Power Play Katie Doyce
Late-morning light poured through the patio doors of Jessica’s high-rise flat. The sun-warmed carpet felt delicious against the soles of her feet as she padded across the living room and into the kitchen, sparing only the barest glance outside, checking the skies out of unconscious habit. Twenty-three floors above the streets of Mercury Bay, Jess never worried about peeping Toms or privacy blinds, even when (like today) she was still wearing nothing but a pair of white panties and a threadbare but much-loved Sonic the Hedgehog T-shirt at eleven in the morning, pushing sleep-tousled auburn hair out of her face to peer at the boxes of breakfast cereal in the pantry. In the two years she’d had the flat, she had never caught anyone watching her patio from an adjoining building; no telltale glint of a telephoto lens or binoculars, and no wall-crawling voyeur lurking behind her deck furniture with a video camera.
Certainly, no one had ever come crashing through the safety glass, collapsing in a heap in the middle of her living-room floor.
Jessica had just turned away from the counter, already munching on a hefty spoonful of muesli, whole milk and sugar, when all that changed. A split second before the stranger came sailing through the window, there was a deep resounding clang, like a large but cheaply made church bell; looking over the wreckage later, she would be able to deduce that her visitor had actually struck the patio railing first – and hard – before arriving in her flat. Glass flew into the room, scattering across the living-room furniture and ticking off the back wall. The man, dressed mostly in black leather with a few red accents, first somersaulted, then rolled lengthwise along the floor before colliding with the heavy coffee table.
Another young woman in this situation – perhaps any other young woman – might have let out a yelp; even jumped back, prancing comically, flailing her arms and inadvertently throwing the bowl of cereal against the ceiling and stepping on several of the small cubes of glass that lay scattered across the kitchen tiles.
Jessica did not. She was not a normal young woman, and Mercury Bay was not a normal town.
Still chewing, she craned her neck to peer around the couch at the man on the floor. She swallowed noisily, set the bowl on the counter next to the sink and picked her way to the hall closet, where she retrieved an old pair of slippers and pulled them on.
Arms folded across her faded shirt, she made her way back to the living room, grabbed the shoulder of the man’s leather jacket and rolled him on to his back. She turned her head left and right, trying to view his face right-side-round without actually moving.
She wasn’t surprised to recognise him.
‘Nathan . . .’ she drew out the end of his name, shaking her head like a disapproving aunt. ‘Have you been a bad boy again?’
She looked back at the ruins of her patio door. Another chunk of webbed glass fell from the top of the frame. Without the double-paned glass door blocking it, the sounds of the street could be heard fairly clearly. Rather than the low murmur of auto traffic, Jess picked out an electric crackle and several low vibrating thumps she could feel through the floor. She moved around her prone visitor and managed to reach the (bent) patio railing and look down. Brightly clad figures circled one another on the street and in the air above, strobe-lit by too-white flashes.
Again, she wasn’t surprised to recognise them, or the blue-and-white figure – large, even from twenty-plus stories above – staring up at her.
‘Bugger,’ she muttered. She turned back to her flat at the groan from within as her visitor rolled on to his side and pushed himself to a sitting position. ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’
‘Sorry?’ He was leaning on one arm and had the heel of his other hand against his temple, his eyes closed.
‘You –’ Jessica glanced from him back to the street, where the large figure was backing across the street, still looking up in her direction and completely ignoring the chaos all around. ‘Shit.’ She turned back to him, gripping the rail behind her. ‘You have to move.’
‘What d’ya mean?’ He blinked his eyes several times, shaking his head in a way that indicated he thought it might come loose.
‘I have no idea,’ she muttered, wondering what the hell she thought she was doing.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. You have to move,’ she repeated. ‘They’re coming.’
He looked in her direction, wincing at the sunlight. ‘No. It’s all right.’ He sounded resigned.
She clenched her jaw. ‘Fuck that,’ she said, stepping in over the doorframe. ‘Run.’
‘Oh.’ He smiled, not showing any teeth, his lips a curl of self-mockery. ‘I don’t think that’s on the cards, love.’
She looked around the room, searching for inspiration. She marched over to him (as well as one can in cotton knickers and old slippers, through broken glass) and grabbed the collar of his jacket. ‘Then crawl.’
Amid general and pained protests, she pulled him into the kitchen, behind the central island and out of sight, half-dragging him and half-leading him like a dog on a leash.
Not a moment too soon. A heavy impact on the patio shook the crystal baubles in the light fixture over the coffee table. Jess heard the crunch-squeal of someone heavy stepping on the bits of glass on the cement pad.
‘Don’t be alarmed.’ The voice was radio announcer smooth and pitched to project. Jessica also happened to know that it was essentially an act. ‘I’m only here to help.’ A pause. ‘May I come in?’
Strange phrase to hear from someone who’d just broadjumped onto your 23rd-storey balcony, but understandable: a pile of breaking-and-entering litigation had been accumulating in the Mercury Bay courts concerning these kinds of situations.
‘Umm, sure,’ Jess replied. Her hands were restless. She couldn’t decide between resting them on the countertop, tucking them behind her (a bad bet, with the way her T-shirt stretched), resting them on her hips (which reminded her she was still half-naked), or folding her arms. They moved from one position to the next like nervous pets.
The doorway darkened almost entirely, eclipsed by the mass of her new visitor, who stepped through as gingerly as possible and still managed to knock more glass loose and dislodge the bent frame of the sliding door itself. The huge man, clad head to foot in a blue and white bodysuit, surveyed the rest of the room before focusing a leading-man smile in her direction.
‘Hello, miss. I’m the Blue Brahma, a member of the Vindicators and a fully sanctioned representative of both the Mercury Bay and national law enforcement. I apologise for the damage done to your flat. On a related note, I’m looking for the, ah, individual known to the public as Cinder.’ He motioned to the scattered glass. ‘The fellow who made this mess.’
Jessica stared at him. ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’
Her other guest, sitting on the kitchen floor with his back to the island, shifted and opened his mouth to speak. Catching the slight movement, Jess dropped her left hand down and pressed her fingertips to his lips, hard enough to make the message clear.
Blue Brahma paused, but his smile remained. ‘I’m sorry? I assure you that my goal here is entirely –’
‘Dwight,’ Jess interjected. ‘Open your eyes, for Chrissake.’
The man blinked, clearly taken aback by the use of his name. His gaze shifted ever so slightly, actually looking at her; the effect was not entirely unlike a television anchorman focusing past the cameras and looking straight at the viewer for the first time after ten years on the air. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t –’ He paused. ‘Jessica?’
Jess nodded, her eyes wide and the movement slow, as though she were communicating across language barriers. ‘Yes, Dwight. Jessica.’
Again, her first visitor shifted, this time turning his head as though trying to clear the obstruction to speech. Jessica slid her fingers around to grip his jaw, and, when his movement subsided, relaxed.
The big man in her living room frowned. ‘What are you doing here?’
Jess tilted her head. ‘I live here, Dwight.’ She made a show of looking around. ‘This is my flat.’
This didn’t seem to clear anything up for the Brahma. ‘You’re supposed to be on holiday.’
‘I am.’
‘But . . . you’re here.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded again, slowly. ‘This is my flat.’
‘But you’re supposed to be on holiday,’ he said, his expression shifting from charming to dogged. ‘You’re supposed to go away when you go on holiday.’
‘I did go away, Dwight.’ Jess tried to keep her tone patient, but Blue wasn’t her favourite conversational partner at the best of times, and her silent guest was moving again. Though he didn’t seem to be trying to ruin the whole thing by talking; he just kept turning his head from side to side. His lips were brushing across the palm of her hand. It was distracting.
‘But you’re here,’ Blue Brahma repeated.
Jess sighed, clearly exasperated (though her breath caught a bit at the end; Cinder – Nathan – had grazed his teeth over the pad of her index finger). ‘I went away from work, Dwight. Just work. That’s why I’m not down there with the rest of you, wreaking random property damage.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, already tired of the conversation. (Not trying to concentrate on what Nathan was doing with her fingers. No.) ‘Clearly, I should have gone further away.’
Brahma’s smile came back at that, and he laughed his television interview laugh. ‘I’d have to agree.’ He switched to a concerned expression and started to walk over to her. ‘Are you all ri–’
She started and took a half step further behind the island, away from him. ‘What are you doing?’
Blue Brahma paused again, brought up short in mid-hero performance for the second time in two minutes. ‘I was making sure you were all right.’
‘I’m not exactly dressed for company, Dwight.’ She looked at him, looked down at the midriff-high countertop meaningfully, then back.
She had to look up again – had to – her silent guest was teasing the end of each fingertip and watching her face. Looking down, she’d met his eyes and simultaneously become aware of how much closer she’d moved her panty-clad hips towards him. The realisation made her face hot and her knees a bit weak; robbed of blood supply that was rushing elsewhere.
‘Oh.’ Brahma’s eyes dropped to the counter again, then widened. ‘Oh! I . . . Oh!’
‘Yes.’ Jess agreed, biting hard on the end of the word for several different reasons; one visitor was annoying, and the other was sliding his fingertips up the inside of her left leg, over ankle, then calf, and higher. ‘So if you could please . . . ?’
‘Absolutely.’ The Blue Brahma nodded, stood for several seconds, seemed to remember himself and stepped back on to the balcony. ‘Very sorry, Timbre.’ He called from out of sight. ‘Jessica, I mean. Sorry.’
‘It’s all right.’ Jess bit her lower lip, dropped her head forwards until her hair obscured her face.
Nathan’s fingers traced the curve on the inside of her knee. She looked down at him, moved her fingers along his lips, bracing herself with her other hand on the counter. What the hell, she thought, I’m on holiday. With that, she took another step and placed her feet on either side of him, bringing her sex within inches of his face. She met his gaze, then closed her eyes. ‘It’s all right.’
His hand reached higher, while his lips opened under her touch and he sucked gently on her fingertips. Jess pressed her lips together to keep a moan from escaping. His touch skimmed her leg from inner thigh to the sole of her foot, and back again, each time travelling higher, lighter, closer. He’d just brushed against the damp cotton between her legs with his knuckle when another piece of glass crashed to the floor, and Jess jumped, looking over at the door.
‘Sorry, very sorry.’
Yes, Dwight?’ Jess braced herself against the counter’s edge and flipped her hair back, putting a hardly feigned look of annoyance on her face. ‘What is it?’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother . . . it’s just . . . well . . .’ He slipped back into official superhero mode. ‘I was looking for Cinder. He was part of that fight, below, and obviously he was here.’ He indicated the scattered glass. ‘May I search for him?’
‘Hell, no, Dwight. Do you ask Batman if you can poke around the Batcave?’
Dwight looked confused. ‘Batman’s not real.’
Jess sighed, her breath catching for a moment, as the object of the Brahma’s quest slid his finger under the elastic of her panties. ‘I know! I’m saying, um . . . Look, he’s not here, OK? He took off right after crashing through my door. Didn’t stop to say anything.’
‘Very well, then.’ Brahma ducked his head back outside, then back in again. ‘Keep an eye out for him though, would you? You know his reputation as well as any of us. He’s not exactly a respectable citizen.’
Big Blue bounded off the balcony again, but Nathan’s attentions didn’t resume. Jess let her gaze drop to his.
‘I should go,’ he murmured, brushing her fingers with his lips.
‘You can’t. They’ll find you.’ She pulled her hand away from his mouth to run her fingers through his black hair, tugging on it as she forced his gaze to meet hers.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ He rubbed his forehead against the soft curve of her belly above her knickers, his nose pressing into her. His teeth caught at the cotton and pulled, gently. ‘You heard him, I’m not respectable.’
‘I don’t –’ Her fingers clenched in his hair as his fingertips played along her slick wet slit. ‘Please, stay.’
Cinder complied, and slipped a hot finger into Jess’s core. She moaned as he flicked her clit, warmth building like an inferno. The heat radiated out from where he touched her, where his fingers slipped inside her and teased, flicking, playing, toying. Jess pressed her palm against the granite countertop, and a delicate glass flower vase shattered as she came in a molten explosion. She sagged against his hands, but managed to remain standing.
When the shuddering aftershocks of her orgasm faded, Cinder slipped his hands back to (slightly) less enticing locations. ‘I really should go.’
‘Maybe I won’t let you.’ She nudged at him with a roll of her hips. ‘Maybe I’m going to have to make a citizen’s arrest.’
She pulled at his hair again, and he looked up, smiling. ‘You think you can keep me here?’
It was Jess’s turn to smile. Hadn’t he heard anything? Then again, he had been somewhat distracted while she and Dwight spoke. Maybe he didn’t catch that Brahma had called her Timbre, or that she’d just shattered a perfectly good vase. Then again, maybe it didn’t matter if he had.
She pulled at the front of his jacket, drawing him away from the cabinet and pushing him down to the floor. She dropped to her knees on either side of him and leant forwards, one hand pressing against the tile floor while the other gripped the leather. ‘I know I can,’ she whispered.
He heard a low-level hum. The sound built, peaked and the glass on the floor rattled away across the kitchen, clearing a space around them.
He glanced to either side, a small smile on his lips. ‘That’s pretty impressive’
She arched an eyebrow. ‘Wanna see what else I can do?’
Ask anyone within the news agencies that specialised in ‘paranormal personalities’, and they would tell you that the sanctioned Mercury Bay hero known as Timbre was a ‘sonic’, that is to say, someone who did something with sound. What that ‘something’ was varied, depending on the paranormal in question, but, in almost every case that Jess had encountered, it involved screaming at the top of one’s lungs like a distraught jilted banshee with PMS.
Jessica didn’t do that. The fact of the matter was that Jessica’s powers weren’t actually sound based at all. Yes, they produced sound, but so did Dwight the Blue Brahma, and Jess could attest that his ability to do so didn’t in any way make him special.
What Jessica did was produce vibrations in anything she could physically touch, as well as control the direction and intensity of those vibrations, anything from a mild hum to foundation-shaking tremors. She’d lost count of the number of times that some ‘criminal mastermind’ had tried to ‘take her out of the equation’ by clamping some wondrous gizmo (or sometimes just their hand) over her mouth, only to start jerking around like a taser victim as soon as they touched her.
She didn’t mind that almost no one knew how her powers worked – it’s why she’d called herself Timbre in the first place instead of something like ‘Tremor’ or ‘Seismiss’ or, God forbid, ‘Vibro Lass’.
She didn’t bother unfastening Cinder’s jacket or pants yet; she let her eyes unfocus and simply feel where he was beneath the layer of leather. The first pulse spread across his chest like gooseflesh, intensifying as it reached each nipple. He didn’t gasp, but she could feel the muscles in his thighs clench and allowed herself a small distant smile.
‘I could make this last a while,’ she said. Her voice sounded dreamy in her own ears. ‘But you were so good and so fast for me, I’ll be nice.’
She slid further down his legs, letting her hands glide over his chest and abdomen, spreading the slow low vibration as she went. At his waist, she tugged the button of his pants loose with one hand, pressing the palm of the other against the rigid length of him, wrapped in the cool black leather. Here, though, she didn’t enhance the contact with her power. Not yet. He didn’t seem to mind. His legs flexed again, lifting his pelvis against her hand. Jess used the motion to help pull the zipper down, then gripped both sides of his pants and pulled them down as far as she easily could, bunching them around his knees. It wasn’t pretty or elegant or romantic, but that wasn’t what this was about. The rest could wait for later.
The stretchy-tight cotton fabric of his briefs strained to contain his sex. Jess caught the top edge of the elastic band with her fingers and pulled it down to reveal the crown, dragging the fabric along the shaft as she stripped him to the knees. Before she’d even got the cloth entirely out of the way, she was bending forwards, tracing the thick bulge along the underside of his cock with the tip of her tongue.
Here, she used her power. Any kind of contact worked, after all – it didn’t have to be her hands. The inaudible hum she sent into the shaft elicited a very audible groan from him. She was inclined to drag that out as long as possible, but she stopped herself and intensified the vibration instead. His back arched and he pressed the shaft of his cock blindly against her mouth. She slid her lips and tongue along the shaft again, first down to the thick fuzzy base, nuzzling, inhaling the musky scent, then up to the head, already slick and glistening with his own fluids. The tip of her tongue circled once, twice, and on the third rotation, she slid him into her mouth and amplified the vibrations again.
There was something to be said for immediate gratification.
Her hands free, she slid them up his thighs, sending shivers into him from three different directions. He writhed, tried to talk, but only managed half-words; at a guess, Jess thought he was trying to get out ‘Don’t’, ‘God’, ‘Fuck’, and ‘More’, in roughly that order. She focused on ‘more’. Moving slightly to the side, she cupped his balls in her left hand and gripped the base of his shaft in her right, sliding the taut skin over the shaft in time with the smaller motions of her mouth – more than enough to please any partner, even without the waves of additional sensation that radiated out from those points of contact and into the rest of his body. She could tell from his ragged breathing that he was already close to coming – all it would take from her was a small push to put him over the edge.
She decided to throw him over instead. Hard.
She splayed the fingers of her left hand, pressing the palm against the very base of his cock and starting a low thrumming pattern that pushed into the core of him. He let out a strained moan that seemed to come straight from his chest. With one finger, she teased down even further, circling his anus in softly vibrating torment. His body arched to the point where it seemed only his shoulders and heels were actually touching the floor.
Something smelt like it was burning, but she ignored it. Her left hand sent tremulous probes into his core, her right continued the steady hard rhythm along his shaft, and her lips formed a tight ring of sensations just below the head as she swirled the sensitive tip over and over with her tongue. Then she intensified every point of contact until he was straining upwards beyond the capacity for breath.
There was no way she could take more of him into her mouth than she already was, but Jess knew that that really wasn’t important – it was making him feel everything she was doing, right through his climax.
He left scorched handprints on the kitchen floor.
‘What the–?’ Nathan’s bellow would have shaken knick-nacks from her bookshelves if she hadn’t long since given up on fragile tchotchkes.
Jess popped her head around her bedroom doorframe. ‘You’re awake.’
He was a bit more than awake; ‘outraged’ seemed a good word for it. Surprised, maybe, at the very least.
‘I’m tied up.’ His voice wasn’t much past a growl. ‘And I’m naked. I’m fairly certain these are both new developments.’
‘Not entirely.’ Jess moved into the room and leant on the corner post at the bottom of the bed, making sure her eyes stayed on his. ‘Anyway, I thought we should have a chat.’
He gestured – tried to gesture, at any rate, with one hand. The movement was hampered by the heavy leather straps securing each of his arms to a bedpost, and the hand (like its mate) was covered in what looked like an oven mitt made out of a shiny sort of neoprene. ‘This how you chat with everyone you have round?’
Jess found she was actually blushing, struck by the simple fact of what she’d done – taken a man (one who’d arrived in her flat, fleeing authorities, then serviced her and been serviced in turn), who was little more than a stranger in the best light and a criminal adversary at the other end of the spectrum, and finally strapped him, stark naked (except for the hand coverings), to her bed. It wasn’t as though she could claim innocent intent. She tilted her head, suppressing a smile and trying to let her hair conceal her face. ‘No. This is a first.’
He was watching her, his expression balanced between suspicion and something she couldn’t identify. ‘I honestly can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.’ He glanced at his left hand. ‘Flame-suppressing synthetics?’
She nodded. ‘We were issued them when you broke out last April.’ She didn’t see the point of denying her connection to the Vindicators – he’d obviously heard Brahma use her ‘public’ name. It didn’t matter much in any case; most professional heroes only used them to avoid paparazzi.
His gaze moved to the heavy leather straps holding his arms. ‘These look a little more multipurpose.’
Again, her face flushed. ‘They’re from when Captain Conundrum escaped from Utumno Prison last year.’
‘Ahh.’ His brow arched. ‘Now that you explain, I can see they’re completely innocent.’ He let his gaze travel down the length of his body, dragging hers along with it. ‘Though I suppose I should take heart in the fact that this is not otherwise anything like the usual method of detainment for the Mercury Bay Vindicators, or the police.’
She returned his look. ‘You should know.’
‘I do indeed.’ He watched her face for several seconds. ‘So –’ he crossed his legs, but just at the ankles, and leant his head back, looking for all the world like someone sunning themselves on a beach without a care in the world ‘– you wanted a chat?’
The conversation hadn’t started out the way that Jess had hoped, but this was the opening she thought she could use to turn things round again. ‘Actually, I thought I’d do you the favour of explaining what was going to happen to you, rather than . . .’ She paused, letting the corner of her mouth curl up. ‘Rather than letting you find out the hard way.’
He tipped his head a bit to the side. ‘That sounds a bit sinister; have you suddenly decided to switch sides? Am I hearing your first monologue? If so, I’d have to say –’
‘Shut up,’ she snapped, ‘unless you want me to black you out again, pull your clothes back on and give the police an anonymous tip.’
He started to reply, then changed his mind and waited.
Jess nodded. ‘That’s better. You see, I could turn you in, but the thing is, I’m on holiday.’ She moved around the post of the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. ‘I didn’t really have any plans, but I knew without a doubt that I wanted to get away from work. Turning you in would be work, and that rather misses the point.’
‘You’ll forgive me for saying so,’ he replied, ‘but in this particular case you’ve taken procrastination to an entirely new level.’
‘Well –’ she laid a hand on his leg, toying with the fine hairs ‘– we get on a bit, also.’
He shifted on the bed, just enough to move the leather straps around the bedposts. ‘Aside from the obvious contradictions, I’d have to agree.’
‘And . . .’ She watched her hand as it moved – almost entirely on its own – up to his thigh. ‘It’s like I own you.’
‘Excuse me?’ Though his words could have been spoken in outrage, his voice was soft.
She shrugged. ‘Well, I can turn you in.’ Her fingernails grazed his hip. ‘Or you and I can play a little game for the rest of my holiday. I own you.’
He was looking at her, but she didn’t meet his gaze. Cinder wasn’t a ‘serious’ criminal – no assault charges or any kind of violent crimes, actually, despite the nature of his powers – but he was a very prolific thief, a notorious safe-cracker in dozens of bank heists and sole escapee of three hitherto ‘impenetrable’ prisons and many lesser institutions, in most cases without any apparent use of his powers. She had no doubt whatsoever that, if he had actually wanted to, he could have been dressed and out of her apartment before she’d even realised he was awake, and even less doubt that he could escape whatever holding cell the police might put him in. He didn’t have to be here, and she wasn’t really blackmailing him.
In short, they were already playing a game.
The thought made her breathing tight. She shifted on the edge of the bed and felt a telltale slickness between her legs. Her hand grazed over his cock, fingers running up and down the shaft in an unconscious rhythm.
‘All right.’ She was so wrapped up in the sensation that his voice almost made her jump. She looked up at him, finally. His eyes were half-closed, but she could see he knew what was going on as well. ‘What do you want me to do?’
A dozen ideas popped into her head – plans and half-formed fantasies that she’d entertained while cleaning up the mess in her kitchen and living room, waiting for him to wake up – but the way she felt right now, she wasn’t in the mood to prolong the anticipation. ‘This time,’ she said, her voice low, ‘nothing fancy.’
She stood and pulled off her T-shirt, tossed it to the floor and shook her hair back behind her head as she hooked her thumbs into her knickers and smiled, then slipped them down over her smooth hips.
She crawled up the bed, lowering her face and running her tongue up the underside of his cock, circling it around the head. She heard him groan, as he tried to reach for her, the move blocked by the leather straps, and smiled to herself. She took the head in her mouth, sucking hard, working on just the end with her lips and tongue until his breathing started to get ragged, then she sat up and straddled his abdomen, letting his cock lie against the crack of her ass and lowering her breasts to his mouth. He sucked roughly, like a starving prisoner finally given his daily water ration, and she heard her own moans and gasps. She moved back and forth, alternating breasts, then edged even further up his body, dragging her sex along his bare chest. She could feel her wetness against his smooth skin as she moved her pussy up to his mouth, grabbed the headboard and began riding his tongue. Unable to use his fingers as he had before, he thrashed her clit and lips, sucking at her, building a heat she didn’t think possible. Her hips rocked back and forth over his face, and he stabbed his tongue into her, fucking her with it, then sucked on her clit, building pressure as she hunched against him, hips jerking, barely breathing until she came, hard, gasping air like a drowning swimmer that finds the surface, before finally dropping back on to the bed.
‘Enough?’ His breathing, Jess was gratified to note, wasn’t much more even than hers.
‘Just –’ she flailed her hand around, trying to get her arm under her ‘– just fine.’
When her limbs were able to obey her again, she crawled up the length of him, bracing one hand against his shoulder and gripping his cock with the other. She slipped it into her and slid down on to it in a continuous motion that made him gasp. She moved over him with a slow steady rhythm for several minutes, watching his face, leaning down to nip at his lips and neck and whisper perversions in his ear. He arched his body upwards, groaning, pushing his hips up to meet her, trying to push into her as far as he could as she rocked, dragging her clit across the base of him with each downward thrust, as the pressure and heat built in both of them. She reached up to brace herself against the headboard, pushing down against him with each thrust, riding him, sweat gleaming, then dripping on to his chest as she came again, the tight shuddering grip of her slick pussy around his cock pushing him over the edge only a few seconds later. She rode him through it, rocking her hips, squeezing him with her core. Sweating. Smiling.
She hadn’t even used her powers. Not yet.
Jess returned to the bedroom, towelling her hair and smiling at Nathan, still sprawled underneath the duvet. It had been easily the best holiday break in history, in her opinion. The week had been a blur punctuated with food delivery and interrupted only once when the repairmen had come to fix the patio door. Otherwise, she’d turned down the volume on the answerphone and left the television off.
Now, she disappeared into the depths of her closet and pulled a pair of red slingbacks away from her shoe rack. The back wall swung open to reveal the rest of her closet, containing her uniform, accessories and the various ‘special situation’ tools of the trade that she’d been re-employing in various ways over the course of the last week. She sighed and pulled ‘the suit’ off its hanger.
‘Back to work?’ Nathan peered at her, muzzy and adorable, from the bed.
‘Duty calls.’ She didn’t look at him.
‘I suppose this means our little game is over, then.’ He watched her dress. She didn’t reply. ‘Jess?’
‘I was thinking,’ she said, still not looking at him. ‘I could say something on your behalf, maybe get them to give you a second chance.’
‘You really don’t have to do that,’ he said, after a pause. ‘It’s sweet, and I adore you for it, but it’s really not necessary.’
‘I want to,’ she interjected. ‘I’ll get the Major and Jasmine and Blue Brahma into a proper sit-down meeting and –’
‘Why’s he call himself that, anyway?’ Nathan interrupted. ‘Blue Brahma. He’s not even Indian.’
He was changing the subject. Letting her win, really, when he didn’t have to. She was just starting to understand him, and she didn’t want that to stop because of her stupid job. She walked towards the bed and sat down on the edge, her hands in her lap, his leg just touching her back. ‘You know, I asked him that once. Y’know what he told me?’
‘What?’
‘He said that, if he actually were Indian, he could never have called himself the Blue Brahma, because then it would have been disrespectful.’
Nathan searched her face, clearly hoping she was joking. ‘I find myself embarrassed for him, and I don’t even like him.’
‘Well, he did knock you through my patio door, so that’s understandable.’ She traced his jaw with a finger. ‘I’ll have to remember to thank him for that, someday.’
His eyes searched hers. ‘Don’t talk to them. Don’t bother.’
‘I want to.’
‘Jess –’
She covered his lips with her fingers, just as she had in the kitchen only a week earlier. ‘Don’t make me tie you up again.’
That made them both grin, and a few minutes later she had to flee the room before things went so far that she missed her first day back on the job.
Jess slid, literally, through the front doors of the Vindicator headquarters. It wasn’t the most glamorous way to get around – she intensely envied the metas who were able to fly – but, by using her powers, she could keep herself in perpetual motion along almost any surface using vibrations to control direction and speed. It wasn’t flashy or very fast, but there were upsides, not the least of which was popularity with the citizens of Mercury Bay, who saw her as a more approachable hero. There was even a group of ‘grrrls’, somewhere between a fan club and a well-meaning gang, who tried emulating her moves as much as possible using skateboards.
‘Timbre!’ Anna Davida waved as she crossed the lobby. ‘You’re back! You look great!’
Jess made a face. ‘Do I? That’s funny. I didn’t really go anywhere.’
Anna’s eyebrows rose. ‘You didn’t?’
‘Timbre used her holiday to stay home.’ Blue Brahma stood just inside the doors to the main meeting hall. He sounded bemused and, somehow, disapproving.
‘Hi, Blue,’ Jess said, careful to use call signs inside the headquarters. It wasn’t a habit that had come easily. ‘Did I miss anything exciting, after you broke my patio door?’
Brahma frowned. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with that, Timbre, other than my brief stop to look for Cinder.’ Brahma’s tone went sour at the mention of Nathan’s public identity.
‘Sure.’ Jess smirked. ‘Did you ever find him?’
Brahma sighed. ‘Finally, yes. Just this morning.’
She stopped dead, only a few dozen feet into the meeting hall. Most of the Vindicators were present and milling about in clusters of various sizes, chatting before the actual meeting started up, but Jess could barely hear them over the roaring in her ears. ‘You caught him?’
‘Caught?’ Brahma shook his head. ‘Those days are over, I’m afraid.’ He nodded to Night Sparrow as the hero walked by. ‘No, he just showed up this morning, like a badly trained dog that finally remembered where the food was.’
‘Blue, that’s hardly fair.’ Jasmine appeared next to Brahma. ‘Hello, Timbre.’
‘Hi, Jas.’ Jess followed, stunned, as Jasmine turned and started walking towards one of the larger groups near the Major’s podium. ‘What do you mean, he just showed up? He surrendered?’
Jasmine smiled. ‘Of course n– Oh!’ She shook her head. ‘Of course, you were on vacation during his court hearing.’
Whose court hearing?’
‘That would be mine.’
She knew the voice – knew it better than anyone else in the room, she was quite sure – and still she couldn’t believe it. Cinder (in his full outfit, which Jess distinctly remembered stowing in her secret closet) slipped out of the knot of people near the podium and pulled himself to mock attention. ‘Hi. Don’t attack me. I’m one of the good guys.’
Jess gaped. ‘How? Who?’
‘Court order,’ Brahma explained. ‘The judge said, if I remember correctly, that any prison term would be shortened inexcusably by either probation or Cinder’s well-documented abilities, so he assigned community service instead.’ He looked down at Cinder with undisguised distaste. ‘Ten thousand hours of it, to be served as a provisional member of the Vindicators.’
‘That’s five years, give or take, if I don’t pull any overtime.’ Nathan grinned and swung a light punch at Brahma’s shoulder. ‘Big Blue here is my parole officer.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Right.’
‘But . . .’ Jess’s voice trailed off in silence.
‘All right, everyone, let’s get this started, moving and finished.’ The Major had stepped to the podium, calling the Vindicators to order as he always did. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
Conversations dwindled and died out as the heroes found their seats. Jess dropped into hers, stunned and numb. She jumped when Nathan leant forwards from the row behind her and whispered in her ear. ‘You OK?’
‘I . . .’ She shifted in the chair. ‘I’m just not sure what to do.’
‘No?’
She shook her head, eyes staring at nothing at all. ‘No.’
‘Hmm . . .’ Nathan murmured. ‘That’s interesting. You see –’ he leant in another inch closer. She could smell his hair. It smelt like her shampoo ‘– I was thinking that tonight, we could play a new game.’