“That’s better. Take care of her. Wake her up if you have to, but take care of her. Do it right and maybe I’ll take care of you. Maybe. Behave yourself.” Cain took his hand off Kati’s at last, but she kept rubbing. He played with the tips of her hair in a distracted way, watching his girlfriend walk to the couch. Blondie bent over and put her hand up Miss Purple’s shirt. That was a nice wake-up for you. Cain said, “I know you’re not here alone. Where are your friends, Kati?”
“I dunno. They’re around. And you should know I’m not planning to behave myself at all.” She grinned when he looked down at her. “I hope you’re not too disappointed.”
“You should,” he replied seriously. “I don’t think you’d like me when I’m disappointed. Show me where your friends are.”
Kati slipped her hand beneath the tight waist of his pants and got her fingers around real, rigid flesh. “Wouldn’t you rather be alone?”
He drew back, blinking fast and frowning slow. “Alone?” he echoed, peering at her lips.
“With me.”
“Ah.” His smile reasserted itself. “That depends on a few things.” He took her wrist again, this time putting her at arm’s length. “First, show me where your friends are. Then we’ll talk.”
Okay, this was definitely not Bake. Fantasy fuck-buddies never gave a rip where other people were. They came, they fucked, they came again, and then they winked out. So Cain was real, which meant that fantastic cock of his was real, too, and if he needed a guided tour before he’d pull it, so be it. Kati took his arm and led him over the ridge and down the path to the water.
The sun was just low enough in the sky to turn the diminished river into a ribbon of blinding white running down the middle of a hellish landscape of cracked earth and skeletal logs. Tabby and some of Ray’s cousins were still splashing around and shrieking at each other. Just about everyone else was coupled up on the small sandy edge that was the river’s real bank. Even Danny had his tongue down someone’s throat. Sarah Ann was completely naked and had two more of the cousins feeling her up with that sleepy fascination that said Green Dragon to Kati. Riffer, who was, as far as Kati knew, straight as a ruler, was receiving a blowjob from Tabby’s boyfriend with an expression of pleasant surprise. Good party, in other words. It was almost enough to make Kati want to wander over and join them.
“Is this everyone?” Cain asked. His eyes were skipping over the scene, mentally detangling and counting bodies, completely unmoved by the content.
“I dunno.” Kati looked around, restless and horny, and moved a step or two closer to the action. “Not quite, I guess. I saw Corky and Owen go off in the woods somewhere. I think everyone else is here. I wasn’t taking coats, you know.” She gave Riffer’s slick rod a longing look and inched a little further away from Cain.
“Show me what direction.”
“What?” She glanced back at him, her eyes fluttering. “What direction…what?”
Cain studied her face, her eyes in particular, and then gave his head a short, hard shake. “You saw…Corky and Owen leave,” he said, very slowly and distinctly. “Show me what direction they left in.”
“Why?”
His eyes narrowed, and for a second there, Kati thought she was about to experience the very first seriously bad Bake trip in the whole universe. Then, although it seemed to take some hard effort on his part, Cain smiled at her. “Because I told you to,” he said. He sighed, caught her wrist, and guided her hand back to the front of his pants.
Clarity sparked. Kati looked at the bulge beneath her palm, felt it, squeezed it, and reached up to pinch at one of her nipples. “Come on,” she said, a trifle breathlessly. “Why don’t you show me what you’ve got, tiger? Stop playing around.”
“Show me what direction Corky and Owen left in,” he said. He put both his hands on her shoulders, turned her bodily around, and gave her a little push back in the direction of the clearing.
She went ahead of him, rubbing at herself as she walked. The Bake was good and fucking with her now. She kept seeing things at the corners of her eyes—birdmen in the air and frogmen hiding in the bushes, all of them sporting gigantic erections and beckoning—and the only parts of her body she could feel were the ones burning with lust. But somehow, she managed to focus on the narrow path that led, if one were inclined to follow it all the way, out to the foot of Ranger’s Mountain. She brought Cain down it until she stumbled on Owen and Corky’s sweaty grope-fest. They were so wasted, they didn’t even look up. Just kept sixty-nining, oblivious even when Kati stomped her foot and whined, “Okay, okay, here they are! Now what do you say, stranger? Let’s dance already!”
“This is everyone?” Cain took the pack he was carrying off his shoulder and opened it.
“Yes!”
“Go lie down.” Cain knelt beside the writhing, four-legged heap of sex and started picking through Corky’s hair as she bobbed on Owen’s dick.
“Oh, come on!”
Cain’s head came up sharply and the look in his all-black eyes was enough to momentarily freeze all the Baked-out sensation in Kati’s body. She found herself thinking, just for one confused instant, that her folks were having a barbeque today and really…maybe she should have gone.
“Go lie down,” Cain said again. Below him, Corky languidly looked up, took hold of his hand and started sucking on one of his fingers. “Go on.” He glanced down at Corky briefly and then met her eyes again and said, “I won’t take long. Kati. Go lie down.”
“Okay, fine.” She trudged away up the path until she found a grassy place where she could sit. She put her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands and waited. Something popped down where Owen and Corky were. Not a pop, exactly. She wasn’t sure what it was. It sounded like a carrot being snapped in half, only thicker somehow. Unpleasant. There it was again. Gross.
Kati lay back and rubbed restlessly between her legs, looking at the patterns the trees made on the empty sky beyond. She was getting sleepy. She’d wasted her fucking Bake. What a fucking dead party.
Footsteps at last. Cain came up into the grassy place, his pack back on his shoulder, playing with something that looked a lot like a shiny, chrome vibrator. It was even humming like one.
“Is that for me?” Kati asked.
“Maybe.” Cain pushed a button on the side of the vibrator and it spat out a chewed-up wad of gum. He unslung his pack and set it on the ground, then took off his long coat and then his hat, dropping them indifferently. He looked her over, his mouth twisted with speculation, and finally he knelt beside her. He put the vibrator down and opened his pack again.
Kati picked up the vibrator and licked it suggestively.
“Don’t do that,” Cain sighed, and took it away from her. He reached into his suitcase and pulled out something that looked a little like a ballpoint pen and a lot like a scalpel. He took her arm. “Hold still.”
“What’s that?” Kati asked, holding excitedly very still. She was always looking for the next Mr. Good-drug and the Bake was almost gone. Her eyes drifted to his hand on her arm. Three fingers. Claws. Well, the Bake wasn’t
entirely
gone.
Cain didn’t answer. He gave her a poke with the device, flicked at a recessed switch, and then took it out and inserted the tip of the scalpel into the laptop sticking out of his case.
Oh, this was bullshit. Kati tried to get up and Cain reached down absentmindedly, his eyes still on the screen of his computer, and unfastened his pants. She changed course immediately, rocking onto her knees and latching onto him with both hands—it took both hands!—to close her mouth rapturously over the head of him. He leaned back to make room for her, but otherwise did nothing. He was waiting.
His computer chimed, and Kati raised her head dazedly and looked around at the trees. Cain uttered a grunting sound and shut his pack up, then put his hand on the back of Kati’s head and guided her back down to his rigid cock. She could feel the pricking of sharp points through her hair, and she burst out laughing.
“I’m so high! You feel like you have claws!” She lost her balance and fell back, giggling.
He laughed with her, then seized both her ankles in one of his hands and pulled her legs straight up into the air. He flipped her skirt up, got hold of her panties and pulled them up and off in one crisp yank.
“Oo, so forceful!” She would have said more, but he opened her legs, tucked them under his arms, and pulled her up and onto his lap. She gasped, absolutely motionless, staring blankly at the sky as he fit the head of his huge cock to her. Then he gripped her hips and yanked her all the way against him, impaling her on that amazing spike. Every woman’s magazine in the whole world was a goddamn liar; size mattered. She’d never felt anything like this. It made every other fuck she’d ever had wash out to kiddie-colored play-dates. It was the first real fuck of her entire life.
He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t paw at her or anything. He touched nothing but her hips, and that only just to keep her moving on him. It was just sex. No slobber, no groping, no nothing but this incredible fucking, filling her and scorching her with every new thrust. Kati couldn’t get close enough, couldn’t feel enough or move fast enough. The sensations were too overwhelming and too shocking to even let her cum. She just kept building, rocking and shuddering in his grip, getting so hot and so wet that soon, everything he did to her felt so good it actually hurt.
She thought he was cumming. Hard to tell. She kept thinking she felt him shooting off, but she had to be wrong, because he kept fucking, if anything, even harder and faster. His eyes were shut tight, his brow furrowed as with concentration, and his teeth were bared. Sharp teeth. Monster teeth. Like the claws pricking at her hips. This wasn’t real.
Kati reached up through fathoms and space and touched his chest. Slick and hard. Like wet stone. She slipped her hand between them to feel the reality of his cock pushing in and out of her, and his eyes finally opened. “I’m not…here,” she told him. Her voice sounded watery. She closed her eyes as sexual heat bloomed sickly in her stomach, and ground herself helplessly up at the cock that invaded her with such magnificent force. “I’m not…not…”
Cain let out a sound Kati could only hear as a monster-movie special effect-a dinosaur growl or a lion or something. He spread his thighs, bumping her into a slightly different position, angled her hips up and suddenly Kati was in a whole new world of fucking. “Are you
here
?” she heard him ask coolly, from somewhere out beyond the blindness of this wrenching carnal fire.
Kati felt her first orgasm, her first real one. Not just a little shiver and a gasp, or that rosy warm glow she’d always thought were orgasms. No, this was a clenching, stabbing furnace-blast, every bit as painful as it was pleasurable. Kati writhed helplessly in its grip, fighting to escape it as much as to hold on to it, her mind blasted white by sensation.
Above her, Cain snarled out that monster-movie sound again and he hooked her again in those hands that did not have claws, did not have just the three fingers. His entire body locked up rock-hard. He thrust three times more, each more brutal than the last, and finally came. Katie felt the jet of it drumming up inside her and experienced a full-body sexual explosion, something so unreal and intense that for a while there, she felt eerily as though her soul had floated completely out of her, hovered around for a while looking at the trees, and then sank back down and sewed itself back to flesh.
She lay limp. Spent, as they say in bad books, but that was such a temporary-sounding word. Spent was something that happened to money, and it only took a trip to the ATM to get it back. Kati wasn’t spent. She was wilted. She was hollowed-out and burnt. She wasn’t dead, maybe, but she was in that soap-opera coma that leads there. Spent, ha. She was fucking bankrupt.
A scraping sound off to her left provided just enough motivation for Kati to open her eyes. Cain was up, dressed, and getting his suitcase packed again.
“What’s your hurry?” she asked sleepily, and stretched out an arm to tug at his boot. “Come on down here, baby.”
He glanced at her, smiling thinly, and pulled his foot out of her grip. “Baby,” he echoed, as though tasting the word, and then shook his head. “Heat’s done. It’s time for me to hunt.”
“Aw, come on, be a nice guy.”
“I’m such a nice guy—” Cain dropped to his hunkers and gave her a chuck to the chin that made Kati giggle. “—I’ll even leave you alone. I know, I know, I’m too sentimental. Stay here, Kati. Get some sleep.”
“I’m not tired,” she mumbled, rolling onto her side to play with his boot laces. “Will you take me with you when you go?”
“Why?”
“This is a dead party.”
Cain laughed, shouldering his pack. “Yes,” he said. “It will be. But I have all the flesh I need. More, in fact, than I even want.”
“I’m better than either of them.”
“No, I hate to hurt your feelings, but you’re really not.” He hunkered down again, pinched her chin between his thick thumb and fingers and gave her head a playful little shake. “Friendly advice, little fuck-mate. Get away from that shit you’re taking. The only door in that long hall opens on men like me.”
“I like you.” She caught his wrist and tugged at it hopefully, giving him her best bedroom eyes from the dry woodsy ground.
He smiled again, but it was a distracted thing. His attention was wandering back up the path to the clearing, and he stood up, pulling easily out of her grip. “Close your eyes, Kati,” he said, turning his back on her. “Count to a thousand.”
She could hear him walking away before she even got to five, but that didn’t matter. She’d show him she was good and he’d come back and get her. When he was done hunting big game in northern Nevada, that was.
Forty-one. Forty-two. Something popped, like a pine-knot in a fire. The boys, dumb shits that they were, making that damn bonfire now that she wasn’t there to stop them. (To wonder how she’d be able to hear a popping pine-knot from where she now lay did not and would never occur to her.) It wasn’t gunfire. Gunfire was louder, Kati knew that. She went to the movies.
Seventy-nine. Eighty. Eighty-one. Pop-pop. Someone screamed. Sounded like Tabby. Cumming from her toes, most likely; that wasn’t a splashing-in-the-river scream. It made Kati smile, thinking of Cain. That first thrust, splitting her, filling her.