In Which Mackenzie Swallows
Ian was staring at me, expectantly… waiting for something. For what? My mind raced.
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 CCKh. 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.”
Didn’t that once say “KhKhKh”?
Yeah, it got retconned once people started noticing how much it looked like “KKK,” which wasn’t what it was supposed to be an analogue to.
Also… hmm. Apparently bicycles exist in the MUniverse. If they’re driven by pedals with a chain and all, it makes me wonder. First, why does she think that “a gear” is such a strange concept? (In the Mechan scene.) And second, if the principles involved here work, it shouldn’t be too difficult to build a motorcycle if you can develop an enchantment to make something spin and stop spinning on command, and put that in place of the pedals on a bicycle. 😉
The Problem is that that wouldn’t be a motorcycle. You have to make it powered by something that isn’t magic. This Universe actively hates Science. It has a DM and if you gain an unfair advantage through Science whatever you use will stop working. People build Steam Engines or Internal Combustion Engines and thought “Logically those should work.” But the DM said: “High Fantasy, High Magic. NO TECHNOLOGY” and simply MADE them not work. If you try to use the Scientific Method, which is just so incredibly self evident once you understand it, it won’t work as soon as you try to do anything with it.
I believe one could create a magical vehicle that was like a motorcycle, that you ride like one, just as the enaction figures have fake motorcycles it seems reasonable that one could have a full size fake. It would be a bit impractical to enchant, but possible. You simply could not have a real one.