Arcadia Resurgence, Vague Vermillion [best book club books for discussion .TXT] 📗

to the Director. But he really didn't want to talk about work. Not with her. "Before the attack..."

"You were in the middle of an apology."

"Yes. But you didn't accept?"

"No? Well..." She slid her chair close to his, rested her arm on the table and turned to him. The candlelight glowed against the pure white skin of her head, her neck, sparkling in her bistre eyes. "I might still be a bit - sore with you. But, I have to say... I understand. I understand what you must have been feeling."

He slurped up the last of his meal. Sat back, facing her. Go on, he thought.

She smiled, hearing him. "I haven't been human for eight hundred years. But, I can still remember, sometimes, what it felt like to be human. To have no control over anything. Living after the Collapse, at the mercy of any race that sought to exploit the meek. It was... exhausting."

"Is that why you turned?"

A blush stained her cheeks. "That's a very personal question."

"We have a very personal relationship," Eiri said.

She laughed at his bold approach. "You don't even know my name!" 

"Well, tell it to me," he said, letting his voice take on just a hint of the tone he used when commanding her to take her clothes off.

She smiled. "My friends call me Noth."

"And... am I your friend?"

Slowly, she reached her arm across the table, turning the soft white palm upward. Reaching for him. "No, but I'd like that."

He took her hand. "Eiri," he said. "Lao Eiri." 

"Nothera Ipomoea," she said, squeezing his fingers, the warmth of her palm against his knuckles. Shyly, she added in Japanese, "Pleased to meet you."

Now he laughed. "Where did you learn that?"

"From my human days. Old Japan was still open then, at least to student workers. I lived there for a little while."

"And then?"

"You really want to know when I turned?" She sighed, ran a hand through her hair, the silky brown strands clinging to her knuckles. "Vampire children are offered The Choice three times in their lives - once at twenty, once at fifty, and finally when you're at death's doorstep. I refused First Choice. When I was in my thirties, I... got sick. Cancer. My husband left me. My father offered me Final Choice, and I accepted." She had tears in her eyes. She blinked them away. "Even now, when I can't remember much else, I can still remember how I felt at the time. Powerless. Victimized. Nothing ever seemed so unfair to me as my life did, then. So - when you say to me now that that's how you feel - brutalized, taken advantage of... I can understand. You have every right to be angry with me, my kind, and the people we do business with at your expense."

 

She hesitated. Then slid her hand up his forearm, caressing his bicep. Trailing her thumb over his chest. She licked her lips.

"And you still want to fuck?" Eiri asked, incredulous. "When you say you know how I hate you?"

"Do you hate me?" She looked into his eyes, but he felt no pull. No hypnotic suggestion. Completely on his own, he remembered the feel of her pinned beneath him, the throb of his cock inside her when the lights shone on the glass and he thought they'd be killed. Wanting to be the last thing she thought of when she died.

"No," he admitted. He reached up and clasped the hand that caressed him, pulling it to his mouth. He kissed her palm. I don't know what it is... The release. The danger. The power. All of it tugged at him in the deepest, most secret places of his heart. Where everything was a blind, raging chaos. He went on kissing her. 

She sighed, enjoying the touch. He went on kissing, down her wrist, her arm. She shuddered when he pressed his lips to the inside of her elbow. "Eiri..."

The sound of his name from her mouth made him hard. He stood, unzipping his suit pants, letting his cock shift upward, out of his left pant leg to peek from between the folds. She stared at the hint of skin there, transfixed. 

I could put it in her mouth, he thought. Nothing would please him more. But, looking at her moisten her lips with her tongue, he caught the briefest sight of her fangs. And thought better of putting his dick so close to them. 

Instead, he reached one hand out, cupped her face. Ran this thumb along her lower lip, inserting just the tip of it. She puckered her lips, kissing his finger.

"Open your mouth," he said.

She did and he put his index and middle fingers onto her tongue. Slid them back along it, deeper into her mouth. Her eyes swung up to him.

Can I trust you? He thought.

She nodded.

"Really?" he said aloud. He looked around, eyes coming to rest on the long candles. They were already an hour gone, beads of wax peppering the tapers. He looked back at her, with his fingers jammed into her mouth, and her eyes widened. 

He reached for a candle. 

Holding her tongue between his index finger and tongue, he brought the light over her field of vision, the heat of it close to her face. Testing her.

"Show me your tits," he ordered. He kept hold of her tongue, and kept the candle in her face, forcing her to move slowly as she hiked up her top over the high mounds of her breasts. She wore a balconette bra in purple satin with a gold front clasp. He smiled. She knew I'd like that. 

Her eyes met his, glittering from the light of the candle. He put her tongue back in her mouth and put just one finger inside with it, thrusting it deep. Let's see if you can keep from biting me... "Hold still."

He titled the candle, positioning it over the creamy half domes above the purple bra. The first blazing drop grazed the skin where it joined to her chest. She gasped, her mouth contracting around his knuckle. A long, sharp tooth grazing him.

"Ah, ah, ah," he scolded her. "I don't want to feel any teeth." He punished her, pinching her tongue, pulling it out of her mouth. "Try again..."

He dribbled more wax onto her left breast. She squirmed, grunted, but kept her mouth still. "Good," he said. He bent, rewarding her with a kiss on her burning red cheek. 

Another drop of wax on the right breast. The merest graze of her lower teeth against the nail of his thumb as she rocked back. He punished her, pinching the quivering tongue between his fingers. "I said keep still!"

She moaned around his fingers, wiggling in her seat. 

"Take your pants off," he told her, keeping a firm grip on her extended tongue. She hooked her thumbs into the sweats and started to pull them down while trying to rise. He splashed candle wax onto the valley of her cleavage and she cried out, sitting her ass back down on her seat. Forced into using smaller, painfully slower moves to pull the cotton sweats down over her thighs.

He let the wax drip onto them, next. "Spread your legs."

He let go of her, letting her lean a little back from him, forcing her legs out toward him, spreading at the knees. He looked down as he dripped wax high on her inner thigh, and saw she wore matching purple panties cut in an old style that partially covered the tops of the thighs. Between her legs, the fabric darkened, already soaked through with sweat and desire. 

"I want it there," she whispered. He looked up, saw her staring at the candle, lips quivering between her teeth as she bit herself, thrusting her hips toward him. Those teeth...

Eiri set the candle back in its holder and knelt between her legs to pull off the sweats. He reached for the band of the panties and pulled those down, keeping the damp satin in his palm as he stood. Stretching the band over her head, he pulled the garment down over her eyes, blinding her, wetting her forehead with her own juices. Casting about, he found his discarded linen napkin on the tabletop, and stuffed it into her mouth, hiding the sight of her teeth. 

She did not resist, though her body rocked under the force of his touch. Blinded, gagged, she waited at the edge of her sheet, legs trembling. Eiri stood back to take in the sight of her, stripped nude from the waist down, top pushed up to her armpits. He reached for the closure of her bra, snapping it open with expert fingers, letting her breasts burst down onto her ribs. Now the look is complete.

"Lift up your legs."

She leaned back again, looping her hands under her thighs to lift and open her legs. The thatch of red-brown curls parted to reveal the delicate swatch of flesh hidden there. 

He took up the candle again and knelt between her legs. He took his time, admiring her sex, examining it. The outermost lips full and fleshy, flushed dark with arousal. She had only the barest of inner inner lips, the left slightly overlapping the right. The hood over the bud of her clitoris pale and stretched, a tiny divet no larger than the tip of his finger just above it.

She sensed him staring her, clenching her vulva under the intensity of his gaze, moaning. Moisture glistened between the inner lips. Eiri caught the faintest scent of it, musky, intoxicating.

He tilted the candle above her and watched the lips shudder and contract as the wax landed on them. Behind her gag, she cried out. The fingers gripping her curved white thighs tightened, nails digging into her ivory skin. 

Eiri moved the candle away. Put his mouth there instead, letting his tongue slide into the little pocket above her clit. Rewarding her. He slid it down, cupping the flat of his tongue against the tight little bud, about the size of a spring pea. Further down, the tip of his tongue grazed the little mouth, pushing the lips aside, tasting sour and sweet. 

"Mmmm," she moaned, writhing in her seat as he stroked her with his mouth.

Eiri held the candle over her stomach, dribbling more wax onto the soft flesh that folded there as she doubled her legs back over herself, exposing the full width of her sex to his probing tongue. He delved into it, stroking, licking, applying just the barest pressure to her with his teeth. When the candle burned a little lower, he took back his mouth and brought the blazing tip right beside the dripping cleft of her mons, watching the curling hair tremble and sway in the heat. 

He looked up at her face, half-hidden by her underwear. She knew where the candle was going next.

"Noth," he said. He pushed the wick into the wetness, extinguishing the flame in her cum. 

...

Work resumed on Fulbright, though a quarter of regular Starbucks employees did not return to work. The catina was closed until further notice, employee meals being served out in the commons. Clan Air only addressed the attack once in a brief all hands, blaming a radical human rights activist group. Eiri didn't notice anything different in the days that followed, except for some of the panelling being replaced with metallic sheets of some flexible material. The walls of the Director's office were fitted with them. But Eiri hardly noticed - he never went in there anymore. 

At work, she even seemed to avoid him, declining calendar invites to the weekly sync. Once, Hall tried to schedule her to attend a 1 on 1, but she sent a proxy - a snooty young vampire who interrupted Hall almost