Agrippa
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Wake-up Call – Chapter 65
🕑 Added 2022-12-12 03:32:30 +0000 UTCSo, my old room.
It’s… I dismantled my computers when I ran away from here after Taylor’s little stunt that would forever get me unfairly labeled as a school shooter by people who shouldn’t be throwing stones while living in forcefield houses.
I mean, I shot one student. Colin has outright demolished at least two public high schools.
(During two separate Endbringer fights, after they were completely evacuated, for perfectly sensible tactical reasons, and with no collateral losses, but it’s still weird that it happened twice. Also, the point is that I need to come up with the best way to turn that into a snappy rejoinder for ‘Schoolshooter.’ Schoolwrecker? Schoolbomber? Schoolkaijuer? It’s a work in progress.)
Anyway, back to my room? It’s mostly the same. For some reason that I will ascribe to feigned sentimentality, Alec didn’t steal my Egyptian cotton sheets after I left, so my bed is as comfortable as it was.
It’s also been thoroughly vetted for itching powder and other such things whose absence became increasingly ominous with each second of Power’s assistance.
But… well, the room is about the same.
My old bed, my old desk, the wooden slats of the blinds still fitting imperfectly and letting citrine streetlamps color the nighttime…
And silk lines tying me down.
“Why?” I ask Taylor with an entirely dry tone as I try to blearily blink my eyes open all the way.
“… Nostalgia?” she says from the barely lit corner of my room where’s she trying to sit in as casual a way as possible while wearing what I once termed ‘her full regalia.’
Because, back then? She still was Skitter.
She was Taylor, yes, my friend and personal project, the girl to whom I had grown too close too fast, but… But when she wore the suit, when she allowed herself to be what she always hid behind the mask of the bullied girl? When she walked with that… not confidence, but aplomb. When every room she stepped in turned into her stage…
Yes. She was Skitter, back then.
To me, at least.
But now?
“Can’t you be nostalgic when it’s not—” Lack of traffic, no noises in home, Alec not playing videogames, Lisa Wilbourn’s fatigue— “four in the morning?! What the Hell, Tay!”
“It’s actually three,” she says with a bit of bashfulness creeping in despite her mask.
“You aren’t wearing your sling,” I accuse her, and not just because I’m deliberately ignoring Power’s misfire.
“I don’t wear it to sleep anymore,” she rushes to say.
“Well, you aren’t sleeping right now, are you? And neither am I,” I say, finally managing to open my eyes all the way and forcing them not to narrow.
“This isn’t going at all how I expected. Why would I think things would go as I expected when they involve you?” Tay complains as she drags her hand down her mask, her glaring lenses briefly obscured for a blissful, non-horror-movie-monster-filled moment.
“The triumph of hope over experience?” I tell her as I try to shimmy up the sheets despite the bindings—oh, she’s gotten better at these.
Of course she has.
“That… That quote was about remarrying,” she says, the exasperation growing with every exchanged line. Which is kind of my goal here, because I’m not currently equipped to deal with a Taylor Hebert whose plans aren’t being thoroughly derailed.
“Something you’ll never have to do. I hope. Unless I die, in which case you have my blessing to find a maddening blonde with which to scar whatever’s left of your psyche after I’m done with it. I’d recommend Victoria Dallon, but only because fuck Panacea.”
“You’re doing a very good job of killing my libido right now,” she says with all but a grunt.
“Thanks! I try,” I tell her with the brightest, most cheerful expression I can manage with the current circumstances.
Taylor stares at me, and, once again, I get the clear impression of a cocked eyebrow hidden behind black silk.
Then she stands up, and…
Fuck.
Taylor walks toward me, slowly crossing the room with a hip-swaying thing that has my eyes glued to the shifting highlight of yellow light over deep, aquatic black. Her silhouette seems to ripple with every step, with every time her long legs cross and uncross as she approaches me.
I’m grumpy. Tired. My neck is at an awkward angle after my latest attempt to crawl up and out of her bindings.
It doesn’t even register.
Not when she’s above me, barely leaning down to caress the line of my jaw with the soft pads of her gloved fingers, the chitin nails briefly rasping my overly sensitive skin in a way that transmits more texture than sensation.
“Tay…” I breathe out.
I only see round, yellow lenses. The things she, for some mind-boggling reason, thought would be appropriate to portray herself as a hero.
But I know what there’s behind them. I know the seafoam green, the focused attention, the way she looks at me when we’re alone like this.
When I’m at her mercy.
As if I ever am not.
“That’s more like it,” she murmurs.
I’m wearing my fuzzy, gray pajamas. They are both comfortable and comforting, just the thing I need the reassure myself that there’s still some warmth left in this godforsaken world before I drift off to a restless sleep.
They are the further thing from sexy I could’ve ever bought. They are baggy, loose in all the wrong ways, and they hide most of my figure.
But she cranes her head down, and, suddenly, that doesn’t even matter because I feel like I’m naked, like she’s stripping me of things I didn’t even know I wore.
And I feel beautiful.
Desirable.
“You can’t do this to me. Not so easily. Not when I have every right in the world to be mad at you for waking me up at an unholy hour when I shouldn’t even have gone to sleep—”
She pulls her mask up.
I shut up.
She rarely says it out loud, but she… she doesn’t like her mouth. Lips too thin. Too wide.
It’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard her say.
Because, yes, her lips may be a tad more masculine than most girls would prefer, but… but she’s expressive. And when that mouth of her purses before slightly opening? When that spark of hunger goes from hidden eyes behind glaring lenses to a panted gasp?
That makes my toes curl.
And then she’s near me, her hand buried on my pillow, by the side of my head, and our lips are almost brushing as I look through the glass and at the blurry outline of what lies behind.
“You kept turning in your sleep. You were distressed. I didn’t know what else to do,” she says.
I could answer a lot of things. Joke about her penchant for theatrics or her one-track mind, for instance.
Instead… I kiss her.
I feel thin, elastic lines pressing down on me when I reach up as far as she allows me to, and it’s enough for our lips to meet, for me to first just press them together, a thread of air passing between our slightly open mouths before I pull her lower lip between mine, suckling at it as she lets out a slight gasp when I trace it from right to left and back again with the tip of my tongue.
“You worry too much,” I whisper, my eyes lidded as I look up at my girlfriend, fiancée, lover, and whatever else we can call one another.
Partners in crime, I suppose.
“With you? Not enough,” she says, a hidden laugh in her tone.
And then Taylor gets on top of me, her thigh parting my own as she’s once again tied me down without impeding our legs from tangling with one another.
I can feel her heat on top of my left thigh, and then she undulates her body, and I press up until she arches her back and bites her lower lip harder than I would, letting out a muffled whimper that makes my nipples stand up against her breasts.
“Tay… You’re so beautiful,” I tell her before nibbling up her jaw, toward her ear, and then I suck her earlobe in, and the hand buried on my pillow goes to my hair—because of course it does.
My own whimper is not that muffled, mostly because she’s caught me by surprise.
… Power? I both want to thank you for your new penchant for discretion and blame you for everything that will spiral out of control because of it.
Lisa Wilbourn’s fickleness—
Love you too.
“Liz… Sometimes, when you look at me like that, with your cheeks flushed in that delightful tone, your voice barely a rough breath… Sometimes, I believe you,” she says, her every word coming in a burst of warmth caressing my neck.
And I look to the side without relinquishing my auditory prize, digging the very points of my canines into the springy flesh until she gasps.
“About time,” I mutter before digging the tip of my tongue into her ear canal, making Taylor whimper, her own thigh pressing down between mine, making sparks burst behind my suddenly closed lids.
“I love you. I love you so much I couldn’t help myself when I saw you tossing and turning, and I had to do anything to take your mind off—”
“I love you. I love you so much I can be myself with you. I can be grumpy, and intractable, and a brat, and I know you’ll still be there to put me in my place.”
Taylor pulls back, my tongue dragging a glimmering line from her ear to the corner of her lips that only shines brighter when she smiles down at me.
Then… Then she takes her mask the rest of the way off.
And seeing her eyes, even in this almost darkness colored by sodium streetlight, is so much better than just imagining them behind thick, citrine lenses.
Especially when she looks down at me like she does.
“Is that what you want, Liz?” she says, her voice a thrill of dark, hot chocolate almost burning the sides of my neck. “For me to put you in your place?”
I bite my lip, trying not to beg, trying not to say something shamefully Lisa Wilbourn until I find the right answer.
And, finally, I do:
“You already did. And here I am: by your side.”
For the rest of my life, I’ll savor the day I finally shocked Taylor Hebert into speechlessness.
Oh, and the way she’s staring at me, her wide lips open in slack wonder, her eyes wide, her…
Her everything.
“Tay? I—hmmmph!”
What do you know? Even when silent herself, Taylor finds new ways to shut me up.
Well, not that new, if I’m being honest…
Not when her hand leaves my hair to contour my silhouette before drifting up and palming my breast, pressing it up despite the layers of clothing between us. When her legs maneuver to drag my sheets away so her uniform and my pajamas can meet, my legs gliding beneath fuzzy, comforting fabric at the rhythm mandated by my bossy girlfriend. And most certainly not when her tongue pushes mine down so she can claim my mouth and my very breath.
No, none of this is new. None of this is something I couldn’t have expected if my head wasn’t a mile away from here, ruminating on everything but what’s right in front of me.
Yet… Yet every moment she’s by my side? That’s… Those moments are still new. Will always be.
Because we can laugh together a thousand times, and that won’t make the next one any less special. Unique.
Ours.
“You’re thinking about something sappy,” she says, her own voice ragged with unsteady breath.
“That’s an unfair and entirely unfounded accusation,” I tell her before peppering kisses on her cheek, each one soft enough that the next one doesn’t delay.
“Is it, Miss ‘I’d put on my best faux British accent—?‘”
“Won’t you ever let that rest?”
“No. I’ll never let rest the moment I fell completely for you,” she says, unfairly exploiting my weaknesses.
I guess this is how Lung felt.
OK, I really hope not, because that’s gross.
“I already was in—” I try to argue, to regain my own momentum.
“I don’t care who fell in love; first, I just care how deeply,” she says before she leans back and tilts her head, prompting her hair to cascade down her shoulder and by my side so I’m surrounded by her and her scent. “I just care about how much I love you.”
My heart races as I stare up at her. At green eyes framed by darkness more impenetrable than that of my room at night.
“You don’t play fair,” I finally manage to tell her.
“You’re one to talk,” she says, her soft smile turning into something lopsidedly cocky.
“Shut up. It’s only unfair when I’m not the one doing it. That’s just common sense.”
“Because common sense is a notion you’re concerned with.”
“I know plenty about common sense. I have studied at length how to best subvert it.”
Taylor laughs, and my own smile comes forth with a rush of warmth straight from my belly when I see the mirth in her half-closed eyes.
So unfair.
“You know what’s the worst of it? I know that’s literally a thing you have done,” she says.
And then she leans down to lay a soft kiss on my forehead.
Before crawling down my belly.
“Tay?” I say.
“Shush. This is for you.”
And… well, I could argue.
But she’s looking up at me, the elastic of my pajama pants being pulled up between her teeth, and I…
I shift my legs so I can push my hips up, and she drags the pants down with both her teeth and her healthy hand. I know this gets her face to face with the incriminating wet patch in my panties, the white, unremarkable things that I put on because I was too exhausted to choose something else, and…
There’s a brief tingling of heat on my cheeks, but it’s not quite embarrassment even if it’s close to it. It’s just me being beneath Taylor’s gaze, at her mercy, and Taylor only taking advantage of that to take care of me.
It’s… It’s me being loved by her.
The tingling grows fiercer. And crosses my nose.
“Just… Just enjoy yourself, Liz. For me. Please?” she says as she tugs at the waistband of my panties.
I look down at her. At the way she’s staring up at me, asking for both permission and collaboration.
And I nod.
She’s… slow.
My panties do not quite part from my skin, they just slide down as Taylor forces me to close my thighs until the elastic is just below my opening, as if framing it for her eyes, digging into the sides of my hips.
She kisses the top of my thigh, where she was pressing down on earlier with her own sex, and I briefly wonder if she can taste herself on me, if that is a thing that she’s doing right now as her eyes lid and she focuses on the stretch of my skin in front of her as her hair caresses the side of my leg and my pants tie down my knees as effectively as spider silk binds my body to my bed.
Then she kisses up, sometimes not quite separating, dragging her lips over me until she wetly rests them on my thigh just a bit higher, a bit closer to the line of bunched underwear she’s restraining me with.
Her hand is caressing the outside of my other leg, the one she isn’t kissing, and her long, deft, gloved fingers feel like branching electricity, like something so intense that it should hurt, even if it does anything but even when her fake nails drag over me.
My breath gets caught yet again, and a short gasp makes her look up at me just as she reaches my panties.
Then she smiles up at me… and keeps kissing my body.
Up.
Not much higher, but enough to drive me to distraction as she nears the last line of silk tying my sheets down to me, the one right below my navel, and she slides a furtive hand underneath it before tracing a maddening circle around my bellybutton that makes me acutely aware of the void in there, of the concave spot in my body that she could lick or caress but that she’s chosen to avoid.
Then that very same hand, still gloved, still teasing me with the smooth touch of silk, reaches up to my breast, the very same she was palming earlier, and her touch is delicate, tentative, teasing, until she orients herself and finds what she’s looking for.
The tips of chitinous nails held together with glue and dye reach the very edge of my areola and circle it.
And I have to bite my lip not to scream.
It’s… It’s not so much the sensation as the idea. The idea of Taylor knowing my body this well, owning it, demarcating every spot, everything she has laid claim to.
With every almost scratch, with every touch that is a tad too sharp when I inhale deeply and push my breast up against her, Taylor is saying that she can do anything she wants to me, and that I’ll enjoy every single second.
Except the seconds when she keeps kissing me tenderly, but not where I want her to as she circles back and down my other thigh. Those seconds are the worst, and they should fuck right off.
“Tay…” I say, clearly not begging.
“Not yet,” she whispers, her breath a maddening caress on skin wet due to her lips.
Rather than, you know, other skin wet due to other, perfectly natural causes.
“Tay, I—”
She kisses me between my thighs, just below my panties, and her tongue peeks out of her lips to dig between them, to lick both my legs at once as I can’t help but rub them together and tilt my pelvis up in a silent yet eloquent offering.
Then she bites the front of the drenched piece of cloth and slithers down my body, her silk-clad breasts gliding over my bare thighs before my pajama pants get in the way of me feeling her and gain my eternal resentment.
And now Tay’s looking at me, her chin resting between my knees, her hand on my hip, her eyes lidded, her lips…
Smiling.
Yes, she’s smiling, but… It should be something with a hint of mockery, of superiority. Something to get me even more worked up as Taylor exerted a power over me that I enthusiastically gave her.
Instead?
It’s… soft. Tender.
And it makes my heart melt.
“I don’t tell you often enough how beautiful you are,” she says.
“I—”
“No. No, listen: you are beautiful. And, if I don’t say it? If I let my own hang-ups get in the way of telling you how much I admire even the most superficial aspects of the girl I fell in love with? Tell me. Scold me. Tear me a new one. You don’t have to handle me, Liz; not anymore. I… I want to be by your side, and not just because you’re pulling me along.”
I blink at her in dumb incomprehension.
“You think I am pulling you along?” I ask with all the incredulity such a statement merits.
Taylor, to her credit, has the grace to blush and look aside from my disbelieving, blinking stare.
“You know what I mean…” she mutters.
“I—Tay… You… You’re a goddamn force of nature. I could pull you along about as well as I could leash a storm. Or a swarm, I guess.”
“Don’t make a big deal out of this, Liz,” she grumbles in warning.
“I mean, I suppose I could leash a storm with… I don’t know, cloud seeding? Making it rain before it reaches—hey!”
She bit me!
“I just warned you.”
“And you bit me!”
“Because threats that you aren’t willing to follow on are not an effective deterrent.”
“You forgot to make the threat!”
Taylor, her lips still brushing the reddening spot of left thigh that was recently savaged, blinks up at me.
“I didn’t?” she asks with, dare I say, sheepishness.
“Oh, for… Just for the record: if I’m naked and you get your teeth on me, I want it to be more playful than that.”
“You aren’t completely naked—”
“I swear to God, Taylor Hebert, if you get technical about this with me—”
“Fine! Fine, I’m sorry, it’s just… You know what I’m talking about, and we just had that conversation earlier today, so I’m a bit miffed that you would outright deny you’ve been handling me—”
“I haven’t! I… all right, I may have avoided certain subjects and outright ignored others, but do you really think I’ve done anything but what comes naturally? I love you! You! I didn’t expect you to start praising my looks, of all things!”
“Well, I love you, and you’re a gorgeous woman who takes extra good care of her clothes, makeup, and hair, so not even commenting on that is borderline hurtful!”
“Well, I’m glad that you’ve come to such a realization! I’m really happy we’ve taken this step forward! Now, will you finally eat my pussy?!”
“Fine! But because I want to, not because you told me to!”
“Fine!”
“Fine!”
…
I am blushing.
So is Taylor.
For reasons unclear yet profound.
“Liz?” she finally says with a sheepish voice that has no apparent cause.
“Yes?” I answer, mirroring her tone just because that’s the polite thing to do.
“If I make you come at least three times, will you forget what just happened?” she offers, clearly already in the third stage of grief.
“Worth a try,” I tell her.
She nods.
And dives forward.
Her lips meet my lower ones almost violently, and I, just like I did that first time with Power whispering suggestions in my ear, slide both hands beneath my sheets and grasp her hair, tugging her up, closer to me as I close my eyes and hiss when her tongue comes out to tease me.
Then her arm snakes below mine, and once again, my breast is held in a careful touch that threatens me with even more tenderness and kindness.
My legs writhe beneath her body, held in place by both my clothes and her weight, and I can barely open them enough to grant Taylor access to me, to my naked sex, to wet lips that are never not eager for her touch.
And thoughts threaten the moment. Thoughts of the future, of everything I’ll have to do and face tomorrow because the world isn’t kind enough to stop just because I’ve been thrown yet another curveball, so I’ll have to balance… everything.
Yes, those thoughts threaten to intrude in our moment.
Thankfully, they have the good sense of being scared away by Taylor Hebert.
So I…
I don’t think.
I just feel Taylor, my Taylor, between my legs, kissing me in that way she has learned to master since our first time that, on reflection, was far less fumbling than it should’ve been, and I tug slightly on her hair to get her even closer to me, to feel her nose bump past my clitoris before she decides to circle it with her lips and make me gasp as her palm leaves my chest to warmly lie flat on my belly, my body as arched up as her bindings allow, the lines yet again digging against me, both above and below my breasts, but not crossing them like I now wish they would just to feel something tighter against them, something of Taylor that would mold them when her touch makes me rise.
Her pointed tongue presses down on me, past her lips, pushing me out of her suckling kiss, and I protest the absence with a wordless, plaintive whine. She tortures me briefly, teasing me, circling my clitoris just with her tongue without pushing it.
“Tay…” I manage to breathe out, her name almost a prayer.
And she goes back down to swallow me, to pull me back into soft warmth that tugs at me with varying pressure that travels up my body, makes my nipples brush against fuzzy fabric that is now less welcome than chitin claws on me, and has my eyelids flutter as the ceiling above me, the one streaked by broken rays of yellow light coming in from imperfectly adjusted slats on wooden blinds, blurs.
Light and shadow. And Taylor’s kiss on my sex makes me confuse one for the other.
Why am I not surprised.
“You’re… You’re doing good. Great. I… Tay, I…”
“Do it,” she commands before I can say what it is that I’m about to do, her voice once again traveling across my wet skin, yet this time it’s not her kisses that have made it like this.
Or, well, not entirely.
So I…
I caress her hair, my fingers massaging her scalp with all the smooth tenderness I can conjure as she resumes her assault on my senses. I feel the silk that is softer and smoother than the one of her suit. The darkness more soothing than the one behind my eyelids.
I caress Taylor’s hair with all the love I can show her with ten fingers reaching down from the bindings she’s draped me in. The hair that I learned not that long ago was the one thing about her body she felt pride in. The hair I understood to be Taylor’s weakness in that she could believe me when I showed I liked it, that I felt attracted to it.
Once upon a time.
Before… Before everything.
Because now Taylor understands that I’m attracted to her. To her everything. Yes, to long legs, and a slender waist, and a perky derriere and bust. To green eyes and a slightly masculine mouth. To long, flowing hair that I could spend hours trailing my fingers through.
But… But it’s because it’s her.
And I’ve shown her, again and again, as often as I have been able to. I’ve told her.
I’ve finally made her believe.
So, now, when she suckles on me a tad harder and my fingers clench on the hair wrapped around them? It no longer sends the old burst of incredulous arousal through her.
It… excites her, yes.
But it no longer breaks my heart.
“I love you. I love you so much,” I mutter, not entirely coherent as her tongue’s tip attacks me in varied patterns, her wonderful mind no doubt dissecting my reactions and adjusting at every twitch of my lips or tightening of my eyes.
“I know. I know, Liz. And thank you,” she whispers low enough that I suspect she doesn’t expect me to hear her.
And then her fingers plunge inside of me, her barefingers that I now notice are absent from my belly, and they curl up, teasing at the rough patch of flesh slightly further in than where her lips are latched on top of me. And something sparks between soft fingertips and a deft tongue, something that seems to blaze, to burn brighter as she pulls with her lips, and then…
Then the… the sheer pleasure radiates up and outward, my legs trying to shake beneath her as I bury the back of my head into my pillow and my breasts yet again ache for something to tighten around them as they shake freely when my whole body becomes a bow taut with Taylor’s touch on me.
Her tongue flicks my clitoris one last time, and I break.
I… I don’t know if the wail I must have let out when white light took my sight was as loud as I suspect. I just know that my throat is sore and that motes of color are floating in front of my eyes. I just know that I don’t have any strength left, that I’m sinking into my bed, and that I can’t even conceive of moving.
Her warm weight is on my legs.
“That’s the first one. Two to go,” she darkly whispers.
And I whimper.
***
Taylor is sleeping.
By my side.
There were no interruptions this time around. No Alec petulantly intruding on the moment.
There also were no dark revelations about my secrets or my captor.
There were… not a lot of things.
Because those things already happened. Because we’ve gone through all of that already. Grown from it. Grown closer, together, and on our own.
So this isn’t a too theatrical first time brought about by our own misunderstandings and Taylor’s need to turn everything into something fit for a movie script, or, at least, a novel with open shirts on the cover.
This is my girlfriend and me making love yet again. Not in a routine way, never that, but…
But there were not a lot of things.
Just the girl I love, being with me, trying to give me a moment of peace before the storm.
And that’s more than I ever hoped.
