Page 3 of Unwavering
(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 molesagain—“
“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 takingtoo 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? Doyouwant 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!)
