“Well, those things are slow acting. Probably take the best part of twenty minutes to sever his foot completely. Sure, I might have gotten my hands on it in the tumble, tried to trigger it, but while I was wasting my time doing that, old Stefan would have buried that knife in my spine.” He paused, reviewing the fight. “Or my eye.”
“That’s not what I mean.” There was a hot exasperation in the way she came back at him, an edge of tone that tugged in the base of his belly and dripped a slow, pooling tumescence into the length of his prick.
“Well, what do you mean then?”
“I mean he knew there was a risk he’d lose a foot, not to mention bleed to death trying to get away. And he still tried to kill you.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her Are you sure you dated a thirteen, I mean a real one? He bit it back, walked on. Modest gene-stunted cottonwood trees sprouted at intervals from squares cut out of the pavement along this end of Moda. Their branches broke the streetlighting as it fell, formed a soft mosaic of light and dark underfoot.
“Look,” he said experimentally. “First of all, Stefan Nevant wasn’t planning on getting away anywhere. He came to kill me, that’s all. Us genetic warriors are pretty focused about these things. If he had managed to ice me, he would have stood up afterward as quiet as a Jesusland housewife while you and Battal restrained him, and he would have gone back out to the tract a happy man.”
“But that’s fucking stupid,” she flared.
“Is it?” This time he stopped on the pavement, turned toward her. He could feel his own control coming unmoored, feel it seep into his voice, but he couldn’t tell how much was this, how much was the mouth-itching display of her standing there wrapped in streetlight and shadow, tumbled hair and long mobile mouth, jut and swell of breasts under the dark sweater, tilt of hips, long-legged in the canvas jeans despite the flat-soled boots she wore them with. “I put Nevant in the tract. He was out and I brought him back, to a place he’ll never leave except hobbled the way he was today. He’ll never breed, or have sex with anyone who isn’t a paid tract whore or an UNGLA employee cruising for twist thrills. He knows, to within a couple of thousand square kilometers, exactly where he’ll die. You think about that, and then you ask yourself whether it might not be worth the risk of losing a foot—which he’d get a biocarbon prosthetic for anyway, under the rules of internment—you ask yourself whether that might not be a price worth paying to put out the light in the eyes of the man who fenced him in.”
“Worth dying for?”
“You forget: there’s no death penalty in Europe, even for thirteens.”
“I meant you might have killed him.”
Carl shrugged. “I might. You’re also forgetting that Nevant was a soldier. Kill or be killed is pretty much the job description.”
She locked her gaze on his.
“Would you have killed him? If we hadn’t gotten there first?”
He stared at her for a moment, then, swift as the fight, he stepped in and hooked an arm to her waist. Her feet shifted on the pavement, she leaned back and lifted one long fingered hand. For fragments of a second he thought she would strike him, then the fingers clenched in the collar of his jacket and dragged his face close. She bit into his mouth, thrust in a coffee-tasting tongue. Made a deep, soft sound as his free hand molded to her breast, and dragged him back into the shadows of an apartment house entryway.
It was like the mesh, a rising tide in blood and muscle. He tore at her clothing, unseamed the canvas jeans and forced them down to her knees, got his hand inside the slip of lace cotton she wore beneath. She gasped at the touch, already moist. With his other hand, he pushed up the sweater, forced it over the swell of the breasts, and fingered loose one of the profiler cups. The breast sagged into his hand. He buried his face in the flesh, as if drinking water out of his cupped palm. His mouth slurped up the nipple, sucked it to the roof of his mouth. In the tight trap of her cotton panties and inner thighs, his fingers worked the moistness apart. She shuddered, groped vaguely at the swollen lump in his trousers, finally got both hands on his belt and opened it. He flopped out, tightened to fully erect in the cool air. She laughed, short and throaty as she felt the length of his prick, ghosted an open palm up and down the underside of it.
Four months in Florida jails, nothing female you could touch. He felt himself sliding down the long hard slope of it, made his mouth unfasten from her breast with an effort of will, left the fingers of his other hand where they were and squatted, trying to pull one of her boots off. She saw what he was trying to do, laughed again, shook her leg impatiently up and down, stamping the air, angling her foot to get it loose. No luck—the boot stayed on. He caught a glancing blow from her knee in the side of his face. Grunted and shook his head.
“Oh shit, I’m sorry.” She stopped, bent toward him. His fingers slipped loose, damp. “Look, stop, wait.”
She twisted away, something that was almost judo, pushed him upright and against the wall in her place. She tore her jacket off arm by arm, stowed it in a wad at his feet, and dropped to her knees on it. Wide, split-mouth grin up at him, and then she bent over the head of his prick and sucked it in. Her curled fingers slipped up and down the shaft. Her mouth moved. His hands slapped flat on the shadowed wall at his sides, crooked as if he could claw into the evercrete with his nails. He thought then that was it, grabbed the moment, but something had hitched up inside him, would not let go. The orgasm subsided, rocked away, just out of reach.
She felt the change, made a muffled, querying noise and went to work in earnest, mouth and fingers; he felt himself climbing the curve again, but knew again he would not make it. His hands uncurled, came loose from the wall, hung there. He stared at the shadows.
“Hey,” she said softly.
“Look, I’m—”
“No, you look.” Sudden instruction in her voice, it hooked his gaze downward and she grinned up at him. With her left hand, she gathered her exposed breasts up and together. She gripped his shaft hard in the other hand, pushed the glans back and forth in the press of her cleavage. He felt something leap violently in his chest. She grinned again, bent her head and spat gently, drooled spit onto the head of his prick and then, still gripping hard, pushed the wet-gleaming flesh back between her breasts, rubbed it there, in and out, in and out, for the ten or twenty more seconds it took before he felt the furious heat come raging up through him, no hitch now, no stopping…
And out.
He made a noise like a drowning man hauled back aboard, like the sound he’d made the day the rescue ship hailed Felipe Souza for the first time, and he sagged back against the wall, then slid down it, as if shot. He felt her fingers let go, stickily, felt her gathering her disordered clothing together, and put out his hand.
“Wait.”
“We should go, it’s—”
“You’re going. Nowhere,” he said unsteadily. “Stand up.”
He pushed her upright again, where she’d been, against the wall, and this time he crouched, slid hands up the insides of the long thighs to part them, pulled the scrap of lace cotton firmly to one side, and sank his tongue in her as deep as it would go.
Back at the apartment, he did it again, this time on the bed where he’d seen her asleep that morning. Pulled up close to breathe her scent, one hand raising the cushion of her buttocks up so the lips of her cunt met his mouth like a mismatched kiss, the fingers of his other hand deep inside her and the breadth of his tongue lapping up against the rubbery switch of her clit. He felt a carnivore itch rising in him, a deep thirst that was only partly slaked when she bucked and flexed across the bed and clamped hands and thighs around his head as if she could push him by sheer force inside her.
She flopped, panting, face rolled sideways, eyes closed, gone, and he gathered her under him and slid into her to the hilt of his newly swollen-tight erection. Her eyes flew open, and she said oh, just that single sound, lightly, delightedly, fresh hunger rolling on the edge of the syllable.