BAZ

I thought we’d start with something safe and slow. We stroked and sniffed and slowly shed our clothes.

“What’s this?” she said, grabbing my foot and looking at the sole. “What a dumb place to put a tattoo.” Her pretty little titties were perked up.

I lay back on my elbows. “That’s my Infernal Identification Number.”

“Your—what?”

“The Regional Office assigned everybody an IIDN when we went paperless in the eighties. Eighty-eight digits. Ridiculous. Most of us tattooed it on our foot so we wouldn’t have to memorize it.”

“Nowadays you would have a QR code,” she said, tracing the rows and rows of teeny numbers. “Or a chip.” That tickled.

I shook my foot. “You would be so good for the organization. Oh, shit,” I added. “That reminds me. I suppose I have to tell my supervisor I’m quitting.”

“Your supervisor at the theater?” Her hand slid up my leg.

“My supervisor at the Regional Office.” I pointed down. “I haven’t had an active account for a long time—I fiddled the computer during the conversion—but he does know where I live.”

“Baz, if you quit, won’t those, um, people get mad?”

“Relax, baby.” I put up fingers. “One, I don’t exist in their records. Since my last roomie left, we’ve been filing all our reports at Veek’s ghost account, and I suppose that’s gonna go phut if he runs off with this French chick. I’ll have to find another way to supplement my income.” She tickled the foot again and I jerked it away. “Two, they can’t damn their way out of a wet paper bag these days. And, hello, three, I’m not dead yet.”

“So relaxed,” she mocked, but then she frowned again. “I can’t see the Regional Office saying, ‘Oh, you want to retire? No problem!’ They’ll be pissier than my Uncle Chester.”

“I was around before they incorporated. I outrank ’em all.”

“So? Won’t that matter?”

“Only if I ever want my job back. Or if they ever figure out I did something to their computers and want me to fix it,” I said, grinning. “Say, all this talk isn’t getting us laid.”

She rolled her eyes. “So why tell your supervisor?”

“I’ve known the guy for close on seven hundred years.”

Her jaw dropped. “You like him! A demon supervisor!”

“He’s no worse than any other schmuck.”

“Well, I’m not taking any chances,” she said. She tapped the number on my foot. “This thing proves you’re a registered sex demon?”

“Was. My file got deleted.”

She got that bossy look. “C’mere.” She took my foot in both hands and turned it sole-up.

“Ow! Hey!” I had to flip over on my stomach or let her sprain my ankle.

“Stay like that for a minute.” She crawled to the end of the bed and took hold of my foot again.

“If you tickle me again, I’m gonna kick.” I twisted so I could look over my shoulder. “What are you trying to do?”

“Never mind.”

I shut my eyes. Yoni’s hot little hands squeezed my foot. I sighed and turned my face to the bed.

“I changed my mind. You can watch,” she said. “This should entertain you.”

So I twisted my neck so I could watch.

First, she slid out of her post-show sweatpants and threw them in the corner on top of my pile of dirty sweat socks.

Then she knelt over my foot. She lowered herself over it until her ying-yang touched it.

Then she closed her eyes and—made love to my foot.

Actually.

I was stunned. Not because it turned me on, because frankly everything about this woman turned me on, but because no woman had ever done that to me. You’d think by now I’d seen everything.

She opened her eyes, rocking slowly back and forth over my instep. “Shut your mouth, Baz, a fly’s gonna get in. Haven’t you ever met a foot fetishist?”

I hitched up the jaw. “Yeah. Guys. No women.”

“Well, you’re not meeting one now. Ouch, my back is tired. Unless—” She tipped forward and landed on the coverlet with one hand on either side of me. Then she lowered herself all over me. Her breasts touched the backs of my thighs. Her hands slid up between me and the lynx-fur coverlet and wrapped around my dick, and I gasped.

“Yoni!”

“Just checking to see if you like this.”

She was slippery lying on me, slippery and hot and sweaty. She slid down and squatted back on my heel. Now her mana began to flow. She started rubbing back and forth over my heel and moaning. That made me even harder. Her hands twisted on my dick. As sex went, it was awkward and goofy, but the mana made it wonderful. She could talk me into anything in bed, if it felt like this. Then she switched to rotating on my heel, breathing harder, pressing down, wow she was hot down there, and her mouth was hot and wet on the small of my back, and her hands squeezed my dick, and her thighs trembled on either side of my foot—holy shit, she was gonna come—Yoni!—her fingers squeezed my dick in little bursts—“Yoni!”—and I went off with a bang.

She lay on me like a dead weight, shuddering.

“I’ve messed the bed,” I informed her, my face smashed against the fur.

The mana faded. It was getting so I could feel it and not get a boner for, oh, thirty or forty seconds now.

Languidly she rolled off me. I looked. Her smile turned smug. Her hair stuck to her neck. She was sweaty all over and she smelled delicious.

“Come up here so I can do this the right way,” I growled.

She curled herself into a ball, groaned, then stretched backward, then got up and inspected my foot. A little sigh escaped her.

I said, “You are way kinkier than I expected, babe.”

“Look!” She sounded pleased.

Reluctantly I stretched and sat up.

She grabbed my foot. “Look,” she repeated.

I looked. “My foot smells great. Thank you.” Then I realized my eighty-eight-digit IIDN tattoo was gone. I nearly sprained my back trying to look closer.

Not a trace left.

“Now that’s what I call doing it the right way,” she purred. She met my eyes with a mischievous smile. “I could have tried fixing it by laying on hands, but I wanted to be a sex goddess about it.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I gaped and nodded like a bobble-head. “Yeah. Yeah, uh-huh. I can see that. Yup.” I couldn’t even see red marks, which I would if the tattoo had been removed in the ordinary way.

“Don’t look so surprised. I’ve brought you gold, emeralds, fur blankets, and a ridiculous number of roses.”

I pulled her into my arms. She smelled like shampoo and sexy woman. “With my help. And you intended to bring only that last batch of roses. The rest were accidents.”

She pulled back far enough to give me a look of mock-outrage. “Hey! I’m trying to take control of my magic. You could be a little more supportive.”

“I’m supporting, I’m supporting! Thirty-three years I’ve had that tattoo. Truly, this is the power of the pussy.”

She snuggled up against me. “Nice. I can look forward to hearing all the dirty talk you’ve stored up since Mesopotamia.”

“You can look forward,” I said, sniffing her hair and her neck and her mouth and the skin between her breasts and her armpit and her neck and her ear, “to hearing everything I can think of telling you. The second-best thing to having a friend who’s known you all your life is having a friend who knows only your version of your whole life.”