Black than Blue Read online

  She boldly let her hand rest on my shoulder. Her fingers lazily passed over my skin. I looked down at her fingers, pretending to be frozen at the forwardness, then I glanced up at her face. “What do you want to tell me?” she said.

  “I’m going to walk over there. You can follow me if you want to.” I grabbed my water without hearing her answer and walked over to the farthest side of the club. When I found a good spot, I leaned against the wall and waited for Cleo to make her way to me.

  She braced her arms on either side of my shoulders and leaned down to whisper in my ear. “What are we doing over here?” I turned my head and did my best not to shudder when she nipped my ear. I unbuttoned her jeans and slid my hand down the front of her pants.

  “We’re dancing.”

  We looked into each other’s eyes while I stroked her wet slit with my fingers. Her breath came in deep, harsh pants through her nose as she fought off her climax, but I knew exactly what I was doing. Even her demon could only resist me for so long. Her eyes squeezed shut and her fangs shot down from her gums as she growled out her orgasm. I reached up with my other hand and pinched her nipple through her shirt just to help things along.

  The next thing I knew, I was pressed flush between Cleo and the wall. I hadn’t even blinked and she’d pulled my hand from her pants and was leaning into me. She bit hard but so quickly that by the time I really started coming, she was on her knees in front of me. I didn’t stop her as she hiked my skirt up around my thighs and buried her face between my legs. A few strangers heard my gasps of pleasure and turned to glance and then gawk at what Cleo was doing to me. It might have been the fact that I was still fairly covered, Cleo’s head and the bunching of my dress hid my private parts from view, or possibly the fact these people had no idea who I was, but I found their voyeurism turned me on.

  I clenched my teeth and rubbed myself against Cleo’s face, my eyes sliding closed as I came in a room sparsely littered with my sorority sisters, but mostly full of strangers.

  *

  Our time in St. Martin went by too quickly. I did spend a few days down under the house with Cleo in the dark, but for most of our trip, Cleo slipped into some animal form and stayed with me and the girls during our adventures around the island. Most of the adventures involved shopping. We found plenty of time to make love, and we played the way we liked to best. She bound me in the rental house several times and spanked me properly, had me service her on my knees. One night we even went over to the OBA beach house and watched Rodrick flagellate a blindfolded and bound Andrew.

  Jill became less and less annoying as the days went by, to the point where I didn’t mind when she tagged along with us almost everywhere we went—during the day. Tokyo kept a respectful distance, but she seemed like she was waiting for some weakness in our relationship to make itself evident so she could butt back in between us. So sad for her that that opportunity never presented itself.

  The last night on the island we joined the girls out for dinner, but when they decided to hit the Gold Coast, a slightly fancier nightclub, we opted to head back to the rental house. I begged for another spanking, which Cleo gave me, with gusto, but she didn’t let me come. Instead she lubed up my ass and filled me with the weighted steel plug. Then she led me outside to look at the stars from the privacy of the hammock.

  We were silent for some time, just holding each other, listening to the crackle from the fire pit. It took a great deal of effort to forget about my slightly tender ass cheeks or the plug nestled between them, but eventually, my mind was able to focus on other things. I was not easily amazed, but it was stunning to see how much my relationship with Cleo had changed. I’d thought I was in love with her before, but now I felt that love and its intensity was matched with this deep infatuation. I wanted to be with her always, where before I felt I had to measure and space our time out together. I was afraid of a number of things, but it was this all-consuming feeling I was hiding from.

  I thought if I could control every aspect of our situation I could control my emotions toward her too. I was wrong. When she had her accident, I realized that I had no control over anything and that led to my horrible reaction. My fear and unease led to me showing Cleo a side of myself I wasn’t proud of, the side of myself that forced us apart.

  Recently, though, I’d begun to think about Cleo differently. When I was younger, I was particularly selfish, and I was honest about that fact. My mind was made up about Cleo’s family and her life with her parents and her church. I thought I knew what was best for her and the best solution for the future of our family, but now that we were together and Cleo was no longer a human, after spending this time with her and seeing how her demon nature changed simple things like kissing, I was able to see Cleo. Nothing about her, as a human, had changed.

  Same sense of humor. Same gentle authority. Same sense of selflessness that was masked by the humor and the confidence. When she wasn’t fighting with me, she was kind to everyone, even Jill. She was vigilant in her concern for the girls’ safety, and not just her feeders, but the whole sorority. That concern was genuine, but she had been the same way when she was a member of Alpha Beta Omega. During initiation, it was clear that I was terrified of meeting a new group of girls. Not to mention I knew in advance what the initiation ceremony would entail. It was Cleo who promised to look out for me before bid day even rolled around. I could have told Daddy I didn’t want to go through with joining ABO, but Cleo had made me want to go through it. Cleo had made everything okay.

  And I’d never heard her complain. She joked, sure, but she never asked why she should care about us. She never challenged Ginger and Camila’s orders, except when it came to me, of course. Part of me wanted to know why and then part of me just wanted to know Cleo better. Now that the dust had settled, I wanted to know what was on her mind and how she felt about her own life and us moving forward. I had a bunch of questions, but one that I think caught us both a little off guard came out of my mouth first.

  “How are you feeling about your faith? After all of this.”

  “I don’t know.” It felt like a long time before she went on, but I stayed quiet, rubbing my hand on her stomach under her shirt. “The same. A little better. The faith part has kind of been stripped.” She chuckled, her voice sounding a little tight. “The stuff with my mama wasn’t about that, you know.”

  “I know. I knew that when you were human.”

  “It feels strange because I know that bad things still happen. I know evil exists for sure.”

  “That’s how I feel.” Mama had raised me in the church, and my experience had been a good one, but things changed when I met Daddy. When I knew exactly what he was, his positive presence in our lives changed my views on a lot of things, particularly with my faith.

  “But I know good exists too,” Cleo said.

  “Feeding you wasn’t the only reason I wanted you to change.”

  “Hmm?”

  I looked up into her eyes, then back down to where my fingers raised bumps in the fabric of her shirt. “Did Camila tell you anything about ascension?”

  “No.”

  “She might not know about it. Daddy told me…sometimes, maybe once every hundred years, a demon like you is offered ascension.”

  “Into heaven?”

  I nodded against her shoulder. “You get your wings.”

  “Hmm.” Cleo let out a thoughtful sigh. “I’ve thought about that.”

  “Being an angel?”

  “Not myself, but just what it must be like. Kina said she’s met one, once, but it was four hundred years ago or some shit and she never saw an angel again.”

  “They do things much differently. And when I say that, I mean I have no idea what they really do,” I said.

  “I imagine it’s not much different from what we do now, minus the blood drinking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve always thought of angels like employees to God, just like Dalhem would have been on the payroll to evil.�
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  “I like this business model you’ve thought up,” I said, chuckling softly.

  “I know. It’s brilliant, but I don’t know. I just thought if I live like this for hundreds of years, and then I finally die and I’ve passed my interview into heaven, I don’t know that I want to go back to work. I always imagined the real afterlife to be somewhere I can relax. Doing evil seems so easy, but doing good for eternity would be much harder.”

  “Daddy said the same thing to me once. I mean, he expressed the same idea. He’s under contract to God now. Forever. He knows he’s done enough to never earn those wings, but in the end he will still be under his ‘employ,’ as you phrased it.”

  “I was talking to Ginger about her parents, you know, since her brother wants to change. I asked her what they’d planned to do, and her dad said he was so tired that they had no interest in living forever. He just wanted to do the most good that he could in his given tim,e then take Ginger’s mother and go.”

  “I will change with you, eventually,” I said. “I’ll probably be sixty or seventy by then, but I will.”

  “It’s cool. I like old bitches.”

  “You’re so sweet. But, no. I think that will give us enough time to get a couple kids off on their own.”

  I looked up as Cleo looked down at me. “A couple?”

  “We can start with one and see how it goes,” I replied.

  “Mmm-hmm. You want to have like seventeen kids, just admit it.”

  “No, I don’t. I…” I dropped my head back down on Cleo’s chest and reconsidered what I wanted to say. Complete disclosure was a new thing for me.

  “What is it?” Cleo asked softly.

  “I’ve been sort of fixated on one, actually.”

  “Me too.”

  “Really?” I looked up again in shock.

  “Yeah. I told you, I never stopped thinking about us being together and having a family.”

  “I—God, I sound so crazy.” I buried my face in Cleo’s shirt. I wasn’t sure if I could say this part of what I’d been holding in.

  “Bunny, tell me.”

  “I’ve had this image of this baby in my mind for a long time,” I confessed. It wasn’t an exaggeration either. When most girls were thinking about senior prom, I was thinking about baby names. Before Cleo, I’d never told anyone how badly I wanted to be a mother.

  “Tell me about it,” she asked. “Or him. Or her.”

  “It’s a girl. I’ve always wanted a girl.”

  “Dalhem can’t control that sort of thing, can he?” Cleo laughed.

  “I don’t think so. I hope not. That would be too weird. I’m sure boys are fun, but I’ve just had such a clear picture of a girl in my head. With the best of both our features. Your hair and your lips—”

  “I think a baby would look strange with this sexy butt,” she said as she grabbed a handful of my ass. I groaned and wiggled against the pressure of the plug.

  “You never stop, do you?” I asked.

  Suddenly, Cleo was quiet. When I glanced at her I was surprised to see tears lining her eyes. “I’m sorry I can’t give that to you,” she said.

  “Sweetie, we can’t change the science of making a baby, but don’t worry. You’ll have hours and hours of diaper duty ahead of you,” I said trying to make her laugh. “You’ll get to parent your ass off.”

  “Is that why you want me? Round-the-clock child care from someone who rarely needs to sleep.”

  “No.” I leaned up and kissed her bottom lip. “I want you because of who you are. Any child you help raise will be the luckiest child in the world.”

  “You know what I’m looking forward to?”

  “What’s that?”

  Cleo grabbed another handful of my E cup. “I’m looking forward to these getting even bigger.”

  I shook my head as I laughed. “You’re going to have to share them, you know.”

  “I know. But not tonight.” Cleo’s hand trailed from my breast to my arm. She touched the raised edges on my forearm. I’d give anything to scratch the mark clean off.

  “Paeno offered me a baby.” I confessed. “She said I could have whatever I wanted.”

  “You can have whatever you want with me.”

  “I know.”

  “Always the princess.”

  “Always.”

  “What if Dalhem can’t fix this?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I have this feeling she won’t want me if I don’t want her, though. The blood bond wouldn’t change the way I feel about you. I’m not sure she’d want to deal with that.”

  “That’s a good point.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought her up. You were saying something about my boobs and my butt.”

  “You’re right. I was.” With skilled hands, Cleo easily exposed my breast. I whimpered against the feel of her tongue sliding across my nipple. I wiggled closer and started to beg, but it was a while still before she let me come. The delay didn’t bother me at all.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Cleo

  The girls slipped right back into their regular schedule the day after we returned from St. Martin. That Friday, though, we skipped out on movie night and headed to D.C. I felt bad leaving the girls behind, but once they had the honest truth, that I was going to spend more time with my soon-to-be in-laws, time where Dalhem wasn’t kicking me around, they were completely on board with me dipping out for the weekend.

  In my head, Dalhem kept Benny and her mama in a sealed fortress under the White House. He fed off the First Family in their sleep and probably replaced the First Pets he chewed on on a daily basis. The truth was, the Tarvers lived in an extravagant colonial town house in Georgetown.

  An hour and a half after sundown, I was standing on the Tarvers’ stoop with Benny, waiting for their butler or some similar servant to answer the door. It was nice to see the place from the outside. It was even nice to have been invited this time by Ms. Leanne instead of being ordered by an enraged master. Benny had been chewing on her bottom lip since we left the house. Now she was wiggling her foot. She rang the doorbell again.

  “Shouldn’t I be nervous? I’m having a formal dinner with your mother.”

  “No. Mama loves you and you hate Daddy. It all works out.”

  “It’ll be fine.” I wrapped my arm around her neck and pulled her closer. I kissed her hard on the top of her head, but that didn’t stop her erratic twitching. Not that it would. Benny didn’t have many friends in high school, and the majority of those she did have weren’t the come- over slumber-party types. She confided in me that she’d never had any friends over after they moved. Her need for privacy kept the rest away. The night I’d first met Ms. Leanne, Benny had been overwhelmed by the whole almost dying and trying to keep Dalhem from killing me aspect of the evening. Now she was on edge because for the first time I was seeing a different part of her world. My being there under these new circumstances was shooting her anxiety through the roof.

  She rang the doorbell one more time. Just as I thought to question the work ethic of this butler, the heavy, dark blue door swung open and light flooded the steps.

  “Angel!” Ms. Leanne screamed and yanked Benny into her arms. I noticed something right away. Ms. Leanne was unnaturally skinny. It had only been three weeks since I’d last seen her, and she’d been pretty small then. It seemed like all of the available weight had just dropped off her frame. Her face, gleaming with Benny’s same blue eyes, looked pale and gaunt. But she was just as vibrant as before, her smile just as wide. Her thin arms crossed around Benny’s back. I tried not to stare, but I was fucking surprised. So much so that I almost missed the sandy brown dog shoving his head in my crotch.

  “Hey, boy,” I mumbled, but my eyes were still glued on Benny’s mother.

  Ms. Leanne caught me with my mouth popped slightly open, and I’m sure my eyes opened in shock. Benny caught Ms. Leanne just in time see what she was looking at. I quickly fixed my face. Thank God, Ms. Leanne went right
on screeching, “Come here, girl!” And then it was my turn to be corralled into a hug. She may have been slight, but the woman had a mean squeeze. Benny grabbed the dog by its collar and extracted him from the middle of our embrace.

  “Hi.” I laughed. “Thank you for having me.”

  “Oh, Cleo. You know we’d have you over any time.” She held me back at arm’s length, and I did my best to forget that I could’ve counted her ribs through her blouse.

  “Come in! It’s freezing out there. Come on, Kepper.” The dog barked and led the charge into the house. As we followed Ms. Leanne inside, I grabbed Benny’s hand. She gripped my hand back.

  I’d only seen Dalhem’s study and the one guest room. Benny decided I needed to see the rest of the house like a proper guest. The first floor of their house was exactly how I pictured it. Old paintings, mahogany sideboards, stiff chairs, yellow painted walls, crown molding. I felt like there was a butler lurking somewhere. Ms. Leanne led us to a library where she, for real, touched the head of an iron jockey next to the fireplace, and the bookcase slid open revealing a hidden set of stairs. The dog, Kepper, took off down into the depths.

  I glared sideways at Benny as we walked down to the lower level of the house. “Really?”

  “Wait till you see the underground moat,” she said. I was glad to hear her voice had lost some of its strain, but she still had my hand in a tight grip.

  “Oh, don’t listen to her. We don’t have a moat,” Ms. Leanne said.

  “And the ogre. You have to see the ogre,” Benny went on.

  “Well, we have one of those.” Ms. Leanne looked over her shoulder and winked at me. “Benny calls him her daddy, but you already knew that.”

  We passed several doors, then stopped at a well-furnished guest room. A blue pastoral theme decorated the toile wallpaper. A large four-poster bed took up the bulk of one side of the room. On the other side was a sitting area with two blue chairs and a low coffee table. A small desk sat where a window would be if we weren’t below ground. The door leading to a large bathroom was open. I felt like I was in a proper bed-and-breakfast.