Husband.
I looked into those bluer-than-the sky eyes and tried to reconcile them with that word.
Husband. It felt both true and strange. Another story lurked in my mind. Lurked the way a dream will after you wake up. The harder I tried to remember, the faster I forgot.
“Crixus?” I tried out his name, sure it would trigger some recollection, that the familiarity of it would solidify the ground beneath my feet.
It did.
And it didn’t.
“You’re having one of your episodes,” he said in a voice both warm and soothing. He took a seat on the ottoman before me, sitting close enough that our knees overlapped. “It’s okay. This has happened before, remember? It will pass.”
“Episodes?”
“Yes. You’ve had them ever since the accident.”
“Accident? What—” But even as I asked, images floated to the surface of my mind.
Me. Liam. A car. Metal and screams. He’d fired shots out the driver’s side window. I’d tried to stop him, yanked his arm away. The vehicle swerved. Flipped. A shower of glass biting into my cheeks.
Then a hand. Reaching into the broken passenger’s side window. Unbuckling my seatbelt. Pulling me out. Carrying me to safety.
The same hand now rested on my knee, lifted to my cheek and traced the particular line of my jaw where it met the curve of my ear, disappearing beneath my hair. His other hand rose to my temple and he was cupping my face, my head feeling somehow small and manageable within the span of his fingers.
“Look at me,” he said.
I looked at him then for what felt like the first time and the ten thousandth.
Perfection is a word not often associated with anything crafted from mortal clay. The man before me could be credited as nothing less. An economy of aesthetics so skillfully calibrated they should have been unreal. From the sloping muscles beneath the tight black t-shirt to the indecently smooth skin of his neck and forehead. The sensory memory of how it felt glued to mine by a sheen of sweat sent lust skittering through my middle.
“I’m right here, Doctor.”
Doctor. Yes. He had always called me that.
Even on our wedding day.
Our wedding. With shock, I realized I could remember that too, if I tried.
I, Crixus, take thee, Doctor Matilda Schmidt…
A warm, intimate chuckle from the guests.
The summer solstice sun making the world go rose-colored beyond the net of my veil. The longest day of the year. But it had been the night that seemed endless. Crixus and I in his big bed. Coiling and uncoiling like two parts of one animal. Finding each other in the dark. Moving together between cool sheets.
Blissfully exhausted mornings.
I now pronounce you demigod and wife.
Because he was not a man. So much more than a man. A demigod.
My husband. My mate.
His thumbs massaged the indentations at my temple. Gentle pressure to ease the troubled mind beneath. “Focus on what’s here. On what’s real. What’s real right now?”
I knew this technique well. I’d used it countless times on clients dealing with anxiety and PTSD. A powerful grounding technique. I let myself be coached.
“You,” I said. I reached up to encircle his wrists with my fingers, feeling the veins beneath my fingertips. His strong pulse. Life.
“And if you can touch me, then what does that mean?”
“That’ I’m real too.”
“That’s right. What else?” His eyes skated to the chair, providing me with a clue.
“This chair.” I focused on feeling my weight pushing into it, its solidity beneath the backs of my thighs.
“Good. Keep going.”
Every breath grew easier. The answers arriving quicker now. Memories reassembling themselves like water draining from a tub. Slow at first, then coming faster and faster. “The floor beneath the chair. The ground beneath that.” All at once, my body deflated in a huge, relieved exhale.
“See? Almost over.” He let his hands drop from my face and stood, taking me by the hand to tug me up with him. His arms circled around my back and I allowed myself to sag against him, reveling in the feeling of letting something else bear up my weight, if only for a second. His chin coming to rest upon the crown of my head felt like everything that had ever been right, and good, and true. The tiny bones of my inner ear vibrated with the steady beat of okay…okay…okay telegraphed by his big heart.
“What triggered it this time?” he asked.
“Triggered?” Again, the word had scarcely left my lips when the memory returned to me. “A name. Why would a name trigger me?”
“The mind is a strange thing.” I felt as much as heard the words rumbling through his chest. “You know that better than anyone.” A protracted beat of silence spread between us. “What name?”
I glanced down at my discarded notebook. The name was there in bold, black ink. I’d traced the letters several times in an urgent, unsteady hand.
“Adelaide,” I said. Reading it came with that strange sensation of simultaneous reality and unreality common to déjà vu.
“Where did you hear it?” Crixus asked.
I refocused inward, mining my spotty short-term memory. “My last client. We were talking about—well, I can’t tell you what we were talking about. But I heard the name from him.”
“Doctor-patient confidentiality?”
“You know the rules,” I said. “If you were my client, you wouldn’t want me discussing your most intimate and twisted thoughts with just anyone, would you?”
“If I was your client, we wouldn’t be discussing my most intimate and twisted thoughts.” His hands slid from my back to my waist, riding the curve of my hips downward. He cupped double handfuls of my butt and squeezed. “We’d be living them.”
“Crixus.” My mock-critical tone discouraged him not at all. “Not in the office. We’ve talked about that.” At least, I had a memory of discussing it. Vaguely.
“We’ve talked about how much fun it would be.”
“You’ve talked about how much fun it would be.” I poked finger into his pectoral muscle. “I’ve talked about how hard it would be to concentrate on my clients if the entire time we were talking, I was remembering how we’d banged on the couch where they were sitting.”
“Easily fixed,” Crixus said. I yelped as he lifted me off my feet and walked me backward, depositing me on the edge of my desk. “We’ll do it here.”
“Crixus, no. We can’t—”
He ate the rest of my sentence.
Ate it. With his lips and his teeth and his tongue and a hunger that dizzied me. Any lingering doubts I might have had about my life, my love, and my place in this world were banished by that lush heat. Ours was a symphony of a kiss. Disparate notes coming together to form a melody so perfect my body couldn’t help but dance to it. It was a creation song. A ballad to bodies joined so well and so often, they knew each other’s notes by heart.
I belonged here. With him.
Crixus’s hand was halfway up my skirt when Julie’s voice came over the intercom.
“Doctor Schmidt?”
Sin itself couldn’t have been more compelling than the wicked grin Crixus gave me then. He pressed a finger to his lips and leaned forward, licking my neck just where my pulse throbbed delicately beneath my skin.
Considerate bastard that he was, he left my mouth free to respond to Julie while he unbuttoned my blouse with his teeth.
“Yes, Julie. What is it?” I managed to not sound like I was panting. For the most part. Even when Crixus pushed my bra up over my breasts without undoing it and brushed feverish lips over my nipple before testing it with his teeth.
“I have a Doctor Wolfe on the phone.”
Dr. Wolfe. Where had I heard that name?
“Can you get a number? I think it would be better if—”
“Go ahead and put him through.” Crixus’s words cooled the moisture he’d painted across my breast. “Far be it from me to distract you from your work.”
“Here you go.” If Julie had guessed what we were up to, she hid it well.
The line clicked and a male voice coughed.
“Doctor Wolfe, how can I help you?”
“Good afternoon, Doctor Schmidt. I don’t know if you remember me. We met at a symposium for the Psychological Stigma of Supernatural Ideations last fall.”
I had trouble resurrecting the memory, in no small part due to the stubble of Crixus’s chin finding the tender flesh of my inner thigh. “I’m afraid I met a lot of people during that conference.” That part, at least, I could remember.
“We talked about the success of exposure therapy in reducing instances of hematophobia for those with delusions of sanguineous dependency?”
Sanguineous dependency. A polite word for vampires among the academic set.
“Right, yes. Of course. How can I…be of service?”
“Well, actually, I was hoping I might be able to help you.”
The same sense of falling returned in a sudden rush. Crixus took my gasp for a sign of ardor and growled something hot and bit my inner thigh.
“What was that?” Wolfe asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just practicing my Latin.”
“Oh. Well, I’m calling because there’s a young man I’d like to refer to you.”
“How thoughtful. You can leave his information with my receptionist and I’ll—”
“No.” The sudden urgency in Wolfe’s tone startled me. “You must see him today. As soon as possible, in fact.”
“Doctor Wolfe, I do appreciate the referral, but I have a full case load today.”
“But you’re free now,” Wolfe said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be taking my call.”
“It’s my lunch hour.” Breath was becoming a rarer commodity all the time.
“And I’m starving.” Crixus sank down on his knees and proceeded to push mine apart. One quick yank saw the silky scrap of my panties discarded on the floor by his black motorcycle boots.
“Doctor Schmidt, I would normally never ask this of you on such short notice, but the young man in question is at great risk. He claims to have information about the Dude Bro Strangler.”
“Oh, God!” A certain demigod’s tongue had located a particular spot that folded my body up like a lawn chair. “That’s terrible,” I added in a hurry. “Wait. Did you say the Dude Bro Strangler?”
“I did. I assume you’re familiar.”
“I’m not, actually.” Episodes or no, I felt certain I had never heard these three words run together in any context.
“I’m not sure how that’s possible. The most recent slaying occurred in your own backyard.”
“Most recent?” All these words. Forming sentences. Meaning things. Requiring me to make sense of them when I all I wanted was a moment’s peace to focus on the small revolution occurring between my thighs. “How long has this been happening?”
“For the past eight months. Bodies found all over the country. The only thing the victims share seems to be a predilection for weight training, popped collars and tanning beds.”
“And this person you want to refer to me, he claims to know something about the murders?” I spoke every word with over-practiced precision, sure that ardor underscored every syllable.
“Precisely.”
“Shouldn’t he go to the police?” I suggested, modestly palming my husband’s cock through his jeans. For once, my memory and I were both pleasantly surprised. As was Crixus, if his muffled groan was any indication.
“He’s expressed reticence to do so. Mostly due to his own…proclivities.”
“You want me to convince him he’s not a vampire so he’ll go to the police. Is that it?”
“A colleague of mine mentioned that you’d had some success with this sort of thing in the past.”
“On occasion.” In all actuality, I’d received referrals from therapists all over the country who believed their clients were having some sort of psychotic break. Individuals claiming to be everything from vampires to werewolves to harpies and púcas.
A word to the wise about the púcas—if you’ve never tried treating a shape-shifting Celtic poltergeist-goat for bipolar disorder, I’d recommend you engage a priest.
And a shovel.
Crixus had removed my hand from his crotch and brought it to his mouth, maintaining eye contact all the while. Slowly, he let my index finger sink into the velvet heat of his mouth, curling his tongue around the tip before withdrawing it and moving on to the next one.
“So you’ll see him?” Wolfe asked.
My hips went heavy, my legs slack, my arms melting from the fire blooming down deep in my belly. When I was certain I couldn’t handle another second of the decadent pleasure, Crixus scooted me forward until my hips were at the extreme edge of the desk.
With a practiced ease I tried not to think about too much, he unbuckled his jeans and freed himself. One hand on his cock, the other beneath my buttocks, he angled me just so.
Then filled me.
When I expected him to draw back, to plunge again, he stilled. The finest of creases scored a line between his brows.
Something about this felt at once illicit and familiar. Illicit not because were in my office, nor because our every sound could be heard by the open line on my desk, nor because Julie sat just outside the door. A feeling new and raw and forbidden traveled from my pelvic floor all the way to my chest and bloomed there, filling the dark places of my closed, imperfect human vessel.
It felt like fucking a stranger.
Like finding each other at the end of a long journey only to realize that time had made us foreign to one another.
And this, Crixus hadn’t read in my thoughts, for I could see the same startled awe writ large on his unnaturally symmetrical face.
The instant intimacy of our kiss…where had it gone?
In his eyes was a wordless plea: Continue?
“Yes.” I threw the word out like a life raft to us both.
Unfortunately, Wolfe also scrambled aboard.
“So you’ll see him?”
“Yes!” I hadn’t meant to place so much emphasis on my answer, but Crixus had driven it out of me along with what remained of my breath.
“Splendid. He’s been waiting outside your building. I’ll tell him to head your way.”
“Wait!” In my urgency to hang on for dear life in the midst of Crixus’s onslaught, I knocked my pencil jar and stapler off the desk. The industrial carpet muffled some but not all of the resulting racket.
“Is everything all right?” Wolfe asked.
“Yes. No. I mean, I’m just finishing doing some paperwork.” Okay, more like I was getting done on top of some paperwork, but I figured it was close enough. “Can you give me five minutes?”
Crixus raised an eyebrow and lifted my hips, driving himself home at an angle that made my eyes go crossed.
“Better make that ten,” I said.
“Ten minutes, then. And, Dr. Schmidt?”
“For the love of God, what?” My fingers curled over the edge of the desk, my knuckles pale with the effort of anchoring myself to the slick surface.
“Be careful.”
It’s hard to perceive anything as ominous when you’re mere seconds away from a supersonic orgasm, and supersonic orgasms were the only kind Crixus dealt in. It was never a question of how hard? It was a question of how many?
The first one turned me inside out.
The second bowed my back and jerked my limbs like someone had plugged my foot into an electrical socket.
The third reached up and slapped me so hard I saw little pinwheels of light dancing across my vision.
The fourth, we shared.
Crixus’s grip on the hair at the nape of my neck prevented me from moving with it as I had the others, which somehow intensified it all the more. I could do naught but look into his eyes while the madness took me and watch him do the same.
I fell into the darkness of his dilated pupils. Somewhere down there in the deep lived a fear and wonder mirroring my own.
The screams we could not release doubled back to feed waves of pleasure roaring low and wild from the place where we joined. He jerked me upward at the last second to exhale filthy words in my ear as he stiffened while we seized and convulsed together. He inside me, and me around him.
We stayed like that for the space of several minutes. My legs wrapped around his waist. His hands resting on the desk beside my hips. Our foreheads pressed close. Our commingled breath humid on our cheeks.
After we disengaged, I cleaned myself up as best I could while Crixus, lazy smile affixed to his face, set to putting my desk to rights.
“We should do that more often.” Crixus took my chin in his thumb and forefinger and pressed a kiss to my lips.
“What would become of my professional reputation?” I gave him a teasing smile and pretended to bite the tip of his thumb.
“What’s losing a client now and then if it means we get to do what we just did? We both know you don’t need to work.”
“A lot, actually.” A bit of the post-coital cloud burned off as a little flame of irritation flickered to life. “My work is important to me.”
His blue eyes cooled a little, their color changing from hot spring to frozen pond.
A brusque knock at the door preceded Julie’s curly blond head poking through a narrow opening. A sudden flush made apples of her round cheeks.
“Dr. Schmidt, there’s someone to see you. He’s not on the schedule, but—”
“He was a referral from Dr. Wolfe who called earlier. Please go ahead and send him in.”
Julie looked from Crixus, to me, back to Crixus. I couldn’t blame her. Asshole or no, the man certainly warranted a second look.
“I guess that’s my cue to make myself scarce.” He ran a hand through his disheveled mane and sauntered toward the door. “See you tonight.”
Julie stepped wide, creating enough space for him and his ego to quit the room.
When the doorway emptied, another figure stepped in to fill it.
And when I say fill it, I mean fill it.
If this kid really was a vampire, then there was no way he didn’t hear my throat making the telltale gulp sound as I swallowed. Not the best way to start off a session.
At about this point, I realized that I had neglected to collect a name from Dr. Wolfe and Julie hadn’t offered one before high-tailing it back to her desk. Usually she would make some sort of introduction, but she seemed determined to put a desk between her and the creature glowering at my office’s threshold.
Which wasn’t like Julie, for whom a hot pink drool cup to match her never-ending army of hot pink sweaters would not have been imprudent on days when vampires decorated the docket.
“Please, come in.” I gestured to the long leather couch opposite of my chair.
He seated himself of the cushion’s edge where no part of his body would come into contact with the ranks of decorative throw pillows.
Before closing my office door, I leaned through it and caught Julie’s eye.
“Julie, will you please let Doctor Dimlow know I’ll return his call as soon as possible?”
This was our pre-established code for ‘stand by in case this bloodsucker decides to tap my jugular like a maple tree.’
Brown eyes anime-wide, she nodded and patted the top drawer of the file cabinet behind her, where she kept patient receipts, extra paper clips, and holy water.
“All right,” I told myself as much as her. “Let’s do this.”