CHAPTER 14
Sampson
After our dinner, fuck-a-thon, and rousing session of sixty-nine, we nap for a couple hours before showering together. I’m bent practically double in the normal-size bath, which is annoying. Nina’s entire house is too small for me. I can’t wait to move her into my place, where there’s more room.
Whoa—slow down, buddy. You’ve been together less than twenty-four hours.
Wise advice from my brain. Too bad I don’t buy into it.
Try not to screw this up.
Also good advice. Probably going to fall on deaf ears.
Nina kisses my dick, for once lying fallow against my thigh. He’s had a lot of exercise lately. He needs his rest. “You do really great work, you know that?”
“Can I get your recommendation typed up and signed? Might need to add it to my resume one day.”
“We’ll see. I’ll need to see you in action some more, just to make sure this wasn’t a one off.” But the smile she gives me is sultry enough to make my dick twitch. I can’t imagine how I resisted her all these years. She’s already under my skin like she’s always lived there.
“Just wait, Jelly Bean. I’ve got so much more to show you.” And I wink so that she blushes, which makes me laugh. We spend the next five minutes soaping her up, arousing her, until I use my fingers to make her come again.
Which requires more soaping.
Eventually, while I twist and turn, seeking in vain to wet all my skin, Nina leaves the shower. I’m just about to follow her out when she pokes her head back in the door.
“Don’t rush. I know conditions aren’t ideal. I’ll meet you downstairs. I’m going to clean up the living room.”
We did leave a mess, which is unlike me, and I think unlike her, too.
Her house is pristine. The downstairs is pretty.
In fact, the whole place is lovely—girlie, but lovely.
I like the decoration because it reminds me of Nina’s lighthearted side.
I just don’t like the height of the ceilings and walls. Or bath.
When I meander downstairs, my neck and back already developing a crick from hunching over, I find her, dressed in a fluffy white robe, pulling out books from the bookshelf.
Mr. Mittens is perched on top of the case, looking down and supervising.
Nina holds up a stack of books when she hears me descend.
“I told you that I had something to show you after dinner. It took a while to get past the distractions, but these are it. Unless it’s too late and you want to go to bed?”
“Always.” But the way my dick fails to rise gives lie to my words. Still, I could be convinced with a few more minutes to recuperate.
She rolls her eyes. “To sleep, I meant.”
Oh. “I’m not tired.” Which is the truth. Inside, I’m all riled up, energized by finally being with my boyhood crush, and by what I’m considering with her for the future.
Dorkdom doesn’t die. It just goes deep and hibernates until a guy is old enough to catch the girl of his dreams with something other than his pimples and aspirations to knighthood. Apparently.
“Good. Because I think you’re going to find what I have to show you…
interesting. Or… something.” With that discernible pause, she gestures with her chin towards the couch, which is better anyway, since I can fit in the space while seated.
Standing creates aches and pains from having to bend, especially along my back, where, contrary to my earlier assertions, I’m not quite as healed as I want to be.
There are still twinges. I just ignore them.
But I don’t want her to send me home, even if that last bout of sixty-nine pulled at the sensitive skin along my nape. “Come, sit on my lap.”
With a happy smile, she bounces over to me, snuggling in just like she’s spent the last twenty years using me as her chair.
And there I go, erection central again.
But she’s speaking, for once not noticing, or not caring, that I want her again. “So, this is going to sound demented, but you need to hear me out, okay?”
She waits until I nod. “Okay.”
For a moment, she bites her lip, studying me, before saying in a rush, “I’ve been plotting out a few different series, because there’s only so many vampire romances that I can write without boring myself into one-line books. ‘He saw her, bit her, fucked her, then end.’”
“Not your best work,” I agree, trying to remain deadpan. But all I want to do is smile. That’s the effect she has on me. Inside that sometimes-grumpy exterior is a total ray of sunshine.
“Right. I thought that demons might make for a good series, since there are so many different kinds. Incubi, succubae, trade demons, punisher demons… Anyway, I started researching and almost immediately stumbled onto the Watchers.”
She looks at me as if she expects some bells to start ringing. “I’ve got nothing, Jelly Bean. What are watchers?” But suddenly, a thought hits me. “Wait, I think Xy mentioned watchers. Some pervy thing?”
“Sort of. Watchers, with a capital ‘W’, are a specific group of angels.”
“Angels?”
“Just… listen. God gave the Watchers the job of watching over the earth and humanity. Best guess, if I have to timeline it, this would have been after Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden, but at some point before the Younger Dryas. The Flood. We’re talking about the antediluvian world,” she clarifies.
“That would make it… hold on.” She flips open a notebook.
Her brow creases as her eyes flow over the words she’s written in a messy scrawl before she flips a page.
“Roughly 11,500 B.C. or sometime before that.”
“Does history go back that far? I thought civilization was about five-thousand-years-old?”
She waves her hand. “Stuff and nonsense. Erase everything you were taught in school. It was all mostly drivel. There are more and more archeological excavations that put civilized man back at least to just before the Younger Dryas, and more likely well before that: Gobekli Tepe, some other tepes, some discoveries under the Osirion in Abydos, Egypt, the labyrinth near the pyramid of Hawara, Yamaguchi in Japan, and so many other sites around the globe. Anyway, the point is, whether we’re talking myth or history, we’re talking old. ”
“Okay. The Watchers are old. How does this relate to me? And how do they relate to demons?”
“They’re angels.”
“But you said you were researching demons.”
“Right. Just…” She frowns. “It’s complicated.”
“I’m good an unravelling complicated.” But even though I reassure her, my pulse feels heavy in my veins.
I have a sudden strange sense of urgency firing through me, as if I need to know everything that she’s about to tell me immediately, and also like I don’t want to hear any of it at all.
Which makes no sense, but the presentment rakes along my skin with iron claws.
She leans in and kisses my chest. “That you are.” When she straightens, she says, “Okay, from the beginning. In the Judeo-Christian world, legend says God sent his angels, the Watchers, to watch over humanity. I’m not sure how many Watchers there were originally, but two hundred of them saw human women and chose wives from among them. With those wives, they had children.”
My instant reaction is disbelief. “What?” I scoff. “That’s silly. Angels don’t have bodies. They’re spiritual. Like ghosts.”
“There are a few passages in the Bible that pretty much say the opposite. They eat, drink, walk, touch.” She pauses. “Fuck, apparently.”
“And second,” I say, rambling right over her, “I would have heard about this in Sunday School. My parents forced me to attend every week until… well.” Until they died, at which point I couldn’t pretend an interest anymore.
She lays her hand flat against my chest. “There are lots of things people aren’t taught.
I don’t know why, but the Watchers are one of them.
They’re mentioned in the Bible, and they have an entire story in the Book of Enoch, which is apocrypha, but it was relied upon heavily in religious communities in the ancient world. ”
“If you say so.”
“Sampson.”
I sigh. I know I’m being stubborn, and a little bit of an ass. I’m just… resistant. “I’m sorry. Go on. Tell me about the Watchers.”
“I’m going to tell you about their children, the Nephilim.”
Shock startles me. A feeling like dripping acid rips down my spine. “Nephilim.” The word Xy used.
Nina nods. “There are some decent theories about how creating these hybrid children with human women was a power move by the Watchers, a way to take legitimate control of the earth, since earth was given to humans to rule through God’s agreement with Adam.
These angels could rule through their ‘human’ hybrid children.
However, most scholars seem to think that the Watchers simply lusted.
But whatever their reasons, the two-hundred made a pact to rise or fall together.
They knew that they were going against direct orders, but they did it anyway. ”
“Like Lucifer?”
Her head bobs from side to side. “Yes, and no. Different kind of rebellion, I think. Anyway, these particular angels were said to be imprisoned beneath the Euphrates River to await judgment at End Times. But they’re not the important part of this. Their children are.”
“The Nephilim. Like Xy said. That’s what he called himself.” And me, I think. I wish I could remember more clearly, but I was doped up, and in agony.
“Right.” She pauses, bites her lip, inhales a deep breath, and sighs. “The Nephilim were giants.”
And just that easily, the earth rolls beneath me. My hold tightens on Nina like she’s gravity, until she utters a little cry. Instantly, I unclench.
“Sorry. I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you?” She’s so tiny, so fragile. I’m such a big galoot, as my Aunt Sylvia used to call me.
“I’m fine. Are you okay?”