In Which Mackenzie Receives A Polite Request From A Floormate
I wasn’t waiting in the downstairs lounge for very long. In fact, I’d just started to wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have waited in the stairwell or the outer lobby in case Ian decided to go straight up to the fifth floor when he showed up, his lute case slung over his back.
We gave each other a “hey”, and then he kissed me on the cheek. I’d actually leaned forward, expecting a real kiss, even a small one, but I suppose I couldn’t blame him. The last time he’d seen my mouth, it had been wrapped around his thing. I wondered how often girls who gave head ever got kissed on the lips. Probably not very often, I thought.
It was a weird thing to think about… the sort of thing I’d never had to really think about before.
“Where’s your friends?” he asked.
“Busy,” I said. “Two’s cooking, and the others… have homework and stuff, so… um… we kind of have some time to kill by ourselves, before dinner.”
I looked up and tried to give him what I hoped was a meaningful look. Though, exactly what that meaning was, I wasn’t sure. I was kind of new at this thing.
“That’s… good,” Ian said. I watched him swallow nervously.
“Yeah… it is,” I agreed. “Good.”
“Yeah,” Ian agreed.
Steff was right.
We were dorks.
“I was… um, wondering,” he said quietly. “Would it be okay if… I mean, can we… um…”
“Can we what?” I asked, smirking. I had a strong suspicion where he was headed. In fact, it was hard to tell, as he’d changed to a longer, baggier shirt, but I thought it even showed a little.
It felt odd to see him all flustered about it, though. In fact, it felt delicious. I’d had feelings I called “delicious” before. This was the first time I could actually seem to taste it, in my mouth.
I was obliged to give him pleasure whenever he felt like it, but now it seemed like he was under my power. How exactly did that work?
“Can we… can we go up to your room?” he asked.
“Any reason in particular you want to go there?” I asked, turning my head coyly to hide my smile. Okay, and also because I was blushing madly and couldn’t have met his gaze even if I didn’t feel like being coy. But I did feel like being coy.
“You know,” he said.
“I think it’s best if you say it,” I said, remembering with pleasure how it had felt when he had made me do this. “Just so there’s no misunderstandings.”
“I… I want you to suck my dick again,” he said softly.
“What was that?” I asked, leaning in closer.
“I want you to suck my dick,” he said, blushing.
Up close to him, I found that I could smell him… a hint, a diminished fragment of the musky masculine scent and taste he’d had before. I had figured that was a sexual smell. A lot of the saltier romance novels made it sound like sex had a smell. It was weird to think that a boy had a smell–apart from ordinary B.O.–all the time.
Or… maybe it was just a sex smell. After all, he had been next to naked in the mirror, and his boxers had been unbuttoned… so… he could have been…
Okay, that was just too gross to think about. I wondered if there was a rule for how long you could date somebody before it was reasonable to expect them to stop masturbating. I mean, the whole point of it… to the extent that it has a point… is to substitute for an actual real live person, right? So once the real live person’s on the scene, there’s no reason to keep it up, so to speak.
I’d have to try to find out. I knew asking Amaranth or Steff wouldn’t be helpful… their views on the subject would likely differ wildly from the human standard. There wasn’t anything necessarily wrong with that, but Ian was–for lack of another term–normal. I couldn’t imagine a normal, straight guy without any weird kinks or fetishes choosing to masturbate when there was a girl available.
Anyway, it was something that would have to be addressed. I didn’t need to worry about what he might have been doing every time I held his hand. I had enough sexual stuff paraded in front of me on a daily basis. I didn’t need to think about my boyfriend getting himself off. It was too much. The thought of Ian, sitting in his dimly lit room, in his boxer shorts, his thing out, all hard in his hand… his strong, callused fingers… that thought was…
It was…
“Penny for your thoughts?” Ian asked.
I jumped, clacking my teeth together with painful force.
“I’d take it,” I said with a laugh. “I can use all the copper I can get my hands on.”
“Seriously,” he said. “What were you thinking about just now?”
“Um… you,” I said. That was true. I had been thinking about him. Therefore, there was no reason for me to elaborate, no reason to keep talking, no reason whatsoever for my mouth to stay open and add the word, “masturbating,” the way that it did.
FUCK! Shit shit fucking fuck!
“I… I like to think about you masturbating, too,” Ian said, his voice suddenly hoarse.
“That’s nasty,” I told him, in the tone he deserved. “I don’t do that.”
“Why not?” he asked. “A moment ago, you looked like you were ready to start right here and now.”
“I did not,” I said. “Anyway, girls aren’t like guys. We don’t all feel the need to do that… in fact, most of us don’t.”
“Okay, whatever,” Ian said, rolling his eyes.
“Hey, just because you can’t control your fucking libido…” I began angrily.
“Khersis, Mackenzie,” Ian said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What, something has to be wrong with me just because I don’t play with myself?” I demanded.
“No, I mean…” he gave a frustrated grunt/sigh, and kicked the toe of his shoe on the carpet. “It seems like every time things start to get going good between us, you flip out about something and turn into a total cunt.”
He didn’t actually emphasize the word, but the emphasis was there in my head, anyway.
Nobody had ever used that word on me before. Some people… strangely, mostly girls… seemed to use it so casually and frequently that it had almost no force from them. From most people, though, it was the ultimate expression of contempt and disgust you could level at a woman… and with good reason, I thought, because it was the ugliest, most visceral word for the ugliest, most visceral part of a woman’s body. I’d always hated the word. It was, as I said, ugly, and stupid and juvenile in a way that went beyond most four-letter words.
But… hearing it now…
Was there any better word for it? It packed so much meaning, so much feeling into one short, guttural syllable.
Hearing it now… being called it now by the guy who’d so recently called me his girlfriend… was like a bucket of ice water running down my back and leaving a trail of fire in its wake.
“Oh, shit!” Ian said, barely a second later. “Mackenzie, I’m sorry! It just… slipped out.”
“Say it again,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean it,” he said, oblivious. “I just meant, you know, you get a little… snarky… sometimes, but really, there’s nothing wrong with that. I just…”
“Forget it,” I said, sighing.
I didn’t think I could make him understand how he’d made me feel, and trying would probably just convince him all the more that I was screwed up beyond the point of redemption. That might lead to more choice words and the resulting tingly feelings, but it wouldn’t really do much for our relationship.
“I really didn’t mean it,” he said, a desperate edge in his voice.
“Look, I believe you,” I said. “You’re forgiven. You forgive me for flipping out on you, I forgive you for saying… that.”
“Okay,” Ian said. “Um… I suppose you don’t still want to…”
“It’s up to you,” I reminded him. “If you say you want to, then I want to, no matter what you want to call me before.”
Or, you know… during. Hint hint, telepathic hint.
“Okay,” he said. “But… only if you really want to.”
“Are we really going to go through this every time?” I asked.
“I’m just making sure!” Ian said. “Fuck, you don’t have be such a b… bother.”
Such a bother? Was he serious? A bother? One little slip of the tongue and I couldn’t even get a “bitch” out of him.
“Let’s just go up,” I said, praying the way would be clear and we wouldn’t run into any of my more contentious or naked floor mates.
Well, nobody in particular was half-listening… Celia came out of the room she shared with Feejee right as we were walking past. I thought at first she was suffused with some kind of orange glow, which may have made sense, considering her fondness for “recreational alchemy”… but on closer inspection, it was simply an illusion. The apparent glow seemed to be a combination of the facts that it was just that vibrant a color and that the illusion didn’t cover her perfectly but “bled off” into the surrounding space.
“Check it out, mammals… now who’s pink?” Celia asked, triumphantly indifferent to her failure to color within the lines.
“Uh… still you?” I said, watching the orange fade back to her normal, remarkably human-looking skin tone.
“Oh, damn!” Celia said. “Well, I haven’t really learned how to bind it into a spell yet… but, when I do, I think that’s going to be my full-time shade. Well, maybe a little less bright, if I can get a handle on fine-tuning it. I’m going to try to texture it, too, so it looks more like scales.”
“Um, you aren’t studying illusion just so you can look more reptilian, are you?” I asked, with a little touch of trepidation. I was curious, but Celia was damned touchy about some things.
“No,” Celia said. “But, as long as I’ve got the option… I mean, I never thought that I looked all that human before I came here, but I’d hate to think somebody might mistake me for one, even for a second. Speaking of humans…” She flicked her snake’s tongue at Ian, tasting his scent on the air. I blushed, for reasons that wouldn’t have made sense to anybody watching the scene. “You order take-out or something, Mack?”
“This is Ian,” I said. “My… um, my date from the dance.”
Of course, he actually was my boyfriend. He’d said as much when he called me his girlfriend. I figured there was no sense making a big deal out of it, or spreading it around, or giving him a chance to deny it.
“You really feel safe dating her?” Celia asked. “I mean, not that you shouldn’t… Mack’s an utter wuss. She’d vent herself at a loud noise, if she was fully human.”
“Humans don’t ‘vent’,” I said. “And I’m not that big a wuss.”
“Anyway, she only eats virgins,” Ian said, helpfully. Helpful, helpful Ian… such a big help he was. Yes, he was really helping. “Which I’m not, so… I’m okay.”
“I only feed from virgins,” I corrected sharply. “But, that’s really not anybody’s business.”
“Virgins?” Celia said. She turned her big, lidless eyes towards me. “No wonder you’re so skinny.”
“Ha ha,” I said.
“Well, good luck to you, anyway,” Celia said. “I bet there’s not a lot of human guys who’d date a half-demon girl even if she wasn’t doing half the girls on her floor.”
“I am not ‘doing’ half the girls on the floor!” I shouted.
“Seriously, Ethan,” Celia said. “Around here, she’s like the central trunk passage: everybody’s slid down her.”
“Uh, right,” Ian said.
“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” I said, pulling gently on Ian’s arm and heading in the direction of my room.
“Whatever,” Celia said. “I’m going to go work on my color some more. I just wanted to show it off before it faded.”
“Did she call me ‘Ethan’?” Ian asked, staring after Celia as she returned to her room.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“When she said half the girls on…”
“It doesn’t matter,” I repeated. I gave what I thought was only a slightly less-gentle tug, and nearly pulled us over. The jolt surprised him into looking around the hallway for the first time, in the process of which he couldn’t help but notice the drawings of me staring at him from all over the place.
“What the fuck is this?” he asked, pulling down the nearest one. “A campaign poster?”
“Not mine,” I said. “Please, put it back.”
“But, that’s sick,” he said. “‘Go to hell no wait you already beened there ha ha ha.’?”
“Just ignore them,” I said, pulling and prodding him over towards my door.
“‘Mak Blayz: Eetn Ppl An Pussy’,” he read off another one.
“Just ignore them,” I repeated.
“You’re just going to leave them up?” he asked.
“I don’t have a lot of choice,” I said, fumbling my key out of my jeans pocket.
“You could tear them down,” he said.
“With my luck, I’d get in trouble for it,” I said. “Hell, that’s probably why they put them up in the first place.”
“But who…?”
“You met one of them,” I said. I got the door open. “Suzi. Remember? ‘You girlfriend ugly.'”
“You should complain to somebody,” he said, looking around the hall. “This can’t be legal.”
“Hey, do you want me to suck your dick, or what?” I asked, perhaps a bit louder than my normal conversation voice.
Well, maybe a bit more than a bit. The single-bodied Leighton twins and Twyla, the horned girl stepped out of the room next to mine to see what was going on. The lizardwoman that everybody called Hissy poked her head out of the room across from them. Down the hall, the swan maiden Leda leaned out of her room briefly, just long enough to see who had caused the commotion, and then disappeared.
Then, just to make my evening complete, the door across from mine opened. There stood Sooni, the beautiful, bronze-skinned girl with a fox’s ears, tail, and predatory smile. Her masses of hair were braided and coiled in four big round buns on the sides and top of her head, with loops coming off in architecturally improbable fashion. I suppose some people must have found her elaborate styles impressive, but I knew I could have got my hair to do that, if I’d had slaves to take care of it… and I had that much hair… and it was that well-behaved.
She smiled frighteningly wide at me, and her black eyes glistened with cruel delight. I froze, transfixed.
“Please do debase yourself sexually in a more reasonable tone,” she said fluidly. “There are actually some among us who are here to study.”
“Sorry,” I said, ducking my head and backing away into my room, conscious only moments after I’d done this that it must have looked a lot like a bow. Sooni stood in her own doorway like a statue, staring at me, unblinking. I wanted to close my door and cut off that gaze, but Ian was just standing there in the hallway, staring at her. She stared at me and he stared at her.
It felt like we could have gone on like that forever, but then it was Sooni who ended it, and I felt an absolutely pathetic wave of gratitude towards her for it.
“Your girlfriend is a lesbian,” she said to Ian, then turned sharply in place and went into her room, flouncing so that her tail swished, and her too-short-already skirt, which rode up in the back anyway, flipped up in a very noticeable fashion. I got a good look at her pink, lace-trimmed panties, and I was sure Ian did, too.
“Who… who was that?” Ian asked, finally coming into the room a good ten seconds after Sooni shut her door.
“Sooni,” I said darkly. “It’s her posters you were admiring.”
“Well, we’ll forget about her,” Ian said. He pressed in close against me and kissed me on the cheek. It wasn’t the mouth, but I’d take it. I’d even accept without asking that the massive hard-on he sported was entirely due to me.
Sooni could call me a lesbian all she wanted, but I had a boyfriend, and I was about to do something with him that was more directly, unequivocally sexual with him than anything I’d done with any girl… and it would be the third time in a single day. What kind of lesbian would do that?
Ahh, the good old days, when like the hands of a clock chiming 12, I was able to get an erection every hour or two. Of course these days it would be a terrible thing to waste.
Makenzie is just so damn smooth. People would have to be crazy not to vote for such a suave, classy, sophisticated lady.