesbian, because from your point of view, this will prove you’re not, right? Right! So… everybody wins. Got it?”

She unshushed me.

“I’m not sure…” I started to say, but her finger came back up.

“I’m giving you an order, Mack,” Amaranth said, looking down the length of her arm at me. The look was even more imposing for the fact that I was sitting and she was standing, never mind how high the bed was. “I don’t think I’m honestly asking that much. I mean, the last I heard you wanted to keep dating Ian, anyway, and sex of some kind is the ultimate goal of dating, right? I mean, without sex, you’re just kind of kidding yourselves. Besides that, it’s for your own good… for everybody’s good, actually, and I can’t explain how or why right now, but you either trust me or you don’t. So, when I take my finger off, you can either say ‘Yes, ma’am’… or… you can say your safeword… and then… I guess I’ll just have to figure something else out.”

From the way she said the last part, I had the feeling she wasn’t about to go back to unburdening her soul about whatever was troubling her even if I dug in my heels against her “solution” to the unknown problem. She took a deep breath and lowered her hand. Words tumbled out of my mouth.

“But I don’t under…”

The finger came back up so quickly, she effectively smacked me in the mouth. I don’t think she meant it that way, but there was an almost angry glint in her eyes as she looked over the edge of her glasses. She shook her head to clear it away, and I saw a note of pleading. Then, she composed herself a bit more and there was nothing but firm resolution.

“We’re going to try this… one… more… time,” she said, in as stern a voice as she’d ever used. “Close your eyes and think very carefully about what you want to do. When you’re ready to answer, open them.”

I closed my eyes, but I could still feel her gaze. I thought about it. Ian was nice, sort of. Actually, if I was going to be honest with myself… if Ian hadn’t freaked out when I asked him if he was a virgin, I probably would’ve gone through with it. As freaked as I’d been to touch his hand when I thought he’d been getting himself off, the context of the music and the dancing and his hands on me had made all the difference… and if I was willing to do it in one situation, I could be willing to do it again.

So, no… she really wasn’t asking that much, when I looked at it that way. At the very least, she wasn’t talking like she expected me to turn around and… and dump her, or something… any more.

I had been almost willing to do it at the dance, anyway… I still couldn’t find much enthusiasm for the idea, in general… but… Amaranth wanted me to. The idea, for whatever reason, seemed to please her beyond the extent which everything sexual normally did.

Also, she was right… it would be great to settle the lesbian question once and for all… and for the answer to be “no.” I had accepted being in love with a woman. I had accepted that another woman could make me incredibly horny with just her voice. I still would really rather not be a lesbian, if it turned out that I could help it.

And, Also, Amaranth wanted me to. That one was worth mentioning again… over and over again. Amaranth wants me to. Amaranth, had in fact, ordered me to.

And Steff… I knew what Steff would say about me, bound to give some kind of pleasure to a boy on demand… what she would call me. My face burned. My heart thumped. Oh, yeah… Steff would definitely let me know how she felt about this development. I could think about that what while I did it.

It went without saying that Ian would have little reason to complain.

Was all that what Amaranth meant when she’d said that everybody wins?

I couldn’t really see a downside… other than, you know, the part where I put my mouth on the thing a guy pees with and get his stuff either all over or inside me.

But, was I being foolishly squeamish there? I knew… I knew… that my body was naturally filthy. Could a girl with demon blood possibly have any excuse to be grossed out by contact from anything that came from a fully human boy? If anything, I’d probably be cleaner at the end than when I started. It might not feel that way, but I would just have to tell myself any feeling of extra dirtiness was in my head.

I opened my eyes. If I hadn’t already made up my mind, the look on Amaranth’s face would have convinced me… her eyes, so big and round like Two’s, watery and pleading… her other hand up by her own mouth, where she chewed on her thumb in a nervous gesture that went beyond the fits of lip-biting I’d occasionally seen from her. She needs me to do this, I realized. I didn’t know why, but it was clearly true.

Very slowly, she pulled her finger away.

I lowered my face to the floor and said, softly but clearly, “Yes… ma’am.”

She let out a gasp and a squeal and then practically tackled me.

“Oh, Mack, you won’t regret this!” she said.

“Can I ask why?” I asked. “Why is this so important?”

“Don’t you worry your head about that… just know that the problem I was so worried about will all but take care of itself now. It’s just part of the miraculous nature of life that whatever the problem is, sex can be the solution… even when the problem is also sex,” she said. She pulled me close, burying my head in her chest “Oh, I could get down on my knees and thank Mother Khaele… but I won’t. I’ll save that for later, when you’re not around.”

That thought seemed to sober her a bit, and she loosened her grip. I stood on my toes and tried to return the embrace in a more equal fashion.

“It can’t be easy, having to watch yourself around me,” I said.

“We all make compromises for the ones we love,” Amaranth said. She released me, and began to pace excitedly. “Anyway, Mother Khaele told me I don’t need to pray all the time to show my devotion, only for the really big stuff… and this, well, it’s big. It’s huge.” She laughed again. “You might not understand it now, but… well… this will change everything, if it works. Which I’m sure it will. I mean, I can’t imagine anybody not enjoying cock after they’ve got a couple blowjobs under their belt…”

I tried to imagine why it would be so important to her for me to “enjoy cock.” I wasn’t liking any of the possibilities… most of which only just barely qualified as “possible.”

“You don’t need me to start helping you with your ‘work’ for some reason, do you?” I asked. This one seemed the most likely.

“Oh, no, nothing like that,” she said. “I mean, you’re always welcome… everybody is… but I could hardly expect it of you.”

“So why…”

She shushed me.

“No more questions,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Well… it’s a little bit early, still, but do you want to find Two and get breakfast?”

“Oh… um… well, you’re out of punches, aren’t you?” she said.

I colored with embarrassment… of the non-exciting kind. Amaranth had paid for my admission to dinner the night before, as she had when I’d run out of allotted meals the week before.

“I am… completely out of cash,” she said. “So… um… why don’t we just skip breakfast today, and… for lunch… well, you’ll be seeing Ian before then, right?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “But…”

“So, you’ll be eating something else entirely,” she said, then giggled. “Meaning, of course, Ian’s cock.”

“What if he isn’t interested?” I asked.

“Do you really think that’ll be a problem?” she asked. “Persuade him if you have to… though I really doubt you’ll have to.”

“Didn’t you want me to try eating more regular food?” I asked.

“Yes, but this is more important,” Amaranth said. “So I do not want to see you in the dining hall for lunch… I want you either going down on Ian, or keeping after him.”

“Do you really think it’ll take that long?” I asked, doubtfully.

“Take your time… any job worth doing, and all that,” Amaranth said. “Oh!” She actually slapped her forehead. “You have your first melee class today, right?”

“…yeah,” I said, not sure what this had to do with the topic at hand. “Right after my afternoon lab.”

“Why don’t you skip it and see if Ian wants another go?” she asked. “Oh, wait… that’s on your black list. Um… well… just make sure you definitely do a session with Ian before that. And… if Steff gets too friendly, make sure you remind her that she’s not to distract you during classes, alright? Plus, you know… weapon safety, and all that.”

It wasn’t weird for Amaranth to push anybody to have sex with… anything… but this insistence that I make myself so available to Ian, right next to her telling me to slow things down with Steff was downright bizarre.

“Are you trying to get me to go with Ian in place of Steff?” I asked.

“No!” she said, with enthusiasm that probably couldn’t have been faked. “Oh, no, nothing like that! I want you to have as many lovers as you want! Honestly, nothing would thrill me more than if you fucked everybody who showed the slightest interest… but… um… the thing is, Ian really hasn’t had as much of your time and attention as Steff and I have. Now, seriously, no more questions. This will all make sense soon… a couple of days at the most. Definitely by the end of the week. Do you understand what I expect of you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I figured it would probably end up being one of her bizarre notions like her mysterious germs or whatever… but… did it matter? I’d just watched her go from being so sure I wouldn’t want to be hers to being almost deliriously happy at the idea of me going down on a guy who was basically pretty nice. After the way she’d talked… like she was going to leave me, or she was going to lose me… it would be worth going down on a hundred guys to make her happy, to keep from losing her, or her from losing me.

I wasn’t about to volunteer that information, of course. Amaranth could be pretty excitable on the topic of sex.

And, on the topic of germs, she mentioned them again as she excused herself to go take a shower, reminding me to do the same when she was done. I half expected her to tell me to come with her, but evidently she kept her (utterly unnecessary) sanitary efforts separate from any pursuit of pleasure.

She was a very, very strange girl… probably even for a nymph.

But she was my owner, and I was her toy.

She was mine, and I was hers.

That was worth a little flexibility.

In Which A Bit More Than A Spanking Occurs

Amaranth arrived at my room after I’d finished what little homework I had and taken my requisite shower. She accomplished the trick of taking my breath away the moment I opened the door, despite not looking the least bit different than any time that I’d seen her. Somehow, she wore her nakedness like a badge… or maybe I was simply more aware of it than normal, because I knew what she was there for.

I stammered out a greeting that may have actually been a takeout order run through a blender. She laughed, and I burned with embarrassment… but knew I wouldn’t have given up that silvery sound for anything.

“So…” she said coyly, once I’d closed the door behind her. “It seems to me that I owe you a spanking or two… don’t I?”

I could’ve leapt at this announcement, as I knew that–apart from deserving punishment–I needed a good spanking before I tried calling water in class the next day, but that thought put a bit of a damper on things. I remembered what Barley had said, about nymphs being able to read people… I’d kind of skipped over that when I had told Amaranth about the encounter, focusing more on what had happened than on what had been said.

I told her now, though… it seemed important for me to know the truth, before I did anything else with her. I trusted Amaranth… I loved her… but I still needed to know.

“Well,” Amaranth said cautiously, when I had finished, “how would you feel about that, if it were true?”

“I told Barley it didn’t matter,” I said. “I said you were a good… uh, you know, lover… for me, because you know what I want,… and it doesn’t really matter why.”

“Do you… do you believe that?” Amaranth asked. There was a wince in her voice, like Two sometimes had.

I nodded. She let out a breath.

“I do,” I said. “I really do.”

“Good,” she said. “Because it’s the truth… the best lovers will always have a feel for you, and I don’t come by the knowledge dishonestly or use it maliciously. It’s just part of what I am.”

“How does it work, though?” I asked. “I mean, you don’t always seem to… well… I mean, you thought I’d enjoy the Mechan circle more than I did.”

I hated bringing that subject up again, but I really was curious about it. Sometimes Amaranth seemed to be able to read me like a book, and other times she was almost… well… oblivious. I suppose I could chalk it up to her only being human… or rather, to her being fallible.

“We aren’t mind readers,” Amaranth said. “But… we do have good instincts about sexual wants. I couldn’t tell that, for instance, you wanted a pony for your birthday… unless, of course, you really wanted a pony,” she said. Her voice and facial expression both underwent a sudden change, from her attitude of lecturing to one of utter enthusiasm. “Of course, I’d be totally supportive if you did, though I’d be forbidden from participating… though watching isn’t really participating, so… um, but that’s getting off topic, isn’t it? What I meant to say is that I’m in touch with the sexual needs and desires of those around me, but not necessarily the other needs and desires… like how Steff talks about emotions being multidimensional?”

“Yeah,” I said, though I hadn’t fully understood that conversation.

“For instance,” Amaranth said, “I might see like a college professor and just know what he really wants is for somebody to put a diaper on him and stick a pacifier-shaped gag in his mouth… but that doesn’t mean he’d actually appreciate somebody acting on that.”

“Um… that’s a purely hypothetical example?” I asked.

“Right,” she said, nodding. A playful smile curled her lips. “A purely hypothetical example involving my healing arts instructor.”

“Some day, we’re going to have a talk about the meaning of the word ‘hypothetical’,” I said, very glad I would never have any reason to take a healing class.

Amaranth giggled.

“Um… so,” I said. “Earlier… that is, last week… when I was… when Puddy…”

I tried to find the best way to put what I needed to know, but I could tell from how fast the smile was chased off Amaranth’s face that she knew what I was getting at.

“I knew you were looking to be dominated,” she said softly. “I knew you wanted domination and a side of suffering, from the moment I saw you. I also figured there was a total lap baby somewhere inside you, and then I see Puddy taking you on her lap and… well… I was just so damn glad to see you acting on your wants.” She gave her head a little toss, and then looked away, down at the floor, as she spoke. “I used to think I was pretty, you know, empathetic… on top of the nymph stuff, you know? But now I’m wondering how much of that’s just being around people whose emotions ranged from ‘I want to fuck you hard’ to ‘I want to fuck you harder.’ The bottom line is that I saw Puddy giving you what I knew you wanted, and I thought you were happy about it. I messed up… and you got hurt.”

“No!” I said. “That wasn’t anybody’s fault but mine. I could have said something… I could have done something… and I didn’t. You didn’t mess anything up.”

“I did,” she said, shaking her head. “I messed things up, and I’m still messing up… and now even more people stand to be hurt by it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “You’re doing a… a wonderful job.” I meant it, too… okay, she had odd lapses like her fits of vanity about her intelligence, but nobody was perfect. “Not just as my owner, either. You’re like… you’re the glue that holds us all together… you, me, Steff, and Two. None of us would be hanging out with each other if it wasn’t for you.”

She gave a little choked-off sob, and turned away. She took a couple steps towards the dresser, with the mirror hanging over it.

“Amaranth?” I asked.

She took off her glasses and set them down on the dresser, then turned on the small light over the mirror. She turned back to face me, and there was a kind of resolution on her face.

“Let’s not have any more talking,” she said. “Turn out the lights.”

“But I don’t…”

She gave me a great impression of her over-the-glasses look, considering she wasn’t wearing them, and I scurried over to get the overhead light. I turned back around to face her, but found that she’d came in very close behind me… I almost ran my face into her chest as I turned.

“Amar…”

“Don’t talk,” she breathed. “‘Yes, ma’am’, ‘no, ma’am’ if I ask you a question… nothing else, for the rest of the night. Got that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“You’re my toy,” she said. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to say that, but tonight, you’re my toy, and…”

“I’m not going to just leave…” I started to say, but she reached around to grab a chunk of my hair and jerked. Her other hand was at my lips.

“‘Yes, ma’am’… ‘no, ma’am’,” she purred… or maybe “growled” would be the better term. She unshushed me, and released me just long enough to adjust her grip on the back of my head. The hand behind my head tilted it back, to look up at her face, strangely hungry and strangely blank.

“Yes, ma’am,” I mouthed, barely daring to speak.

“Good,” she cooed, and led me… still yanking on my hair… over to the bed, where she released me and began to undo my jeans. I started to help, but she pushed my hands away.

“You stay still,” she said. “If this is my last night with you, I’m going to do everything to you that you’ll let me.”

She got me undressed without allowing me to help beyond raising my arms and lifting my legs. It wasn’t smooth or elegant, and when she finished I was feeling far more self-conscious about my naked body than if I had simply stripped myself.

The dorm beds were raised fairly high off the floor, so that the space beneath could be used for storage and so that one could be stacked on top of another without further modification to make bunk beds. When she pushed me face-down against the mattress, my legs spread and hanging over the edge, it wasn’t totally uncomfortable, but it wasn’t totally comfortable, either.

She knelt behind me. There was a wet popping sound, something like a lollipop coming out of a child’s mouth, and then something cold and wet was pushed into the crack of my ass.

It felt like a tongue… or like I imagined a tongue would feel there. I whimpered… bit my lip to suppress a yelp… and then realized it was her thumb, wet from her mouth. She flicked the ball of her thumb around a bit, and her long nail trailed across the sensitive skin.

She was going to stick it in, I knew… the fat thumb and sharp biting nail… she was going to jam it in a place where it was never meant to be, and it was going to hurt, like nothing else I’d ever felt had.

I knew it.

It was coming.

I knew it.

She toyed with me, teased me, drawing it out… making me wait, making me guess, as her moistened digit circled and prodded and probed without penetrating, without opening. Then, it was gone, and I knew she had only drawn it back to prepare… but, no… she was on to the next game.

She kissed the base of my spine, and then extended her tongue and licked it. She trailed down, licking as she went.

I curled my lips under my teeth, sucking my mouth inward. I wanted to say something… a warning, a reminder of what was off limits, but she was following the letter of the law as I’d laid it down.

Her face was buried against my ass, her tongue trailing the bottom of the cleft, but she jumped over the one explicitly prohibited spot and picked up again beneath it, to lick up and down the tiny interval between the one thing and the other, stopping just shy of the place where it had to be said my ass had ended and my… my pussy had definitely begun.

She kept her attention there until I almost wanted her to beg to move on, in either direction, just so that it could come to some kind of an ending… and then she retraced the path upwards, this time not licking with her tongue but pressing with her lips and sucking.

Again, she skipped over the opening to end by planting another kiss on the base of my spine that sent an electric shock right up into my brain. She pulled her head back, planted her hands on either side of my ass and pushed it apart, spreading the cheeks wide. I felt… sensed… imagined… her attention trailing over it, tried to imagine what she saw.

I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at my rear in the mirror under ordinary circumstances, to say nothing of bent over with my cheeks spread, and the… well, let’s just say that I had an image in my head of what an asshole looked like. I’d never really stopped to examine how accurate that image might have been, either in general or as it concerned me.

If the hot, hungry breath I felt was any indication, what I saw in my imagination was nothing like what Amaranth was looking at.

She’d talked about licking me there, about sticking her tongue up in there the first night we’d been together… she was thinking about it now… and, if there was any truth to what she and Barley had both told me, then she knew… she knew what I wanted.

That was more than I knew. I was still forcing my mouth tightly closed, and the word I was holding in was “please.” Please… please what? Please don’t? Please do? I wanted it. I didn’t want it. It was sick, it was disgusting, it was disturbing… it was… it was…

Then, she was moving behind me, and her mouth was again open wide, sucking in as much of the soft flesh of my behind as she could accommodate. She bit… soft, like she was chewing taffy, and then hard… hard enough to draw blood if my flesh had been human. The scream of pain tore open my mouth, and had barely subsided when she’d done the other side, just as hard… bringing a second, somewhat diminished cry.

I went limp, and almost slid off the bed… would have, except that Amaranth slumped forward, covering me… her breasts pushing into my back. I shook beneath her, panting. The pain and the screaming had released some of the tension, but it wasn’t a true release.

“My toy,” I heard Amaranth whisper, her voice tinged with a touch of sadness. “My teeth can’t mark you… but for now, you’re mine all the same.”

She stirred, rose. I didn’t move. I hadn’t been given permission to. I don’t know if I could have stood, anyway. She sat down on the bed beside me, and she took me by the arms, pulling me up onto the bed and then laying me across her lap.

She scooted us back from the edge, adjusted my position a little so that my midsection was more hanging off her lap than laying across it, and then parted my legs. Her hand went between them, reaching up underneath me, and she stroked drawing her fingers across me from just below my dark curls of pubic hair to that same spot where her tongue had stopped. Her fingers were forked like a trident, and she alternated, middle finger trailing oh-so-lightly, oh-so-gently up the middle, skimming the surface without breaking it, and then index and ring finger rubbing hard against the outer surface on either side.

It was exquisite agony.

The certain knowledge that Amaranth was a nymph, that she was inherently clean and pure, couldn’t cancel out the rising tide of awareness of how filthy it was, how filthy I was, how filthy what we were doing was… but the feeling of pleasure, of anticipation, of denial… which built with each double-stroke quickly outpaced that awareness.

It went on forever. It was over too quickly. When I felt like I couldn’t possibly stand any more and I was about ready to lose all control and buck and heave and jam myself against Amaranth’s hand or any other part of her to relieve the pressure building up within me, there was a break in the rhythm… a half-second hitch in the pattern that let me know something had changed, something was about to happen… and then her hand struck my ass.

She made up for the spanking I’d missed on Sunday. She made up for everything. She made up for my whole life, if only for that moment. My vision swam. Whole universes exploded into being and faded into nothingness inside my head.

This is just like orgasm. This is what sex feels like.

Stupid. Absurd. I’d never had sex, so how could I know? Anyway, Amaranth hadn’t once in the entire process penetrated my body in the tiniest way. There couldn’t possibly be any comparison. I didn’t care. I pushed the foolish thought away and rode out the rest of the feeling.

I was still feeling aftershocks when Amaranth carefully slid me off her lap onto the bed, turned off the remaining light, and then lay down beside me and pulled the blanket over us.

My face was by her breast. I kissed it. Not the nipple, or even the front of it… just the side, where it was practically touching my mouth anyway. I wanted to open my mouth wide and suck, as she’d done before biting my ass. I wanted to move around and get my lips around her nipple. I didn’t, though. I didn’t know if it would be allowed and hadn’t been given permission to speak. Still, I did kiss it, and she made a small, appreciative sound before her breathing changed and I knew she was asleep.

I myself felt drained… or maybe satiated. Used up? No… fulfilled. I felt fulfilled.

There was a dim thought echoing around the back of my brain, which wanted to know what it was Amaranth was so worried about… why she seemed so certain there’d be a falling out among our tight little group. It wanted me to wake her up and demand answers, if only so that something could be done about it… but it was a tiny voice, and it was shouting from a long way away.

Were we as close as I thought, or was this my own relative inexperience with having friends making me mistake one level of acquaintanceship for another? I didn’t think so. I hoped not.

Though, on another level, I could have wished it was just Amaranth and me… because that would have made it easier to tell her about my encounter with Barley. I faced a bit of a dilemma there. Amaranth would want to know that Barley was still at school, but wouldn’t like hearing about her ongoing conduct.

Actually, given that Amaranth had ordered me to tell her if anybody abused me regardless of whether I thought she needed to know or not, it wasn’t really a dilemma so much as something I had to do that sucked because I knew it would distress her. She realized that something was wrong when I declined a seat on her lap. I needed to be facing her when I told her this. It would be easier if I wasn’t… and easier still if I was in my place of comfort and safety… but I felt that this kind of thing wasn’t supposed to be easy.

I felt a guilty twinge when I told Two to take her time getting her food, but I didn’t want her to have to listen. Two, always eager to please, walked away from our table with exaggerated slowness. When she was out of earshot, I launched into the story, telling Amaranth what had happened as quickly as I could… both to stop the stream of words from drying up in my throat, and to get through the whole thing before Two finished and returned.

Amaranth listened with an expression of deep concern which came to be overshadowed by one of despair as I spoke. I told her everything, except for the part about the headband and armbands. They weren’t relevant… the key elements was that Barley was still in school, and what she’d said and done… not what she’d worn, or the fact that she’d worn anything at all.

“But… she stopped when you told her to,” Amaranth said. “She stopped, right? I mean, she’s… so… it’s not… do you think I should find her? Talk to her?”

“Amaranth… I don’t think that’ll help,” I said. “I think the best thing you can do for her is give her some space.”

“You’re… you’re probably right,” she said. She shook her head, took off her glasses, blinked a few times, put her glasses back on, took them off again, put them back on once more, and then gave a profound sniffle. “Let’s… let’s not talk about Barley any more. You… you didn’t let her take advantage of you, like I told you to… and you stopped her without yelling or getting violent. I want you to know that, whatever else I’m feeling, I’m proud of you for that.”

“Thanks,” I said, looking down. I wasn’t blushing, though, because I didn’t actually feel like I’d done anything special. I’d let Barley back me up against the wall, I’d let her touch me… I’d only been able to say anything at all because Amaranth had ordered me to.

“What would you like for your reward?” Amaranth asked.

“What?” I asked, confused and surprised.

“Your reward,” she said. “You may ask for anything that is mine to give you.”

I hadn’t been expecting this and had absolutely no idea what to say. I still felt the need to make up the spanking I’d missed the day before, but that was punishment… not a reward. Though, since I had my elemental lab on Tuesday, and since the release that the punishment brought with it seemed to be the key to getting me into the right frame of mind, maybe it could almost count as a reward, under the circumstances.

“I… I don’t know,” I said.

I realized that in the time we’d been together, though my body had been pressed close against Amaranth’s many times, I’d very rarely actually touched her… put my hand on a particular part of her, felt and squeezed her the way Ian had done to me. I could have drawn the shape of her breasts with my eyes closed, and had taken comfort in burying myself against them, but could think of only one occasion where I’d touched them with my hands.

But, I could hardly have said that to her. “I want to feel your breasts.” On top of any difficulty inherent in getting those six little words out of my mouth, it would sound lame… lame and childish. Amaranth had actual sex with multiple people, multiple times a day. Letting me play with her impressive accessory set was tame even compared to our non-sexual discipline sessions.

For the same reason, asking to kiss her was right out.

Amaranth watched the outward signs of my inward struggle with an air of quiet patience, looking at me through the lenses of rather than over the top of her glasses. If it had been anybody else–if she’d had any other expression on her face–the attention would have made me more uncomfortable and made it harder to think. When I hadn’t said anything for a long time, she prompted me.

“What do you want, more than anything?” she said. “Don’t think… just answer. What do you want to do?”

“Sleep with you tonight,” I said. As she had commanded, I spoke without thinking… then felt stupid. It was too much to ask for. She couldn’t just skip “work” to sleep with me whenever I felt like it, or I had a bad day. I tried to figure out how to take it back in a way that made it clear I knew I’d asked for too much and was sorry, but then she gave a slow, careful nod.

“Okay,” she said. “I think we can both use some comfort tonight.”

“But… your work,” I said. “Your field. You can’t just…”

“I won’t know what I can or can’t do until I try,” Amaranth said. “I’ve had over a week of some pretty intense fucking going on, including with partners who have greater-than-human strength, virility, and stamina… and our last night together gave me a pretty good idea of how draining such a thing is. I’m fairly comfortable with the idea of spending one night a week just being with you… as long as you accept the condition that I may have to run out for a quickie in the middle of the night.”

“I… yes,” I said. “Of course.”

“And, of course, our first night together was fairly cozy and restful,” she said, giving me what I can only call a hungry smile. “Tonight, maybe we can find something that doesn’t conflict with your list, that’ll still give me a little… boost.”

If Steff could make the harshest words sound sexual, Amaranth could do the same with the most innocent ones. I shivered.

“Twoey, dear, go ahead and come sit down,” Amaranth said. I followed her gaze to see Two, creeping towards us as though she were wading through molasses.

“Yeah, it’s okay, Two,” I added. By Amaranth’s own instructions, Two wouldn’t accept anybody’s word over my own orders… but there was no need to explicitly remind Amaranth of that.

I winced to see her almost pitch forward and dump her tray as her legs obeyed the order a bit faster than her brain. There was something almost reflexive about her obedience, so inherent it was to her personality.

“I require clarification,” she said as she set her tray down and took her seat. She was smiling. Her tone and expression made it sound more like an announcement than usual. It was as though she had something exciting to tell us rather than a question about something which confused her.

“About what, Twoey?” Amaranth asked indulgently.

“About Mack,” she said. Turning to me, she asked, “Which part of you has trouble eating human food?”

I stared back at her, confused.

“What do you mean, ‘which part’?” I asked. “My stomach, I guess… my mouth can obviously handle it, but I start to get nauseous if I eat more than a little bit of it, and the slightest little thing brings it all back up.”

“No,” Two said, shaking her head. “I mean, which part… you are part demon and you are part human. Humans can eat human food. Demons can eat most things, though it gives them no sustenance to do so. So why could you not eat salad, or a hamburger, or pudding, if humans and demons can both eat those things?”

I looked at her, digesting–no pun intended–her words.

“Two, it sounds like you’re telling me that I should be able to eat whatever I want without getting sick,” I said, finally, when I thought I had the shape of it.

“I might be mistaken,” she said, though her voice and her strangely confident smile left no doubt that she didn’t think she was. I found myself once again cursing the fact that Two had achieved another moment of uncharacteristic self-assurance in a matter where I knew for a fact she was wrong. “But I think you should be able to.”

“I’m afraid you are mistaken,” I told her, trying to sound more regretful than reproachful. “I haven’t been able to eat normal food since I came into my nature. It isn’t fit for my body… that’s what my grandmother told me, and she knew more about demons than anybody else I’ve ever met.”

Actually, I think what she had meant was that my body wasn’t fit for normal food, though I kept that observation to myself.

“I think I am not,” Two said. “If a demon can eat something and a human can eat that same thing, then a person who is both demon and human and nothing else should be able to eat that thing.”

“Two, it… it just doesn’t work that way,” I said.

“You know, I think she’s right,” Amaranth said. “I feel a little silly for never having thought of it myself. I mean, full-blooded demons can eat human food for pleasure or in order to blend in, and they’ve been known to eat livestock and other animals in order to create an atmosphere of terror… which isn’t exactly the same thing as eating a hamburger, but the implication is clear: meat other than their particular need still does them no ill.”

“I’m not a full-blooded demon,” I said.

“Of course not,” Amaranth said. “But, when two races interbreed, the offspring never has any trait not present in either of the parents, so why should a half-demon gain an intolerance for regular food?”

“Did you miss the part of my story where I threw up the cookie I had for lunch?” I asked. “My body does not like human food. Two, I love the fact that you want to help me… but telling me that I should be able to eat whatever I feel like doesn’t make it so.”

“I’m sorry, I was mistaken,” Two mumbled half-heartedly, looking down at her lap. Damn. She was getting more expressive in more ways than simply being outspoken, and it was breaking my heart to argue with her.

“Two, honey, I think it’s too early to say that you are,” Amaranth said in a comforting tone, though she was giving me a rather shrewd look out of the corner of her eye. “Mack’s grown up with one assumption…”

“It’s not an assumption…” I said, but Amaranth hushed me with her finger.

“Twoey, would you please go get Mack a bowl of soup?” Amaranth asked. “Chicken noodle if they have it, or whatever is the lightest soup they’ve got tonight.”

“Okay!” Two said, scurrying off to obey.

“When she gets back, you’re going to try the soup,” Amaranth said, in her tone of command. “Even if you just drink the broth. Do your best to keep it down… if you won’t for your own sake, then think of poor dear Twoey and how she’ll feel if the research she’s been doing comes to nothing. Got that?”

She removed the finger from my mouth.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said automatically. “But… you make it sound like I throw up on purpose.”

“Not exactly ‘on purpose’,” Amaranth said. “But, the more I think about it, the more I think the ‘part of you with the problem’ is your head, not your stomach.”

Two returned, with two bowls of chicken soup. She put one down in front of me.

“Here, Mack,” she said. “I got one for me, so that we can eat together.”

“You are such a darling, Two,” Amaranth said.

“I got us crackers, too, but I can eat yours if you don’t want them,” Two said.

“Thanks,” I said feebly.

“Well, go on,” Amaranth said expectantly.

I picked up the spoon, and tipped it so that a noodle and a nearly transparent piece of celery tipped out of it, along with about half of the broth, then raised it most of the way to my lips.

“This is such a waste,” I said. “Even if I can keep it down, I don’t need it.”

“I’m sure they toss out gallons of the stuff at the end of the night,” Amaranth said. “They’ll make more tomorrow. If you enjoy what might otherwise be thrown away, then it’s hardly going to waste.”

“This is enjoyment?” I asked.

“Eat,” Amaranth said.

I closed my eyes and brought the spoon to my mouth, sucking the liquid in through almost-closed lips.

It was hotter than I had expected, though of course that didn’t bother me. The taste caught me by surprise. I hadn’t had soup… or any real food… for years, though of course, the aroma of boiling soup carries. The actual memory of the flavor had muted and mutated in my head over the years, so that the taste of the chicken soup was almost nothing like what I expected… but I found that once it hit my tongue, I recognized it all the same. The memory of the taste came back: oh, yeah… that’s what chicken soup tastes like.

I had another spoonful, and another. Two watched with an expression of glee that would have been worth a bowl full of holy water. Once she was sure I was really going to keep eating, she tucked into her soup with a vengeance. I passed her the rest of mine after I’d finished half the broth and a few vegetables and miniscule bits of chicken.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” I said, feeling absolutely shitty for raining on Two’s parade, but feeling it was necessary to be realistic. “I’ve managed to hold little things down before.”

“But, even that’s kind of telling,” Amaranth reasoned. “I mean, if you weren’t able to eat food at all, that would be one thing… I want you to keep trying. Not just half a cookie or a spoonful of ice cream, but some actual food at every meal. You can scale back if you have a bad, you know, reaction to it… but I think we just need to get your body and especially your mind accustomed to eating.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said.

She tilted her face and looked at me over the top of her glasses.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You have not been coming to knife class,” she finally said, her voice oddly flat, as if the random-seeming peaks and valleys of her musical accent had been ironed out. “It has been a week now and you never came back.”

“Uh… I actually dropped it,” I said. I thought about adding a sarcastic, “If that’s alright with you,” but she was kind of freaking me out with the intensity of her stare.

“You did not come to the television room yesterday, either. I waited halfway through your stupid bike show,” Sooni said, making every sentence a separate accusation. “I wanted make certain nobody would come and claim the set before you arrived. But… you never arrived.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, my head dropping. Why would she care? Why did I care that she cared? Anyway, I hadn’t asked her to reserve the TV for me.

“If this is your idea of handling a commitment I do not see how you intend to represent the floor in the senate,” she said. “You should drop out of the race the same way you dropped out of knife class. You should drop out of school. Nobody likes you except for your lovers and you cannot even commit to one of them.”

Nobody likes me, I should just leave… she was saying all of the things I imagined girls like her thought every time they looked at me, but somehow it didn’t affect me. I’d like to say it was because I was growing as a person, but really she just sounded so petty and… well… pathetic when she said it.

I didn’t even feel compelled to argue the point about who was or wasn’t my lover, as I usually did… or what exactly was meant by “commitment”, as Steff once had argued to me. Sooni just didn’t seem to be worth the effort that day.

She glared at me, her shiny black eyes seeming even shinier up close, and it seemed like she actually expected some kind of response to her bizarre diatribe. I had nothing, though. Finally, she turned and huffed away towards her seat. Maliko immediately leaned across the aisle and began crooning to her in Yokano, only to get a vicious-looking backhand across her nose for her trouble.

How was it that she could just do that, in public, and nobody even said anything?

If Sooni thought I was going to withdraw from the election, she was doomed to disappointment. I didn’t know what kind of groundwork Puddy had laid when she’d placed herself in charge of my campaign… and to be honest, I didn’t really want to know… but it was time for me to get serious. I was determined to do whatever it took to win the election, even if it meant going so far as talking to my dorm mates.

Hazel and Honey seemed approachable, now that they’d loosened up a bit. Gnomes had a reputation for being particularly sociable. I could ask them if they’d seen the posters for bingo night and what they thought about it. Shiel the kobold was probably less likely to be interested by a night of little rubber balls with numbers on them, but she’d certainly be interested to hear about the CSC’s habit of skipping over Harlowe when it came to promoting campus events. I could start with them and hope they’d tell others.

I thought about this throughout the class and after it let out, planning out different approaches in my head and wondering if it would be enough just to talk to those few people. Celia, Amaranth, and Two were already on my side. Amaranth hadn’t hesitated to spread the word about my role in the whole bingo poster thing. Celia could be counted on to do the same.

On the other hand, if Sooni won because I was unwilling or unable to knock on a few doors and get to know my neighbors…

Then there was the fact that some of the other fifth floor girls actually were human, or nearly so. Could I honestly ask them to vote for me? Then there was the fact that I’d made an ass of myself with Feejee, and I’d never had an encounter with Trina that went well… and I could see Delia Daella going either way, given my friendship with Steff.

And there was Puddy… the last time I’d talked to her, she’d said she was still my friend, but she’d been drunk and half-conscious. If she was still supporting me, at least as far as the election went, then that was another vote or two. If not, I had a feeling she could do a lot more damage than just voting for Sooni.

“Fuck! It’s a demon!” somebody shrieked from uncomfortably close behind me as I hurried down the hall after class. I’d been so wrapped up in my thoughts about the election that it would have startled the hell out of me no matter what the person had shouted.

As it was, my heart didn’t just leap up into my throat, it crashed through the roof of my mouth to cling nervously to the underside of my brain. I spun around, eyes huge and hands spread out wide, desperately searching for the right words to convince the world that I meant it no harm, no matter how dangerous my heritage made me.

Then I saw who had screamed.

“Barley,” I said. She was wearing white cotton sweatbands on her wrist and head. I wondered what Amaranth would have said… were those clothing, or accessories? “We… we wondered where you’d gone. Celia said you took your stuff out of Harlowe.”

“Yeah, I’ve been sleeping with a nine hundred pound troll,” she said, then snorted. “You know where a nine hundred pound troll sleeps, don’t you?”

“Anywhere he wants,” I said. I confess… when I was much, much younger, I had a huge weakness for stupid jokes with obvious punch lines.

“I’m young, beautiful, naked, and willing,” Barley said. “Finding a bed isn’t a problem for me. I’ve been making a survey of the fraternity lifestyle… thinking about pledging.”

She cackled at her joke.

“You’ve been drinking again,” I said, not making it a question.

“Again… still,” Barley said with a shrug. “Whatever. Beer, though… not that shit Puddy has. Barley beer… there might be a little bit of me in every bottle, do you think?”

“I don’t think alcohol of any kind is going to help you,” I said.

“I was wrong,” Barley said, regret seeping heavily into her voice. “I know that now.”

“I’m… glad you do,” I said, relaxing by degrees.

“Wrong about you… I thought you needed rescuing,” she said. “But you’re too fucked in the head to let yourself be free. You just go from one captor to another.”

“Amaranth isn’t my ‘captor’,” I said sharply.

“Oh, of course,” Barley said derisively. “She’s your perfect love.”

“I know she isn’t perfect,” I said. A beat, and then, “But… I do love her.”

“She’s a fraud,” Barley said.

“She tries really hard,” I countered.

“The whole damned valley thought she was something special even before Mother fucking Khaele started turning up to chat with her,” Barley said. “Of course, nobody stopped to think exactly why the goddess was dropping in on one of her daughters so often, nooo… they were all just soooo proud of their exotic new amaranth nymph. Everybody just thinks the world of her…”

“Yeah, and who did she think the world of?” I said.

She recoiled as if slapped. For a moment, I thought I’d got through to her on some level, but then the look of shock and hurt fell off her face, replaced with something mean.

“You know, I’m going to do you favor, Mack,” she said.

“Is it anything like the last one you tried to do?” I asked, taking a step back.

“Better,” she said, with no trace of irony in her voice. She came closer again. “I’m going to tell you a secret. Did you know that nymphs can look at people, at mortals, and know instinctively what they’ll respond to… what’ll make their pot boil?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head, though I’d kind of suspected it. Even though I’d refused some of the things Amaranth had offered, I had to admit–at least to myself–that they all held some kind of excitement for me.

“It’s true,” Barley said, stalking after me as I backed away until I was up against the wall and she was standing far too close. “That’s how Amaranth has you so wrapped around her finger… she just knows how to jerk your strings, how to push your buttons.”

As she said the last, she stuck her hand between my legs, cupping my crotch and lifting upward as if she meant to pick me up. My stomach lurched and knotted. I closed my eyes.

“Amaranth loves me. It doesn’t matter how or why she knows what I like, it just makes her a better lover for me,” I said, trying to keep the words coming in an orderly fashion. It was important to me that I addressed this point, even before moving on to what seemed to be the more pressing matter… which also needed addressing. I wasn’t supposed to let anybody take advantage of me. “And… please don’t touch me.”

She squeezed and then let go, stepping back. My stomach heaved and I fell to my knees, retching fruitlessly.

“My touch disgusts you,” Barley said. “Puddy’s didn’t.”

I didn’t correct her. It wasn’t any of her business, anyway. I recovered myself and got to my feet.

“I’ll tell Amaranth you’re okay,” I said.

“Tell her to eat shit,” Barley said. “Though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turns out she’s actually into that. There’s something for you to think about, the next time you’re kissing.”

I had nothing to say with that. Partly it was because it wasn’t the sort of thing one should dignify with a response, and partly because I’d fallen to my knees again and this time my stomach had managed to produce part of the cookie I’d eaten for lunch. Barley laughed a mean, cold laugh which I heard receding into the distance.

Today, however, I was worried. Given the level of animosity she’d shown towards elven culture, it was understandable why she might not find the subject of elven history worthy of her full attention… though that left open the question of why she’d even take the class in the first place, didn’t it?

So, was she not there because something had set her off about elves in general… or because she didn’t want to run into Delia Daella now. Or… and my heart lurched when I considered this… was she avoiding me?

When there was only a minute or so left before class actually began, I moved closer to Delia Daella. If I couldn’t talk to Steff, I could still try to clear things up with her, at least. We exchanged terse and awkward greetings–guess whose was which–and I launched right into my explanation of Steff’s earlier remarks.

“So, I can take comfort in the knowledge that it is for the faith to which I have chosen to devote my life that Steffain despises me, and not for the skin with which I was born,” Delia Daella said, when I had finished.

Before I could answer, Professor Ariadne swept into the room, her recitation of elven lore begun even before she was completely through the door. I gave her my full attention. I loved history, and elven history in particular was so alive… no dusty lists of dates and facts here. This might be my only chance to enjoy the class without interruption… though I felt guilty for being even momentarily glad that Steff was gone.

I realized then that if I never told her, Steff would probably assume I didn’t mind it when she spoke to me in class… and given that she’d now received permission to “play” with me, to use her word for it… and especially given that her favorite form of such “play” so far consisted mostly of talking…

I shivered. The thought of Steff’s whispered invectives caressing the inside of my ear while Professor Ariadne wove her own vocal spell about the room was strangely compelling. I wouldn’t be able to react too strongly, not without attracting the professor’s attention… and what would she do if she felt I wasn’t giving her subject the attention it deserved? How might she punish me? It didn’t even bear thinking about… but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Damn… even when she wasn’t there, Steff had managed to distract me from elven history. I forced my mind back on track, or at least, back onto the more productive off-track track it had been on. I had to let Steff know that even if I enjoyed her attentions, I didn’t enjoy them during class. In fact, I thought it would probably be a good idea to let both Amaranth and her know that no matter how important they were to me or how big a part of my life Amaranth in particular became, the point of college was college and I really couldn’t let anything get in the way of that.

Among other things, I couldn’t afford to be at MU without my scholarships, and they depended on my grades.

As quietly as I could manage, I fished my notebook out of my book bag. It was already flipped open to the page with the current draft of the list. I wanted to get the idea down while it was still in my head, so I didn’t forget about it. This kind of thing wasn’t exactly second nature to me, after all.

Plus, I told myself that if the instructor saw me writing something down in a notebook during her recitation, it might do something to erase her impression of me as an inattentive student.

After some thought, I wrote “Nothing that interferes with my schoolwork, prevents me from attending a class or doing homework, or distracts me during class.” I hesitated before I wrote the last clause. As I only had one class with either of them, it would be pretty obvious that I was speaking directly to Steff with it… how would she take it? I almost erased it, before I realized that the point would be lost if I didn’t make it clear that talking to me in class was off-limits.

I put my pencil down, and looked up… at Professor Ariadne. I realized then that the poetic lecture had stopped at some point, when I’d been distracted by other things. Her eyes rolled down the page of my notebook. I hastily flipped the notebook over, but apparently not fast enough to prevent the professor from reading it, even upside down.

“I applaud your academic rigor and your dedication to your studies, Ms. Blaise,” she said, in a tone of voice that told me she had seen the page clearly and had a pretty good idea what it was about. “Would that all students shared your determination not to let extracurricular activities interfere with their schooling. So very, very commendable.”

She launched back into her epic poem almost immediately, and I slumped forward, my head on my desk, utterly mortified. Nobody else in the room could have had any idea what the little interlude had been about, but that somehow made it all the more embarrassing. What could they be thinking? What could they make of it? I knew that if I didn’t let it get to me, all they would see was the teacher interrupting herself to make an apparently complimentary comment on my note-taking… but I couldn’t not let it get to me. I kept my head down on the desk for the rest of the class, trying very hard not to light my face on fire.

My mind kept replaying Professor Ariadne’s words, in varied tones of strictness and sternness, with different buried implications and deprecations. I remembered her freezing me in place with a spell in a previous class, when she’d posed me as a tree. That had been embarrassing enough, but there were more embarrassing and less comfortable positions she could have put me in, and I couldn’t stop imagining them.

I probably would’ve walked out of the classroom if I thought my legs would manage it… but then, I probably wouldn’t be able to show my face in it again. Though, if the teacher wasn’t going to cut me a break, maybe dropping elven history wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Except, it had been the one class on my schedule I’d really wanted, for reasons having nothing to do with my major and its requirements.

Approximately forever later, the class ended. I kept my head down until it sounded like almost everyone had left the room. Even then, I half expected to see the professor glaring at me from behind her desk. I was almost disappointed to find she was gone… though Delia Daella was still seated beside me, a look on her face that might have almost been a kind of concern.

“I would not take the professor’s conduct personally,” she said as we left the classroom. “The faint elves know no higher good than to make another creature feel inferior before them.”

“The what elves?” I asked.

“Faint elves,” she said. “That is what my people call the elves whose skin has faded to an unnatural white color. It is not meant as a pejorative, but rather a simple description of their appearance.”

“Oh,” I said. “But…” I started to correct her, but stopped myself. It was like the Mechans. If she wanted to believe that black was the natural skin color of elves and “faint” elves were the aberration, it didn’t actually hurt anything, did it? “I’ve never heard that term before,” I finally said.

“Indeed,” Delia Daella said. “Here comes your friend. I shall see you in class Wednesday.”

I wanted to tell her not to go, but once again she left so quickly that she might have vanished from the spot… and I couldn’t exactly follow her, when as she’d said, Steff was heading down the hall towards me. She gave a kind of self-conscious wave when she saw that I’d seen her. I returned it. She seemed unusually nervous about something, so I approached her instead of making her come to me.

“Um… you’re a little late for class,” I said.

“I was sulking,” Steff said. “But I figured… you, being the sort of person who blames herself for the sins of the world, would be likely to wonder if it was your fault that I wasn’t there.” She leaned forward and gave me a kiss on the forehead. “It wasn’t.”

I felt my eyes tearing up.

“I… I did wonder,” I said.

“No,” Steff said. “I’ve just got… shit… I’m dealing with. It’s not because of you, though… you honestly make it all so much more bearable, and I really can’t wait for the chance to show how much I… appreciate… that.”

I shivered.

“Amaranth wants us to take it slow,” I said. I had to say it.

“I picked up on that, yeah,” Steff said. “I wouldn’t ask you to disobey her.”

Feeling like I was pushing a spear very slowly through Amaranth’s lovely body and twisting it, I said, “I think she’s a little… jealous.”

“It’d kill her to admit that, don’t you think?” Steff said.

“Probably,” I said.

“But it’d kill her to think that she was the reason that two people… any two people, anywhere… weren’t getting it on with each other,” Steff said. “So… we’ll just have to be careful of her feelings, I guess. Like, we don’t have to do anything in front of her, or…”

“I’m not going behind her back!” I said quickly.

“I just mean, we don’t have to rub her face in it,” Steff said. “Like, not talking about our play in front of her unless she opens the conversation.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. That made sense, though I could see how this might get uncomfortable. “And… and please don’t take this the wrong way… but… I love her so much, and if I ever do have to choose… I mean…”

Steff held out a hand and put her finger gently on my lips, muting me.

“Don’t,” she said softly. “Just don’t. You are in love with Amaranth… anybody who’s seen the way you cling to her can tell that. You might be, or might some day fall, in love with me, but it won’t be the same love you share with Amaranth, and I’ll still be in love with Viktor. Let’s not screw up all our other relationships, and our own, by pretending that we need to be anything more than we are right this moment. We did the whole ‘I love you, I love you, too,’ thing on Saturday, but that’s friendship. Let’s not cheapen or denigrate it by saying it has to be any more than that in order for it to mean something.”

“But… aren’t we more than friends?” I asked.

“Well, yeah… we’re two friends who make each other horny as fuck,” Steff said, giving the word “fuck” just a touch of her vocal magic, a subtle inflection which existed only to remind anyone in earshot that the word had other uses besides being a large notional quantity.

I couldn’t recall anybody using the word ‘horny’ in my presence in the entire time I’d been at school. It seemed odd, given all that had happened, but I think it gave the word a disproportionate impact on my ear. It wasn’t a particularly dirty word, not when measured against the sort of explicit and implicit descriptions of the things one did while horny that I’d been subjected to. It was a vulgar word… in the sense of being common, anyway… and I was sure Steff could come up with a much more poetic way of describing the effect two people could have on each other than “horny as fuck.”

It did have an effect, though.

“How… how horny is fuck… exactly?” I asked, breathlessly.

“Exactly very horny,” Steff said. There was a hint of a leer on her face, and a hunger in her eyes that was almost frightening, and that almost made a surprising amount the difference.

“On a scale of one to ten?” I asked, closing my eyes, wanting her to go on… wanting her to talk dirty to me, about me. “How… horny… do I make you?” I felt like such a fake saying “horny” like that… like a bad actress in a worse porn movie.

“On a scale of one to ten,” Steff said, “with one being a schoolgirl at the first blush of womanhood and ten being a nymph coming out of a month in solitary confinement…”

My eyes flew open.

“A nymph couldn’t go a month without another person, she’d die,” I pointed out.

Steff’s finger was again on my lips.

“You know… sometimes, you really are a…” she said, though she trailed off without telling me what I really was. She looked like she didn’t know whether to laugh, scream, or cry. My cheeks burned; I realized I’d ruined a moment. Steff took a second to compose herself and then started again, as if I hadn’t said anything. Her finger was still on my lips to prevent a recurrence. “With one being a schoolgirl’s first blush and ten being a nymph coming out of solitary… you make me horny enough to sneak into the classroom, throw you down on the teacher’s desk, and have my way with your little whore ass in six or seven distinct ways.”

She didn’t specify, but I thought it was pretty clear she was talking about our history class… about the desk used by Professor Ariadne. That made it more exciting, somehow. A kind of hidden revenge on the bitter banshee? I wasn’t even phased by the choice of wording. Steff had seen the black list, and I knew she’d honor it.

I felt a serious need to whimper… tried not to, in order to obey the imperative of silence, and ended up whimpering more.

“I… I have class,” I said.

“You can ditch,” Steff said, and there was an urgency and need in her eyes and voice that told me better than any confused metaphors about sex-starved nymphs exactly how horny as fuck was. Her eyes held me… or maybe I clung to them. Our eyes held onto each other, as if they knew they would drown if they let go. Damn, and I had thought Steff’s metaphor was confused? “Just this once. It’s only the second week. You can ditch.”

Not breaking our gaze, I shifted my book bag off my shoulder and groped around inside it to find the notebook, which I handed to her. It was still open to the list.

She looked at it, perplexed… but of course, she’d seen most of it before. It was only when she came to the bottom and saw the new addition at the bottom. I saw her take it in, and digest its meaning… in particular as it applied to her suggestion. She seemed to deflate a little. If eyes could go limp, hers did, but I didn’t break contact. I didn’t want her to take this as a rejection.

“I’m sorry!” I said. “I didn’t mean to sound like…”

Steff muted me again.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t apologize for your black list, and don’t feel guilty for anything you put on it, okay? Just as you should never feel ashamed for liking what you do–sexually, I mean… you should be deeply and terribly ashamed of your tragic taste in television shows and reading material–so you shouldn’t feel ashamed about anything you’re not yet willing to do. Your partners can live with the occasional disappointment. Anyway, there’s always later… is this your last class?”

I saw where she was heading, and felt deeply conflicted. On the one hand, I think I would have to admit that Steff did indeed know how to make me “horny as fuck” and I would have loved to give in. On the other, I kind of wanted to wait until I’d had a chance to put my first date plan into effect before I consummated–if that word applied–with Steff. Dating did not normally enter into the sort of social and sexual arrangement Steff apparently favored… but for most people, dating and sex still went hand in hand, and it wouldn’t do to put the horse before the fucking hell! Thanks to Amaranth, I could never again safely think of the word “horse” within fifty miles of the idea of sex.

“Um… it is my last class,” I said. “But…”

“But?” Steff asked.

I turned away, hating myself for it… but I couldn’t stand to see her reaction when I said, “I’d rather we didn’t… ‘play’ with each other… right now.”

“Oh,” Steff said. I had such a powerful visual imagination and she had such an expressive voice that I was treated to an image of her face wearing a look of profound and soul-crushing disappointment on it. I might as well have just looked. There was no way reality could be as bad as what I saw. “Oh, well… if that’s… how you feel…”

I spun around. Her face was relatively composed, but I could see the disappointment in her eyes. It was understated, but it was there, and if it hadn’t been as bad as I imagined, it was worse for being realistic, and for being real.

“The thing is that I’ve… um… I’ve asked Amaranth for permission… to do something,” I said. I didn’t want to go into any detail, because I wanted the moment have a feeling of spontaneity when I asked Steff out, so it would seem sincere and not like a game. “Special. With you. And she won’t be able to give me the okay right away, but I think it will be better if we don’t… ‘play’… until after. It’ll be better that way.”

“Oh, well, that makes sense,” Steff said. “At least, I’ll assume it does. I’m not usually one who likes to wait to open a present, but if you say it’ll be better… okay. Well, it’s your call, anyway.”

She didn’t sound completely convinced, but I didn’t know what else I could say.

“I really have to head to class,” I said. “You’re coming to dinner with us, right?”

“Um… probably,” Steff said. “But if I don’t, try not to worry or take it personally, okay? I really am fine… or will be, anyway.”

“Okay,” I said. I leaned forward a bit, and Steff kissed me on the cheek. I only realized as her lips brushed my skin that I’d been leaning forward for that purpose. I hadn’t blushed at the kiss, but I blushed at that realization, for some reason. Steff giggled, as if she’d read my mind, and then turned and skipped away down the hall. I thought I saw a slight blush on her own ivory cheeks the moment before she turned.