Chapter 2: Still trying
The stale pizza air had been permanently layered with the musk of sweat and sex. Demona lay on her side on Harry’s narrow bed, the springs digging into her hip. One of her long, curved legs was hooked over his shoulder, a position that had started as dominance and now felt like a desperate anchor.
Harry moved above her with a steady, relentless rhythm. His face, in the dim light from a Ghibli nightlight, was a study in focused perplexity. He wasn’t lost in passion. He looked like a man trying to efficiently complete a puzzling, slightly unpleasant chore.
Slap-shlick. Slap-shlick.
The sounds were obscenely wet, fat, and full. Each thrust produced a deep, squelching protest from her overfilled body, a queefy echo of the five previous climaxes he’d pulled from her—and poured into her. She could feel every thick, stagnant load inside her, a growing weight that was both repulsive and perversely satisfying.
“Just…” Demona started, her voice ragged, a ghost of its former commanding rasp. “Just hurry up and finish, you scrawny… library-rat.”
Her insult lacked heat. It was a reflex, a worn-out script. Her head was swimming, not with stolen energy, but with a foreign, sluggish saturation. She felt bloated, used, and her own body thrummed with a persistent, low-grade ache that yearned for more of the very thing causing it.
Harry adjusted his grip on her thigh, his glasses slipping down his nose. “I’m trying. It’s not really… it doesn’t work like a vending machine. You said after the third time you’d be done. You said after the fifth you’d definitely leave.”
He thrust harder, a small spike of frustrated emphasis.
“Ah! Fuck!” The curse was a genuine reaction, ripped from her. Her back arched, her nails digging into the cheap bedsheets. The internal pressure shifted, a hot, liquid displacement that made her eyes roll back. For a second, the trash talk died entirely, replaced by a choked gasp. She wasn’t draining anything. He was flooding her, and some deep, ancient part of her circuitry was starting to short out, rewiring itself around this inundation.
She managed to blink, her vision clearing to find his face hovering above hers. He was peering down, concerned, sweat dampening his messy hair.
“Was that… did that help?” he asked, never breaking his pace.
The absurdity of it all—his sincere question, the mundane worry in his tone, the world-altering physical reality between them—crashed over her. A weak, breathless laugh escaped her swollen lips. “You’re… you’re something else, you know that?”
Her gaze traced the line of his jaw, the ordinary shape of his ears, the faint patch of eczema on his neck. This wasn’t a mighty warrior or a cunning sorcerer. It was a boy who shelved books and worried about his shifts. And he had brought her, Demona of the Ashen Courts, to her side, leg in the air, filled to the brim and begging for a sixth round not because she wanted his life, but because she was starting to crave the empty-headed fullness he provided.
Another wave built within her, not as a sharp peak but as a deep, spreading tide. Her confident sneer finally, fully vanished. Her face softened into something unguarded and utterly lost. She watched him as the sensation took her, her mouth falling open in a silent ‘O’ before a low, trembling howl vibrated through her chest. Her body clamped around him, a series of frantic, milking pulses, drawing another hot, thick release from him that joined the rest with a gurgling, internal spill.
He shuddered, finally stopping, bracing himself on trembling arms above her. “Okay,” he panted. “Okay. That’s six. Are we done? Can you… go now?”
Demona didn’t answer. She was staring up at him, her amethyst eyes wide and reflecting the soft, cartoonish light. The hollow, predatory glow was gone. In its place was a dazed, overwhelming confusion that felt dangerously close to awe.
She slowly, achingly, lowered her leg from his shoulder. It felt like lead. The movement caused a warm, sticky trickle down her inner thigh. The physical evidence of her defeat.
She’d come to conquer. To consume. Instead, she’d been pumped full of a mortal’s essence until her own felt diluted, overshadowed. The arrogant script was gone. All she had left was a staggering, simple truth.
He hadn’t even broken a sweat for the right reasons. He’d just been waiting for her to leave.
“Harry,” she said, his name feeling strange and solid on her tongue.
“Yeah?” He was already looking past her, toward his buzzing phone on the nightstand. Probably a reminder about late returns.
She reached up, a movement slow with exhaustion and something else, and her fingers, which had once aimed to claw out his soul, brushed a strand of sweaty hair from his forehead. The touch was hesitant. Almost tender.
“Your… your bed is really uncomfortable,” she whispered, the complaint holding none of its intended venom.
He looked back at her, puzzled by the touch, by the sudden shift in her voice. “I know. I’ve been meaning to get a new one. But they’re expensive.”
Demona continued to stare. The plan—any plan—was ash. The hunger that remained wasn’t for his life force. It was a terrifying, new kind of hunger. For more of this. For more of him. Not to own, but to…
Then a sparkly collar appeared on her neck, and hearts in her eyes