Black Christmas (Plus Bonus Story "Black Supper") (7 page)

Black said this wasn’t normal for seers, either.

He hadn’t really explained what he meant by that yet, not in a way that made sense to me. I definitely got the sense he was implying more than simply saying he had intense feelings for me. There was a personal element to this too, of course.

But there was something else there, as well.

Something that really did feel borderline physiological.

Well, maybe
physiological
wasn’t the right word, but it definitely felt organic.

Or maybe organic wasn’t the right word either––the more scientific areas of my mind weren’t functioning well enough to be sure about anything.

After seven days of more or less zero interaction with the outside world, or with anyone but Black himself, I wasn’t ready to classify this thing. I wasn’t ready to even pretend it mattered to me that much truthfully. I was aware enough to know it probably
should
matter to me, but at that point in time, I didn’t really care. The
how
of it all struck me as irrelevant.

Especially since I was pretty sure there was nothing I could do to change it, even if I wanted to. And I didn’t want to. Not at all.

All I know is, we definitely weren’t fit for public consumption that night he decided he wanted to go out to dinner.

He got a craving for pasta.

He wanted us to go to this particular place in North Beach, the Italian part of San Francisco, where they made a seafood pasta thing he really wanted. He wanted to show me the restaurant, too... introduce me to the chef, who was one of his old military buddies. I’d noticed as we talked over those seven days that he wanted me to meet just about every friend of his he’d ever had. He mentioned a P.I. buddy of his who lived in New York. An oceanographer friend on the big island of Hawaii. Another friend, he’d met doing government work in Iraq. Yet another did some kind of archeological work and lived in New Mexico.

We were naked when he brought up the pasta thing. His stomach had just growled.

It seemed like a good idea.

Hell, it seemed like a
brilliant
idea... but looking back on it, it was probably brilliant in that way that people high on psilocybin mushrooms think it would be brilliant to go to the circus or drive to Las Vegas at two in the morning.

We were cold sober, so we couldn’t blame drugs, or even alcohol.

We’d barely remembered to eat for those past seven days, much less drink anything besides water. We only thought of food when one of us got hungry enough to complain about it, and then Black called someone to bring food to his door.

But he really wanted to go out this time.

Getting dressed to leave his penthouse apartment was humorous enough. We each asked the other to check our appearance a dozen times at least, even though we stood right next to one another in the bathroom while he shaved and washed his face and I made a somewhat ridiculous attempt to put on make-up and brush my hair.

Clothes were challenging. We hadn’t been wearing those much either.

Black answered the door stark naked at least once.

Not for shock effect or even to yank my chain but because it didn’t occur to him he was naked until he’d already opened the door. His poor administrative assistant, a fifties-ish woman named Lizbeth who’d worked for him for years, shrieked as he opened the door. Then she turned her face away, her free hand clamped over her eyes while she handed a bag of food to him as it if were a dirty diaper.

I thought it was funny as hell.

He was concerned at first, mostly that she’d seen him naked and might have noticed something strange about him there... then he seemed to blow it off.

I suspected he let it go because he trusted Lizbeth.

The car came for us promptly at seven o’clock.

We were more or less ready an hour before that, even though we took over an hour to pull ourselves together. Of course, we didn’t hear the phone when the driver called up. By then we were lying on the couch half-naked again and kissing. Also, I don’t think either of us had our phones. I had no idea where our phones were, to be honest. They’d probably run out of charge days earlier, in either case.

Eventually the driver came upstairs and knocked on his door.

By then, Black was hungry again. So was I.

After another five or ten minutes of us double- and triple-checking one another’s appearance all over again, we eventually made it downstairs, the driver shooting us wary looks pretty much the entire time we descended in the elevator. I knew we were acting pretty weird, but I honestly couldn’t tell if we should be concerned about that fact or not.

When we finally reached the curb in front of Black’s building, I found myself scanning the street, suddenly conscious of us being outdoors and visible. I saw a dark-windowed van parked across from Black’s building. I barely paused to stare at it before Black ushered me towards the limousine at the curb and through the open door the driver held for us... but I knew the van was probably the police, keeping an eye on Black’s building.

Truthfully, it was probably Nick.

Nick might even be in that van. He might be watching us right now.

Frowning a bit, I shoved the thought from my mind before Black felt it. Black already hit Nick once, primarily for that drunken kiss between me and Nick while Black had been out of town. Black had been more or less coherent when he did that, too.

I was afraid to know what he’d do now, given the state both of us were in.

A repeat of their testosterone-on-overdrive thing definitely wasn’t advisable. The last thing either of us needed was Black getting arrested for assaulting a homicide detective, whether that homicide detective was conducting quasi-illegal surveillance on us or not.

I knew Nick was worried about me.

But I couldn’t think about that right then either.

Once I was curled up on the leather seat in the back of the limousine, I forgot about Nick.

Black had his hand up my dress before I’d managed to rearrange it from sitting down, and then we were kissing again. In seconds I was lost in that pulling, heated space we fell into pretty much anytime we were touching one another for more than a few minutes.

When I came out of it next, the car had already pulled up to a curb.

Before I could really focus my eyes, I saw Black lunge for the handle of the door even as it started to open right by my head, which now rested on the flat part of the seat. He barked out a command, not in English, and I burst out in an involuntary laugh, right before I looked back and saw the driver’s eyes widen through the crack of the partly open door.

I was still laughing when Black realized his mistake and switched to English.

“Give us a minute. A minute. We’ll let ourselves out...” His voice sounded pained.

Before the driver could answer, Black had already slammed the door closed.

He looked down at me, his gold irises looking unreal and flame-like again.

“You ready for this, doc?” he said.

I laughed, tugging his black hair. “You’re asking me?”

He smiled, even as another jolt of that heat and pain went through me, that time definitely coming from him. “Yes.” His eyes flickered between mine. “I should warn you, Miri. I’ll probably try to fuck you in there. Unless they serve us
really
quickly...”

I laughed again. “Do you want to spend the night in jail?”

“Not particularly.”

I thought about that for a minute too. “We could get the food to go?” I said.

I admit, it was a strangely disappointing thought. Maybe just from all the build-up about going out, leaving our cave, if only for a short time.

I saw Black consider my suggestion.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, once. Those odd mannerisms had gotten more prominent, I’d noticed. Even the way he shook his head looked weirdly not-human. His accent grew more noticeable too. “No...” he repeated. “We’ll eat here. It’ll be a test...”

“What kind of test?” I said.

He glanced down at me. “I don’t know. Just a test-test.”

“A non-specific test regarding our ability to comport ourselves in public?”

He smiled. “I thought it might motivate us.”

When I tugged him down to me, still gripping his hair, we kissed again.

I pulled out of it when I felt that more drugged sensation washing over the two of us again.

“Okay.” I shoved at his chest, using him as leverage to sit up when he obeyed and slid backwards on the leather seat. I managed to get myself more or less upright again, and started smoothing my hair. “Okay. Let’s do this. We can totally do this... I know we can. We’re on this. Completely and totally on it...”

“Like a sports deodorant commercial?” Black said, giving me that killer grin of his.

“Exactly like that,” I said, copying one of his strange nods.

When I glanced at him next, he was looking at me, that nearly-physical heat of his coming off him in plumes. I told myself it was a seer thing, that he’d told me a dozen times himself that the heat-sex-pain-tugging-longing thing was something that all seers did, especially when they really wanted someone, but it still struck me as distinctly
his
in some way.

He was still breathing hard from what we’d been doing, his white collared shirt halfway open under the jacket and showing his densely muscled shoulders and chest. His gold eyes glowed faintly in the dim light in the back of the car. That coupled with his high cheekbones and long jaw brought a pain to my chest that felt physical, too.

Truthfully, I’d never seen any man look so beautiful. He didn’t look real to me at all.

I definitely couldn’t believe he was mine.

That heat coming off him turned into a furnace. He caught hold of my hand, yanking me towards him, putting my hand deliberately on his cock.

He was hard again, straining his pants.

His eyes were glassed when they met mine.

“I’m definitely going to try and fuck you in there,” he murmured, clasping my hand over him tighter. He leaned closer, pulling on me with his other hand, kissing my neck.

You need to watch your thoughts, doc,
he sent softly with his mind, still kissing my throat.
Remember I can hear them. You start thinking stuff like that in there, and for real, joking aside, I might act on it. Probably right in the middle of their goddamned dining room floor... and then we’d both be in trouble, and not just with your buddy, Nick...

I laughed, pushing at his chest.

I’m serious, Miri...

Shaking my head, I laughed again.

Raising his head, he kissed me lingeringly on the mouth right before he grinned at me, already refastening the buttons on his shirt with stumbling fingers. I looked down at myself when I realized what he was doing.

After a few seconds of squinting on my clothes, I tugged the dress back down, arranging it around my thighs. I wondered briefly what had happened to my underwear before deciding that it didn’t matter.

I had on shoes. I was more or less covered by the dress. I still wore a bra.

I still had both earrings.

The make-up thing was probably a lost cause.

“You look hot as fuck,” he said, sending me another dense pulse of heat. When I glanced up, he flashed me one of those killer smiles. “Just-fucked hot. Needs-to-be-fucked-again hot. Every guy in there is going to want to bend you over a table.” I flushed and that heat on him intensified again. “Hell, if they were seer, they’d probably try to fight me for you, doc...”

I let out a skeptical grunt. I was still preoccupied with arranging my dress around my body, since it looked odd to me in some way.

Minutes later, after we’d each made sure the other was more or less put back together in a socially-acceptable way, he began sliding across the seat towards the car door.

“You ready, Miri?” he asked me, his hand on the latch as he glanced back.

When I saw the humor sparking in his flecked gold eyes, I laughed.

I couldn’t help it.