The Hard Way (Box Set) (11 page)

The head of his cock, leaking pre-cum in a slick trail, slid across my thigh and pressed against the damp fur guarding my weeping womanhood.

“Yes,” I breathed, arching against him, trying to force his finger and his erection deep into me.

“So if you ever got here, you could show us how to use the things the Titans left behind.”

I froze at that. “The stuff… Oh shit yes!”

As I paused, Luster took the opportunity to drive his cock home deep.

“The… stuff.” He punctuated each word with a thrust.

I screamed as my legs flew up to wrap around his waist, driving him deeper into me. His finger began a counterthrust that almost over-stimulated me, almost brought me pain. But I screamed and begged for more. The lines between discomfort and ultimate joy began to blur. Right now, any sensation added to the intense feelings crawling through my body.

My world shifted, consciousness dropped away as my being became a thing of complete orgasmic delight. Colors swirled behind my closed eyes and each of his movements rocked me higher and higher.

I could feel the sweat pouring off of me, felt his weight shift to the side a bit to grind against me, mashing my clit against his soft pubic hair and adding yet another thrill to my convulsing body.

His thrusts became rougher, harder, as he grunted above me, setting a rhythm that my body had no choice but to follow. I began to shake as tension built and built. I trembled and arched up against him, every muscle straining for completion.

Then it broke!

I screamed as my body began to convulse around him. The muscles in my ass clenched around his finger as my inner walls tightened around his cock, milking him intently, trying to drain the life out of his body.

He, too, cried out as orgasm took hold of his body, making him writhe and quake above me. The hot splash of his seed soothed me.

“Sinopee,” he gasped. He settled, shaking in reaction, atop my still quivering body. He eased his finger free of me, and then I was engulfed in a tight embrace, our bodies trembling together as we both began to calm.

“Teach me to be a Thinker.” He rolled to the side, keeping our bodies joined even as he pulled my head to his chest.

“You want me to… use my gifts?”

“Yes,” he breathed. “This science thing has to be understood.”

“But what about the magic? Have you given up on it?” I stroked my hand across his damp back. His muscles still trembled.

“I will never give up on magic, but I see the merit of science.”

“Really?” I chuckled weakly. Damn, these sessions with Lust left me totally drained.

“Yes,” he replied, bending low to take my lips with his. “How else will you explain us both touching the mirror at the same time, or how you just happen to be my true mate?”

I couldn’t argue with his reasoning. I couldn’t say anything anyway. I was too busy eating at his mouth, taking in his unique flavor, playing catch-me with his tongue.

Besides, who could explain the greatest bit of magic ever created?

Who could explain love?

Stephanie Burke

It isn’t easy being a young black woman trying to find a place in the corporate world. Fed up with her life, Shaquandra utters these fateful words: “
I wish I was in a soap opera. Five minutes after you get there, you’re a millionaire and everyone loves you
.”

Be careful what you wish for. When the four fairy godfathers whisk her away to “Perfect” City, she discovers that everything isn’t always “prefect”. Between Voodoo Priestesses, the white woman who swears she’s Shaquandra’s sister, the four Fairy Godfathers, the Italian Mob, the Demon Lawyer, and the KGB, Shaquandra will be lucky if she gets out alive. Things really get interesting when she falls madly in lust with the Egyptian Assassin who keeps saving her life.

“Just in time for another fast-paced episode of…
Perfect!”

“Well, it’s not like I have anywhere else to go,” Shaquandra murmured as she settled deeper into her comfortable couch.

Dressed in all of her ratty, terry-clothed splendor, the out-of-work accountant cuddled her closest friends closer. Her friends being three bags of assorted potato chips, one bag of barbecue pork rinds, two packages of popcorn, cheese and caramel flavored respectively, one box of pocky… and a fifth of tequila. She poured another shot of tequila into a tumbler, took the shot, and chased it with a swig of lime juice from the nearby plastic lime-shaped squeeze bottle. She had no place to be since she got downsized by corporate America.

All of her resumes were electronically filed, her interviews from headhunters were conducted by phone, and her unemployment check came straight to her front door.

Now, with her snackable friends gathered around, she settled down for the next round of relentlessly sexist pointless soft porn known as the daytime soaps.

“You know,” she gurgled to her pet potato chip Chippy Three Thousand, named thusly because she had eaten his two thousand nine hundred ninety-nine predecessors, “look at that chick.” She pointed to an overly developed blonde with underdeveloped acting ability. “She was a drunk prostitute turning tricks for her younger brother on the Perfect Strip. Now she’s a millionaire heiress with a handsome, mysterious fiancé. Damn, I wish I was in a soap opera. Five minutes after you get there, you’re a millionaire and everyone loves you.”

Chippy had nothing to say, so she tossed him into her mouth and poured out a little liquor for her newly fallen brother who didn’t make it. And she poured it right down her throat.

She was adding a second memorial shot to her tumbler when the first fly buzzed around her head. Absently, she swatted it away and returned to her TV viewing. Brad was about to announce to the world that he was a product of the first male birth, an experiment gone wrong back in the seventies… and that he was the mother of Christy’s baby, and that Christy was really Christian and had only married the aged oil baron for his money and not for love.

Christy, neé Christian before the sex change operation, was about to rise up and invite the alien horde waiting just out of range of the Star Wars defense grid to come and make slaves of the human race when the second fly dive-bombed her.

Did I forget to close a window or something
?

The third fly landed in her drink.

Cursing, she tilted the glass to peer inside and saw something that almost made her swear off drinking for life. The fly in her drink was reclining on a melting ice cube and smoking a cigar, and damned if it didn’t smell like those Cuban things her ex-boss loved.

She was about to let out the prerequisite B-movie scream when someone speaking behind her pulled her attention in that direction.

“Ignore Murray, love,” the gravelly voice rasped. “You got the good top shelf stuff and Murray needed to wet his whistle.”

“M-Murray?” she stuttered as she slowly turned her head toward that voice.

Maybe it was Chippy coming to claim revenge for all his fallen brethren. But all she saw was another fly. This one was also smoking a cigar and brandishing a metal wand with a heart on the tip.

Okay, she decided, slowly putting down the tumbler. It was definitely time to give up on spirits of a Latin origin. Time to switch to good old-fashioned German beer. She never saw flies with wands smoking cigars and resting on ice cubes, stealing sips of her good hooch, when she was wasted on Jagermeister.

“We are not flies,” another voice huffed, joining the second cigar-smoking… thing that was hovering above her face. “We are personal, paternal, aviated, size-challenged inner desire granters.”

“Did I say that out loud?” she gasped. Then his words, or at least some of them, penetrated her alcohol-fogged brain. “What?”

“Ignore Carl,” the first personal paternal… flying thing interrupted. “He is playing the PC, card-holding metrosexual nowadays. His cigar is a legal Cuban,” he whispered in his rough voice, “and he has manicures to prevent tobacco stains on his fingers and nails.”

“I’m dreaming,” she muttered. “This is a tequila induced fantasy.”

“Then I would hate to see your nightmares,” another fly added as it joined the two hovering over her shocked face. “I mean really, look at those drapes and that carpet. Was your designer Martha Screw Up? I mean, plastic backings! Who has plastic backings on drapes? And that color! Neutral is not a color, darling -- it’s a country, like Switzerland!”

“Okay,” Shaquandra muttered, desperately holding her panic at bay. “My brain is fried, I am receiving fashion advice from an insect.”

“Decorating advice,” the perturbed voice corrected. “If I was going to give you fashion advice, I would say something about that terry cloth robe. Hello? It is so
Laverne and Shirley
! I mean, get out of the seventies.” Then he added, in an aside to the others, “And a little wax will take care of that unibrow, ducky. Wax is for black people, too!”

“I need a drink!” Shaquandra’s voice cracked as she felt herself slipping farther into insanity. She reached for her tumbler, forgetting her tequila moocher until the glass was at her lips. A movement made her look down with a whimper, just in time to catch the first of several cigar smoke rings that the floating fly blew at her.

“I think you’ve had too much,” the first fly mused as she very carefully placed the tumbler back on the table.

“I think you may be right,” she agreed, her voice reedy and thin.

She was shocked that her voice sounded that normal. Hell, she had just impressed herself. “Okay,” she continued, sliding back into her couch to hide her trembling limbs. “Talk to me.”

She was now ready for the pronouncement that the world was coming to an end or that Jenna Jameson, Nicole Ritchie, Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, and Michael Jackson had decided to form a Christian Coalition and give up sex, liquor, scandals, shocking people, and plastic surgery altogether.

“We,” the first voice began formally, “are your Fairy Godfathers.”

“Personal paternal…” the second voice began, but was cut off.

“Fairy godfathers, Carl! We have wings and we wear tutus!”

“Enhanced body sheaths,” Carl muttered, but fell quiet as the rest of the fly-fairy -- or was it the fairy-fly -- contingency shot him glares.

“Carl the PC, Murray the drunk, Phil the fashion consultant, and I am Carter the leader. We are your four fairy godfathers!” Carter sounded pleased with himself.

Shaquandra stared.

“Well?” He flew in closer, close enough for her to see that the fly really did have a tiny face… that was covered with a five o’clock shadow. It was wearing, sure enough, a small black tutu and had a cigar clamped between its lips, lips that spread into a smile without dropping the precious cigar.

“Get out!” She hid deeper in her comfy neutral colored couch and fiddled with her snack friends.

“Truly!” Carter added, shifting his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other without the use of his hands, a truly skilled and magnificent feat.

“No,” Shaquandra stated. “Get out. Get out of my house! Get out now!” Her voice rose with each word, until she was nearly roaring.

“You…” Carter stammered, a confused expression crossing his tiny little face. “Maybe you are not understanding us…”

“Get out! Get out! Getoutgetoutgetoutgetout!” Then she was on her feet ad swatting at the little buzzing creeps like mad. “Get out of my house!”

Suddenly there was a poof, a damned audible poofing sound, and suddenly four -- count them, four -- beefy buff type guys, wearing matching dark colored tutus, ballet slippers, and puffing on cigars, stood in her living room, all fisting heart-topped wands.

She knew that they were there because in her wild, fly-flapping flight, she barreled into the one called Carter’s chest, then bounced, bottom first, onto the floor.

“Now will you listen to us?”

Shaquandra gaped like a slack jawed yokel at the four buff men, who were glaring down at her like she’d tried to kill them.

She opened her mouth to speak, but in tandem, they each snapped open previously unnoticed mother of pearl wings and slammed equally large hands onto their hips, still fisting those damn wands.

Numbly, she closed her mouth and nodded. Suddenly her four personal paternal flies were looking like a thug gang of four.

“Good,” Carter snapped. “In that case, you made a wish and we are here to grant it.”

“Wish?”

“You wished for it, we grant it!” Carl continued. “Too bad you didn’t wish for decent living quarters.”

“Or some better manners,” Phil added, sniffing around his cigar.

Murray said nothing, but he reached down and picked up the nearly empty liquor bottle, shook it twice, and frowned at her.

Shaquandra stared at the four winged fairies and gave in, just a little, to the urge to laugh hysterically. It started life as a chuckle and grew and grew in sound and in fervor.

“I think we broke her,” Carl whispered loudly from behind a raised hand after a few long moments of manic laughter.

Murray just nodded.

“Grant and vacate?” Phil asked hopefully.

“Post haste,” Carter whispered back and gave the others a nod. “Wands up!”

In tandem, four little heart topped wands were hefted with all the reverence of the Olympic torch.

“We grant thy wish!”

Shaquandra paused in her laughter, the sound of the deep voices in stereo knocking her somewhat out of her stupor. She looked up just in time to receive the invocation… or rather, four heart topped metal wands bashing down on the top of her head.

Again there was that “poof” sound, and the room began to spin.

She must have blacked out for a moment, because when next she became aware of her surroundings, she was sitting in a damp clump of grass, leaning against a signpost, wearing the most God-awful red rhinestone stiletto heels on her feet. Her head felt like the whole defensive line of the Baltimore Ravens was parading through, double time!