Chapter 5 #2
“Make a list,” Gail finally said, through clenched teeth.
They were sitting back on the leather couch in the lobby.
It was an awful couch. The second couch was microfiber and much more comfortable.
This one just made you sweaty and sticky with the heat, the backs of Crystal bare thighs uncomfortably stuck to the cushions.
“I’ll think about it. I would have to clear it with the council. ”
“You know,” Crystal said knowingly, “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.”
“You are a terrible influence,” Gail said sternly.
“I am trying to help the only way I know how!”
“I know. It’s very annoying.”
* * *
Mark had been gone for five whole days before he came back again.
That gave Crystal time to not only make a list of what the breeding farm needed to properly care for its women but also to write out in her little notebook all the questions she had about the creche on the floors below and what they might need.
There was nothing else to do with her time anyway.
She wrote down contacts she was thinking about finding to provide certain things, but that wasn’t particularly time consuming either.
So she ended up becoming to the women of the breeding farm, just what she had been before.
She negotiated valuable items out of Gail and the other matrons.
Those cigarettes and airplane bottles of booze had been hidden from them all this time but they were valuable currency that the matrons hadn’t been using.
One afternoon she made herself useful by reorganizing the supply room and taking inventory. It seemed logical that if she were to request new supplies, she should know what they already had on hand. She had been unaccountably pleased to find a real clipboard and a half-used legal pad.
She played music on the little boombox they’d found with a stack of accompanying CDs. It was all ancient 90s stuff. Oasis, The Wallflowers, The Goo-Goo Dolls.
Crystal swung her hips and counted every single maxi pad, bottle of nail polish remover, box of personal wipes, cotton ball, Kleenex, cigarettes, toothbrush, bottle of hairspray and everything else.
It wasn’t a big room, but it was stacked floor to ceiling with stuff, most of which Crystal thought they really didn’t need but which would fetch a decent trade on the network.
That was assuming Gail would let her. But she wanted to be able to point to specific potential trades.
“Crys?” Alex appeared in the doorway and Crystal spun around on one heel, still shimmying to the Spice Girls. “Your boyfriend’s here.”
Crystal froze, and her heart suddenly began to pound.
Since she was doing administrative work, she’d been allowed to change into shorts and a tank top, yet now she suddenly felt too dressed down for Mark’s arrival.
Her long and lustrous ponytail hung down her back, but it was not glossy and curled at the end as it had been the last time Mark had seen her.
“Oh!” Crystal found a hand mirror. She was wearing lipstick and only because she had been playing with shades along with Alex earlier.
But she was wearing no other makeup and looked hopelessly dowdy by the standards she’d already become used to.
It was still somewhat of a shock to feel that way, having rolled out of bed into a pair of boots every day for the last two years.
Yet she couldn’t help that feeling of wanting to look cute for a boy… even a boy with fangs.
“You look fine,” Alex said laughing, still hovering there in the doorway. “He looks like he’s dying to see you. I don’t think he’s going to care that you’re not all primped like the others.”
“Pssht. I wish I was though.” She straightened her shirt a little and swallowed.
She entertained the fear that Mark’s interest would disappear.
Perhaps she had only been some human novelty; a nice roll in the hay before he found some other girl in the breeding pit.
That’s how most Vampyren seemed to operate.
That was how most men seemed to operate in Crystal’s experience.
Mark was different than most. Crystal had seen that quickly, and she had no reason to doubt him.
But that didn’t mean he would be into her long-term.
That seemed like too much to hope for. Which was, in itself, a very strange feeling.
“Okay, I’m coming,” Crystal mumbled. She set her clipboard with its careful inventory on a shelf and went out to meet Mark. She could sense him before she saw him and the sudden epiphany of that sensation made her dizzy for a moment.
Mark looked even better than he had before.
She wasn’t sure how that was possible. He had become so much more beautiful in her memory, she thought.
She found herself smitten. Although if anyone was going to be smitten by a Vampyren she supposed she was a decent candidate, having always had a pragmatic and even-handed view of them.
They were conquerors and colonizers, sure.
But being a mercenary herself, she kind of understood that impulse.
Besides, you couldn’t fight the enemy if you didn’t understand them. But now Crystal understood her way right into Mark’s bed and she wasn’t even sorry.
“Crys,” Mark said in a soft little whisper that Crystal felt on the shell of her ear already even as he looked at her across the lobby.
He wasn’t wearing his armor or the basic stuff he’d been wearing under it last time.
Now he wore tight black pants that looked leathery and form-fitting and a sleeveless vest with buckles and straps, his pecs peeking out of the deep V.
His pleasing biceps flexed but didn’t bulge like the cartoonish arms she’d seen on other men.
They were somehow even more appealing as they glistened with sweat.
The corner of his rosy mouth turned up when he saw her and his big, dark eyes that he lined with charcoal to repel the sun roved over her.
“Hello,” Crystal said, swaying a little.
Shit, Crystal thought. I missed him but I didn’t know I missed him quite this much.
Surely, he had done something even if he hadn’t used pheromones.
What else could explain this sudden attachment she felt after such a short time?
She found herself moving and suddenly they were both in the middle of the lobby, pressed together and kissing heatedly as if he’d been gone for a year and not five measly days.
Mark picked her up off the floor and carried her bridal style to a private bedroom used for rendezvous.
Crystal hated those rooms, but she hated voyeurism more and she wasn’t about to argue when Mark was kissing her like that and kicking the door closed.
“All I’ve thought about is you,” Mark whispered, laying her down on the bed and crouching over her.
The private room was much nicer than the big ones the girls shared.
The bed was queen-sized and fixed with a goose down comforter in an attractive grey duvet cover.
The girls shared the room and nobody lived in it, which seemed like a terrible waste to Crystal who sighed happily, stretching her arms out, her bare legs sliding open, the fabric silky and soft on her skin.
“Really?” She said. “All you thought of? How did you fight then?” She smiled up at him and pretended her heart wasn’t racing as he looked at her with heavy-lidded eyes.
“I barely did fight,” he murmured, kissing the tip of her nose and nipping at her bottom lip. “I could have been killed very easily.”
“Oh, that would have been so sad,” Crystal said, fascinated with the Vampyren’s ability to flirt, especially since he seemed a little stiff, though by far the most gentlemanly she’d yet met. “I mean not for me, I don’t care.”
“No?” He smiled down at her and for the first time since they’d met, he looked cocky. “You wouldn’t care at all, huh?”
“Not a lick,” Crystal said. Mark smiled at that tapped the tip of her nose with his finger and she was about to laugh at him but then he was tracing his finger down to her lip, pressing ever so gently even as he rocked his swelling cock against her, making her gasp softly.
He pulled down her lip, and she tried to bite his finger but just as quickly he pulled away. “Mark…”
“Would you care?” He said, in a deceptively teasing tone.
He wanted her to care, she thought. It mattered to him.
He cupped her breast through tank top and squeezed it gently before ducking his head and yanking the shirt and bra down so he could suckle her there, his fangs softly grazing. “Would you?”
“I would,” she said, truly feeling it in her heart. He’d bewitched her somehow, she was sure. Maybe he hadn’t intended to, but it was definitely his fault. “I would, I swear.”
He covered her nipple with his mouth, shamelessly licking and sucking.
She squealed, wrapping her legs around him.
When he finally entered her, it was somehow even better than the first time.
It wasn’t the unexpected passion taking them over, now it was two souls in a union.
She found tears sliding down her face as he stared down at her, his mouth gaping open as he pounded into her again and again because she’d begged him to.
He reached down to finger her clit and she cried out, trembling from the pleasure of it, as she danced on the precipice of bliss and then plunged right off of it.
“Mark...Markole…” At the sound of her saying his real name, he growled into her neck, freezing for a moment and then growing somehow impossibly big inside her. She shook like a leaf just before he finally pulsed his orgasm, crying out as he thrust in yet deeper.
“Crystal,” he murmured into her skin. “Crystal, my love…”
My love, she thought. How many women got that from a Vampyren?
When they lay together, side by side, atop the duvet, she threw a leg over him. She kissed his shoulder. It was horribly hot even in the “good” room but she didn’t care. She’d cling to him for as long as she was allowed.