Sex?
Or shoes?
In what twisted world would I have to choose?
Ha! I was a poet and I didn’t know it. I have layers, y’know. There’s more to me than a pretty face and an eternally 30 year-old body and a magnificent closet and the whole queen thing and the ruling Hell gig.
(What? There is!)
“Oh my God, Elizabeth Frankenstein Taylor!”
“What? What?” I straightened up in such a hurry, I almost fell off the kitchen stool. “Are you okay? Are we under attack?” I looked wildly around the kitchen. “Did you lose your phone again?”
“I have been talking to you for five minutes about tonight and you’ve been gaping at me with your mouth open muttering ‘sex’ and ‘shoes’ for almost that long.”
“Okay, Marc, but...don’t call me Elizabeth.” What had my mother been thinking? Who stares down at a newborn and says, ‘welp, no need to think about this one second longer, let’s go with Elizabeth Taylor because no one will ever tease her’? “And we’ve been over this—my middle name isn’t Frankenstein.”
The zombie’s (chilly) hands settled on my shoulders and yeah. It was a little alarming. He bent in close. Dentist close. Or doctor close, which made sense—Marc was an M.D. “When my face is pointed at you and sounds are coming out of my mouth hole, that’s usually an indication that I’m talking to you and would like your attention.”
I wriggled free from his clammy grip. “Usually?”
“Sometimes I’m just bitching,” he allowed. “Under the right circumstances, it’s better than Valium.”
“Right. Look, I’d love to hang and chat about whatever it is—“
“Lying!” he declared. “You are looking me in the face and telling bald-faced falsehoods and would be dead to me if you weren’t already.”
“—but today is a special day. It’s—“ I broke off and listened. “Ooh!”
“You look like Petey the dog when you cock your head like that.”
The kitchen door swung open, revealing my tall, dark, handsome husband. Eric Sinclair, king of the vampires and ruler of my cold, sporadically beating, undead heart.
“Oooh, ooh!” It was downright embarrassing how just the sight of my husband reduced me to things like “oooh!” It’s also possible I might have jumped up and down a little.
Sinclair beamed. “My own.”
Marc let out an inelegant snort. Which is probably redundant. (I don’t think it’s possible to elegantly snort.) “I think you should’ve waited until the sun was at your back, Eric, it would have been way more dramatic. Go out and try again.”
“Don’t listen to Marc,” I said. “He’s grumpy about...uh...” What had it been? Something about pads. Or heat? Did he want potholders? Or some of those big puffy oven-safe mittens? I’d buy him a thousand. Just...later.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Marc,” Sinclair murmured. The kitchen door was swinging shut behind him as he advanced on me like a big cat. A lion, maybe. Or a sexy ocelot.
“I haven’t actually told you my problem,” was the aggrieved reply. “And Betsy didn’t, either. Which, in itself, is kind of the problem.”
“I have every confidence the situation will be resolved to your satisfaction,” Sinclair continued, and it wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t. Tall and gorgeous and brilliant and sexy and dynamite in bed (literally! we did it next to a pile of sparklers last 4th of July). He was an embarrassment of riches.
But the strangest thing about my husband? Besides his predilection for baking homemade dog treats for our puppies, Fur and Burr? He thought I was irresistible, too. Which made no sense, but I sure wasn’t going to argue.
“I hate you,” someone—Marc, I wanted to say?—was whining, “almost as much as I hate your wife.”
Then Sinclair was right in front of me, sliding his big hands past my waist, down the backs of my thighs, and then he lifted me to him like I weighed as much as a damp handkerchief. Take it from a gal who has been six feet tall since the eighth grade: when a guy effortlessly picks you up, it’s so. Fucking. Hot.
Then—whoosh! The kitchen door was swinging again. And we were on the right side this time.
“Wait! You never told me where annnnnnd they’re gone.”
“Marc required your assistance?”
By now I was resting my head on Sinclair’s chest so I could feel his deep voice rumble out. “I don’t know, how should I know? Faster, please. We have to go faster because our stupid bedroom is two floors and at least a thousand feet away so faster, right now—faster!”
“That’s not what you urged last night,” he teased.
“Really? You’re trying a ‘that’s what she said’ thing? Stick to 20th century humor, pal.”
“I suppose such things are...ah...better left to experts.” The ‘ah’ because I’d worked open some of the buttons on his deep blue Royal Oxford shirt and was licking the exposed skin. (This was Sinclair at his most casual: dress shirt, slacks, belt, socks—but no jacket or tie, the hedonist.) He set me carefully on my feet and leaned against the bannister to give me some wiggle room. So I did what any right-thinking horny vampire would do: pounced on him. If he was a sexy ocelot, I was a sensual bobcat!
“Too many buttons,” I whined.
“The three words I treasure most from your lips, darling.”
“I’ll give you three words,” I muttered, losing patience and jerking his shirt free of his pants.
“There you are!”
I spun and beheld my friend Jessica holding the Ultimate Mood BreakersTM: her cute weird babies.
“What now?” I snapped.
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry. I meant ‘oh look who stopped by and brought us her weird cute babies without calling first’.”
“I haven’t called before coming over for fifteen years! On your instructions, after the Miss Congeniality debacle.”
Ugh. Don’t remind me. Sullying that pageant was my worst act before I died. Or my finest, depending on where you land on the “are pageants great or terrible” spectrum.
“And they have names, y’know.” Jessica sounded the way she usually did when we got into it: exasperated-yet-fond. Or maybe it was the other way around. We’d been friends since junior high and she was one of those terrible women who didn’t age. She still had the same dark, perfect complexion, the same big beautiful eyes, the same perpetually surprised expression (she liked pulling her hair back—way back—which made her eyebrows arch). And mere months after popping out the twins, she was back to her scrawny-skinny frame. So aggravating. “And you’d better not be calling them weird babies when they’re in high school, Betsy.”
She was in full Aggravated Mom mode (far more terrifying than Irritated Roommate mode), pacing back and forth (she only ever paced three feet forward and three feet back, so it was like watching a wind-up toy with a great manicure) with a beautiful bright-eyed baby on each hip watching us with interest. “Your mom asked me to swing by and grab some of BabyJon’s toys so he could play with the twins. And what thanks do I get, coming here out of my way?”
“No thanks?” I guessed (seemed safest).
“No thanks!” Jessica was wearing her usual collection of comfortable faded clothing (long-sleeved red t-shirt, black jeans, sandals and argh, the state of her toenails!), all liberally decorated with baby formula. (How do you even get baby formula on your feet?) The good news was, the formula set off her dark skin in a really superb way. Except for the only four hours of sleep a night thing, motherhood had been great for my oldest and best friend.
“But don’t worry,” she was continuing, because even if she suspected I’d tuned her out, she figured Sinclair, at least, would be paying attention. Foolish woman! Sinclair was only thinking about my pants, specifically: how to divest me of them. “We won’t be here long, so you two horny toads can get back to humping on the stairs and good God, man!” Jessica had stopped in mid-pace. The babies were also goggling at Sinclair. “What happened to your shirt?”
Sinclair looked down and seemed surprised to behold that his shirt below the second button was shredded. He looked part man, part carwash mop. “To begin,” he said with convincing dignity, “the queen and I never ‘hump’. We—“
“Spare me the perv details.”
“It is,” he continued, a neat trick with the shreds of his shirt fluttering around his knees, “a special day for us.”
“Oh, because you’re about to do a hallway bang?” She giggled and one of the babies did, too. The other was focused on devouring its hand. Not part of the hand. The whole hand. I didn’t know if I should discourage or cheer. I also didn’t know which one was the boy or the girl since Jessica refused to slap a Hello My Name Is sticker on their tiny shirts. (Because she was an unreasonable harridan.) “You guys have a lot of special days.”
“Yep, it’s all special all the time around here so we’d better get back to it.”
“Nice to see you, Jessica!” Jessica yelled, because that was her idea of subtle.
“Well, it was.”
“We miss you around here, Jessica!”
“Well, we do.”
“Jerks.” This in a tone of restrained affection, and, formalities finished, she was bustling past us and up the stairs toward my brother/son’s room. (Long story short, my father and stepmother had a baby together. They’re gone now. The baby remains. We’re the real modern family, what with brother/sons and zombies and vampires and puppies and the occasional ghost all under one roof.) Sinclair turned to follow (we had to; our room was up those same stairs) and I hopped on his back, because he’s super strong and I’m nimble like that.
But I forgot about physics. Sinclair clutched for the banister, missed, and we both tumbled backward and fell.
(Fuck you, physics.)
“Elizabeth!”
“Argh, I’m squashed like a bug.” I groaned and elbowed him off me. He obliged and I heard him swallow a snort of laughter as he rolled to his feet and beheld my flattened form. “Not funny.”
“No, of course not.” He bent, took my hand, helped me to my feet. “It was churlish to laugh.”
“The churlishest,” I agreed. “Let’s totter up the stairs like the geezers we’ll eventually be, then bang like bunnies once we’re on the right side of a closed bedroom door.”
Ah, my own, you read my mind.
That’s literal, by the way. It wasn’t a guess, or a threat, or something he said because lots of couples say it. We could actually read each other’s minds. It took a while to get used to, and I still got some unwelcome pictures in my head—
(“Why are you mulling over cobbling together a tractor/combine/BMW hybrid? So you can get the harvesting done really, really fast?”)
--but Sinclair had it worse.
(“Please. Please stop thinking that not knowing Burberry made rain boots for toddlers means you’re a terrible godmother.”)
We clasped hands like mature adults and sedately mounted the stairs, and our reward for behaving ourselves was—
“—like oversexed moles again—“
“Yes, but it’s a very special day.”
—to overhear more bitching. I’d be annoyed at overhearing someone running me down behind my back, except everyone in the mansion says exactly what they think right to my face. All. The. Time. And now here came Jessica, loaded with babies, and our friend/major domo, Tina, loaded with baby gear. She was small (she barely came up to my collarbone), petite (her little wrists were barely an inch across!), and soft-spoken: she’d been a Southern belle before she died just after the Civil War. Or during the war. I don’t know; I’m not her biographer.
Anyway, her slight frame looked all the more hilarious since Jessica had basically loaded Tina like a pack mule. She had the port-a-crib, two diaper bags, a mesh bag full of toys...and that was just what was in her right hand and slung over her right shoulder. I wondered if I should warn her about physics. Naw. She probably knew about physics. They had physics during the Civil War.
“Majesties,” she murmured, sidling past us to get to the stairs.
“Hope you got splinters,” Jessica added cheerfully.
Sinclair’s thought was like an arrow: Friends. The ultimate mixed blessing.
“Yep.” Then I was hurrying down the hall, the absurdly long hall—okay, let me back up, because living in a mansion is amazing. As oblivious as I can be, even I wasn’t so laden with privilege that I’d dare complain that my new job(s) required a three story 6,000+ square foot mansion. There were a lot of us, that was one thing. We did a lot of entertaining, that was another. You never knew when random vampires would swing by to give us blood oranges and swear to never try to burn us alive, that was a third. Or when random werewolves would swing by to give us venison and swear to never try to hunt us down and slaughter us. Or when random mermaids would swing by and bitch about the state of the Mississippi River. Or when we’d host a pot luck.
We also needed a lot of security (see above), lots of room to spread out (see above: the mansion menagerie), and it wasn’t just our home. It was vampire HQ. Sinclair and I were expected to live like we were large and in charge. Apparently knocking on the door of a two-bedroom condo in South Minneapolis to pledge fealty to the ruler of the undead nation was...anticlimactic.
All in all, good “problems” to have. But today I wished we lived in an RV, or the smallest mobile home ever designed, because getting down the hall to our room was taking too long. But then! Coming into sight: our door, end of the hall, like an oasis. A sex oasis.
In half a second we were back in each other’s arms on the right side of a (locked) door, and now my outfit was the one that looked like someone had fed it through a shredder, jamming be damned. Especially my sports bra. Sinclair loathed sports bras.
I loathe sports bras.
Yeah? Do you want to walk around with a big band of elastic cinched around your chest for ten hours a day? No? Then shut your fang hole.
How do you make the silliest comments sound unendurably erotic?
I don’t—wait. Is that a compliment? Because that’s gonna determine how I respond.
Or I could just hold you down and do filthy things to you until you’re delirious with pleasure.
...that works.
Sinclair tossed a few more scraps to the floor
(whee! fabric confetti!)
and bent his head toward me. The sting of his fangs breaking the skin over my jugular worked on me like Pavlov worked over his dogs, or whatever the hell he did to them. You’ve heard “my knees went weak”? My knee bones disappeared. Knee bone? Singular? (Mental note: check with Marc on the number of knee bones.) Everything disappeared except Sinclair and his sinful sweet mouth. In seconds he’d pushed me from ‘damn, have I ever been this horny?’ to “oh, shit, I’m gonna come”.
Which is when he pulled back, the bastard, and held me at arm’s length. Like he was going to hug me and we’d go our separate ways. Like he wasn’t going to fuck me, the mere thought of which was horrifying. He grinned at my outraged squeak, his teeth red with my blood, and the overriding thought
(I’m about to fuck a very dangerous man)
had lost none of its power in the five
(six? two?)
years we’d been together.
He put his big hand in the middle of my chest and gave me a gentle push, which sent me flying back six feet
(wheeeee!)
and landing in the exact center of our bed. (Sinclair knew about physics.) Before I could even prop myself up on my elbows, he was on me. His kissed and sucked and nibbled up and down my throat, occasionally helping himself to a sip while I did my best to spell his name out on his back in scratch marks. (Fun vampire sex fact #4: the marks and bites would heal within minutes.)
My love, you define delicious.
S-I-N-K—dammit! Your name doesn’t have a K in it. I’m pretty sure...I can’t think when you’re doing thaaaaaannnnnggg...
Sinclair and his clever clever tongue were doing wonderful things to the shell of my ear while his hand slid between my thighs as I tried to remember if there was a K in his name. It was on the tip of my tongue—oooh, his tongue! Of all Sinclair’s yummy collection of parts, his tongue was—
“Uh, Betsy? Sinclair?” A tentative rap-rap-rap. “Sorry to bother you, but we need the heating pads.”
Sinclair froze in mid-nibble, then turned his head and honest-to-God snarled at the door. “Touch that door again and I’ll pull your eyes from your skull.”
(This is all kinds of wrong, but: oh my God soooo sexy!)
I knew the voice. “Not a good time, Will!” Will Jar, part-time blogger and full-time zombie, the latest to join our little clutch. (Our gaggle? Our herd? Our litter? Coalition? Brace?) “It’s our special day!”
“Yes, ours too. Um. Sinclair? I’m not actually touching the door—just having a conversation through it—so maybe don’t yank my eyeballs out?” Will’s voice was calm, measured, and just short of wheedling. “We just need the pads.”
I shifted beneath my husband, who was resting his forehead on my shoulder and muttering dark threats into the side of my neck. “Wait, we?”
A fresh bout of hammering actually shook the door in its frame. “Heating pads, you oversexed bimbo!” Marc Spangler, Zombie M.D., sounding a tad—shall we say—peeved? “And yeah, Sinclair, I mean you.”
Another snarl from the vampire king. “Do you think because you’re zombies I cannot kill you? Gentlemen: I have been at this a very long time.”
Somebody cleared his throat, and then Will piped up with, “Yeah, um, noted, but...your wife would prob’ly just bring us back to life. Again.” A pause. “Right?”
“Right,” I sighed. “You’re not leaving until you get whatever it is you want, are you?”
“Whatever it—I’ve told you what I want!” Little known fact: when Marc lost his temper, his voice climbed so high, dogs all over the block went crazy. “More than once! We could have taken care of this in the kitchen ten minutes ago!”
“Right, right. I remember.” To Sinclair, I added, “He wants oven mitts for some reason. He won’t shut up about it.”
A howl from the other side of the door. “I never asked for oven mitts! Heating pads, I want your heating pads and I’ll be damned if Will and I are re-bingeing Game of Thrones without them!”
“What?” Betrayal! Marc was supposed to binge GoT with me. Oh, wait. That was Better Call Saul. Wasn’t it? We needed a bingeing schedule. A vampire queen’s work is never done. “Besides, you’re already damned. You’re a zombie who hangs out in Hell, for God’s sake. Textbook definition of damned.”
“Focus, if you please, on his reasonable, if inane, request,” Sinclair muttered. “Just surrender the heating p—“
“Never!” I’d elbowed my way out from under Sinclair, climbed off the bed, and was on my feet yelling at the closed door. “Those are ours! I’m claiming squatter’s rights, Marc Spangler, and you, too, Will Jar!”
“Mason. My name’s Will Mason.”
Do. Not. Care.
“You get your own!” I finished, relieved because one way or another, this discussion was almost over, and also because I had the moral high ground. I almost never had the moral high ground. I was a vampire, for Christ’s sake.
“Those are our own!” This punctuated with another flurry of rage hammering. Our poor door! If it buckled under the stress, we’d get a new one for half price. You’ve heard of cut cards? Get ten haircuts at the same place, the eleventh is free? We have bed cards. “I bought two of them from Walgreen’s just before Christmas and I bought three more from Target last month.” Thud-thud. Kick. “Want to see the receipts?”
“Oh. I mean, no.” Huh. “So...you don’t want more oven mitts.” A peculiar movement caught my eye and I turned to look. My husband was lying face-down on our bed, shoulders shaking with what I hoped was a fit of the giggles. “But you do want half a dozen heating pads, all purchased by you?”
“Yes! Jesus, finally.”
“Ha!” I was now directly in front of the door; I was about to chastise the hell out of the door. The door would not know what hit it. (None of our doors knew what hit them.) “Trick question, we have eight heating pads in here!” I’d have mimed a mic drop, but it wasn’t 2010. Take that, locked bedroom door!
Then the door got demanding: “Give. Me. My. Heating pads.”
“You may have half of one heating pad.”
“Half?” The door wasn’t too keen on that, given how it was shuddering in its frame again. Yikes, hope Marc put on shoes for this.
“Darling, for the love of...” Sinclair, his giggle fit apparently under control, had gone into the bathroom and emerged burdened with heating pads, trailing cords like they were tails. “There are mere hours left of our special day. Give him the pads and then give yourself to me.”
All right, two things wrong with that. One, I was pretty sure I still had the high ground. Two, he should be giving himself to me. It was only—
“Agreed,” he said at once. “Take me. Have me. As long as one of us does something to the other one of us. Soon.”
Well then. I reached out, unlocked the door, swung it wide open. “You win, whiners.”
“I don’t think the plural is fair,” Will said mildly, peeking over Marc’s shoulder. He was a writer, and they’re the worst when it comes to nit-picking language.
“Jeez, Betsy, maybe a robe next time before we’re subjected to...” Marc made a vague gesture toward my mostly-naked self. “All of that.”
“So avert your zombie gaze,” I snapped. “You weren’t exactly invited up here, y’know.”
“What’s that got to do with anything? I hadn’t known you a month the first time I saw you naked. In the kitchen, no less! How does someone with your money never have a robe at hand? It’s so tacky and helloooooo, Sinclair.”
My mostly-naked husband handed off the pile of pads. “Here. With our compliments. And so begone.”
I stuck a finger under Marc’s nose and his green eyed gaze managed to shift from Sinclair to me. When he wasn’t being shrill, Marc was actually great-looking: short black hair, vivid green peepers, about six feet tall, and he looked competent AF in faded hospital scrubs. His sweetie, Will, was cute, too, in a slender blond mild-mannered way. For a guy who sat in front of a computer all day when he wasn’t chatting up ghosts, he was in good shape, with lean lines and placid blue eyes. He smelled like clean laundry and was helpful and nice...an example to zombies everywhere.
Now that I thought about it, there were only two zombies in the world, and they both looked terrific. They were a credit to their species! (Right? Species?) Instead of the movie stereotype of rotting corpses stumbling around yearning for brains to slurp, Will and Marc were only one or two minutes dead. Maybe just seconds dead. And instead of devouring brains on the half shell, they needed intellectual challenges to “live”. And they’d remain that way—seconds dead, still warm—as long as they didn’t stray too far from my side. So there were gonna be zombies living here for a long, long time.
In my younger days (three years ago) when I was a naïve waif, that would have been a deal-breaker the size of Alaska. But I’d had to adjust my thinking on a number of issues since I woke up dead. Betsy Taylor: vampire queen, ruler of Hell, stereotype shatterer.
(I really don’t get enough credit for the amazing shit I do.)
And none of it was relevant. So back to the subject at hand: the handing off of the heating pads and the banishing of the zombies. “You got off lucky, pal!”
“I’m pretty sure that’s a lie,” Marc said, still averting his gaze from my nudeness while trying not to openly drool at Sinclair’s.
“Nobody’s getting off,” Will piped up. “We’re taking it slow.”
“Yes,” my husband sighed. “Quite right. No one is getting off.”
“Spare me the grotesque detail of your zombie sexual shenanigans.”
“But that’s my point,” Will continued. “There aren’t any, because—“
“Keep up, Will, the topic is heating pads, which you came looking for, and now have, and we didn’t have to give you shit, but we did.” Again: not enough credit for the nice things I do. “Why d’you want so many?”
“The same reason you do,” Marc replied. He’d finally torn his gaze from Sinclair’s splendid flank and was winding cords so he could dart off with his horde of heating pads without tripping. “While we’re only in the very earliest stage of autolysis, we still can’t regulate our cell temperature without outside assistance.”
I just looked at him, then blinked slowly, like an undead owl.
“They help us keep warm,” Will translated. “For snuggling.”
I turned back to Marc. “Next time, just say that.”
“Next time, I’ll burn this fucking house down around your ears,” came the muttered reply, and then Marc was grabbing Will’s hand and off they went. Will looked at us over his shoulder and opened his mouth as the door (finally) started to swing shut.
“Sorry to bother y—“
Slam. Click. Fuck?
“Yes,” Sinclair said, but before he could do the old grab n’toss, I gave him a shove and followed him onto the bed. We tussled like puppies (horny pupp—nope, no, never mind, terrible simile) for a few seconds until I stretched out on top of him. I lowered my head and indulged in a long kiss.
“I don’t care if they find a bomb in our basement (again). We’re not leaving this room and we’re not answering the door for anything.”
“Agreed. Now if it won’t trouble you overmuch, could you...ah...that? Please?”
I smiled against his throat, took another sip. Marveled for the hundredth time that something that sounded disgusting could feel so indecently amazing. Drinking my husband’s blood was like the best drug rush ever coupled with the best brownie sundae ever and the cherry on top was multiple orgasms.
From one nibble. Just one.
Pleased with his delighted groans, I kissed my way down his throat, across his shoulders, down his chest. I licked and licked at his nipples—Sinclair’s were as sensitive as the cup of my ear was. His fingers were already sliding through my hair and carefully cupping the back of my skull.
There ought to be a law against you.
Well, there isn’t. But there are laws against some of the things I do, if that’s any consolation.
Surprisingly: yes!
I kept working my way down until I was eye to eye (so to speak) with his cock. Here’s something fun: the stereotype about big tall men who have large hands and feet? Totally true. I licked the plummy head for a few seconds
(hhhhhhnnnnnngggggg)
and then sucked him in, taking care with my fangs. Sure, we healed pretty instantly, but who wants to risk a fang to the testicle? I didn’t even have testicles and it sounded terrible. My lips had to stretch just a bit to accommodate him, but given that he was always happy to go down on me for half-hour stretches, I in turn was always happy to return the favor. Well. Maybe not a thirty-minute favor, because if I wasn’t bouncing on his cock in another minute, I wasn’t going to be responsible for my actions, even the really bitchy ones.
“I know, I know,” I said, pulling off, giving the crown of his cock a buh-bye-for-now kiss, then straddling him. “The lack of foreplay—it’s gauche. Rushed. Sophomoric!”
“Fine, it’s fine, everything’s fine, whatever you want is fine, that’s fine.” (Oral sex rendered my husband incapable of using synonyms.)
“Terrific! Glad you’re on board. And technically we’ve been indulging in foreplay since the kitchen. Interrupted foreplay, but nonetheless...you mind grabbing...?” I gestured toward the drawer beside bed and Sinclair tried to vocalize
“Muh?”
and then groped for the bedside table. My book (I was re-reading my favorite, Gone with the Wind...I still remembered reading it for the romance and being kind of amazed to find there was a huge war in there, too), the lamp, and our old-fashioned (it wasn’t even digital! old old fashioned) clock all hit the carpet, the latter with a jangly thump. For a second I was afraid he’d just rip the drawer out and hurl it across the room, but I needn’t have worried.
“Dammit!” he growled, “where is the blasted thing?”
He just yanked the drawer all the way out, then upended it, then nearly pitched me to the floor when he moved over to scoop the contents off the floor, and finally tossed it to me in triumph. I caught the tube of a sexually active vampire’s best friend (mint chocolate chip flavored), flipped open the top, squeezed a generous dollop into my palm. In the old days, I’d hold it in a clenched fist to warm it a little, but...
Sinclair’s sly thought slipped into my brain: This would be a perfect time to utilize one of the heating pads.
“Don’t even start with that,” I warned, but couldn’t stifle the giggle. “And brace yourself.”
He let out a hiss as I slicked him up, and nearly leaped off the bed when I squeezed his length while running my lubed palm over and over and over the head of his cock. One of those don’t-stop-wait-too-much-don’t-stop sensations. (I felt the same way whenever I wolfed down a DQ Peanut Buster Parfait.)
I leaned forward a bit, he leaned up a bit, and then his thick cock was filling me exactly the way I liked: hard and inexorable and so, so fine. I pressed my palms against his shoulders and started to rock back and forth
(ah God that’s good)
as I took from him exactly what he wanted to give me, which was everything. “Christ,” he gasped, gripping my hips hard enough to bruise, and I leaned down for another kiss, nibbling on his lower lip and teasing him with my tongue.
More.
“Yes.”
Harder.
“Yes.”
His hands left my waist and cupped my breasts. I leaned down so he could kiss and lick my nipples, so he could whisper dirty glorious things into my cleavage, so I could feel him smiling against my flesh. We delighted in each other, there was no other way to put it, and we lived for these moments when we could indulge in an act made joyful as much by what we said and were to each other as by the physical part.
“You. Are. Glorious.” Each word was punctuated by an upward thrust.
“Yes,” I agreed. I gripped the headboard to steady myself as I rode him. “Which works out nicely, since you are, too.”
He smiled up at me, his dark gaze never leaving my face. My own, I should be dead without you.
“We’ve done the dying thing. It’s passé. Good thing we got it out of the way early, huh?”
Only you could make returning from the grave—on multiple occasions—sound like filing your taxes in January.
This time on the upstroke I didn’t go right back down, so only the tip stayed inside me. I kept us there for a couple of seconds and smirked as Sinclair cursed. I didn’t have the upper hand for long—my smirk was premature—because Sinclair seized my shoulders and rolled, and in half a second I was on my knees, eye-to-eye (so to speak) with the headboard as he eased his cock back in.
“Whoa,” I managed, and grabbed headboard as he set a punishing/amazing pace. I braced so I could push back and was rewarded with a groan.
“Christ.”
Yes.
“You are exquisite, my own.”
Yes. Harder.
He tightened his grip on my hips and obliged, and I knew I’d have five little bruises on each hip when we were done. Those bruises (all the sex bruises, really) were the only ones I wished would linger.
I dropped to my elbows, was rewarded with another deep groan, and reached back so I could stroke his balls with two fingers (my arms weren’t quite long enough for a real grab).
“No,” he gritted out. “You. Touch yourself. I’m...close. Stroke your clit for me.”
So bossy. Still, it was an order I was happy to follow. Stroke your clit was right up there with try on the allllll the shoes. So, obedient creature that I was, I slid my hand down between my legs and skated my fingers over and around and alongside my clit, again and again, and I didn’t have the words to describe how gdslkdgjlsg lskdg;a llksdg laskgd;alk llsdgj;;
You’re close, too, my own, darling queen. You’re getting tight all over. It’s hhhhnnnnnnggggg
“Less thinking,” I gasped, amazed I was able to vocalize. Everything was getting brighter—like our room was lit by rheostat and someone was turning it all the way up—while the sensations had narrowed to my fingers and Sinclair’s cock. “More fu—ah!” A sensation not unlike leaping from an airplane and falling into an orgasm blanked my brain, and even as I was trying to think/say/beg ‘don’t stop’, he wasn’t. He fucked me through it until there was nothing but white noise—no, that was Sinclair, who was usually discreet but now and again didn’t give a shit if someone heard him roaring out his orgasm.
In the movies there’s always this tender moment between lovers who have just banged the bricks loose. They gaze into each other’s eyes or manage breathless declarations of love and/or fidelity as they shiver in each other’s arms with just the slightest sheen of sweat on their gorgeous perfect bodies.
Since this was real life, I released my grip on the headboard and flopped prone, mumbling a breathless declaration of love and/or fidelity into my pillow. I might have drooled a little.
Sinclair flopped down beside me and chuckled. “La petite mort is wholly inadequate.”
“Gmmmff umph,” I replied. Also: a tiny bit more drool.
“And we still have three hours left of our special day.”
That motivated me to flop over until we were facing each other on our sides. “I can’t believe you remembered.”
He’d reached out to smooth my bangs out of my way, but paused. “How could you think I would forget?”
“Because normally you give not one shit about that stuff? Hey, I’m not complaining. It was a great day.”
“Agreed.”
“I finally—“
“Happy anniversary, my own darling queen.”
“—got my hair the exact shade of red—what?” Oh, fuck.
In a panic, I sat up. “No,” I said, trying not to lose my shit. “No! Our anniversary is months, months away.”
He reached out, caught my arm, pulled me in close for a snuggle. “Calm down,” he murmured into my (newly red) hair. “Your heart is hammering.”
“Yeah, sure, it’s probably pounding away at ten beats a minute. Listen, I didn’t forget our anniversary.” For one, Tina would have never let that happen. I’d had to actively prevent her from buying a gift for him, ostensibly from me (“I only wish to lighten your burdens, Majesty.”) more than once. “I think—I think you’re a little mixed up.” Or senile. He was over a hundred years old.
“No,” he murmured, stroking my (newly red) hair. “Not the meaningless government ritual you insisted we practice. Our first wedding, our true wedding.”
I wriggled until my kissable hair was out of his reach. “True wedding? Dude, if you’re getting me mixed up with some floozy you hooked up with during the Great Depression...”
“You know you’re the only floozy for me, dearest.”
“That’s a relief.” I was too sated to give him a well-deserved pinch for turning floozy back on me. “So then, what...?”
“The pool. The fight. The Fiends. The ignoble end of a tyrant, the start of our glorious reign.”
I mulled over “ignoble” (and tried not to giggle at “glorious”, because he sounded like a Russian propaganda poster) and then I had it: he meant the swimming pool “wedding” that took place within days of our first meeting. How could I have forgotten?
Serious question. How could I? I saved Sinclair’s life that night. I cured his fatal burns. We killed the bad guy and then fucked, naked and upside down, in the deep end of a random swimming pool. When we came up for the air we didn’t need, we were—hey, presto!—the new king and queen of the undead. Such were the rules of undead matrimony and monarchy.
(Hey, it’s no weirder or inconvenient than a destination wedding.)
“We belonged to each other from that moment.”
I snorted. “Which was awkward, since I hated you back then.”
“No,” he said smugly, and that time he did get a pinch. “And your hair is lovely. But you must know I wouldn’t care what color or length your follicles were.”
“Ooh, I love your sexy follicle pillow talk.”
“The we are well matched for that if nothing else. And we have some time left. We—oh.”
Yeah, I heard it, too. Now that we weren’t focused on getting laid, we were a little more aware of the world around us. There were at least two sets of footsteps coming down the hall, followed (natch) by a knock on our door.
“Betsy? It’s Mom. BabyJon caught some kind of bug, the poor thing just barfed all over his car seat.”
Offer her a heating pad.
Oh, very funny. It could have been worse. She could have knocked ten minutes ago and I would have had to beat her to death.
“I wouldn’t be bothering you—“
“Of course you should bother me, Mom,” I called, hunting for clean clothing that wasn’t shredded. “He’s my brother/son.”
“—but Marc and Will were adamant that you would want to be notified at once. And Tina and Jessica backed them up.”
“Because of course they did,” I muttered. “I’ll be right down.”
Sinclair was still lolling on the bed; he looked like a Roman general, post-orgy. “’Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’”
“Not so fast, co-monarch, your head’s uneasy, too. He’s your brother-in-law/stepson. C’mon, give me a hand.”
“At once,” he said agreeably, because he was a modern centenarian and hip to feminism. He rolled off the bed and to his feet, then began his own search for a shirt that hadn’t been reduced to cotton confetti. “And I have been remiss. How could I have gone most of this day without telling you I love you?”
“Because you suck? Which is literal and figurative.” Then I hit the pause button on Sarcasm Mode. “I love you, too.”
“Because of course you do.”
I grinned. “Because of course I do.”
Five minutes and a quick wash later he presented his arm. “Shall we?”
“You’re gonna escort me to a puke-covered car seat?”
“But of course.”
I had to shake my head at the hilarious absurdity. We were co-monarchs who routinely cheated death (or co-opted death for our own ends) when not hoarding heating pads, squabbling with our friends, and sponging up puke.
What the hell, I took his arm. “Lead on, sir.”
And he did.
THE END