Before I sign off officially, I send one final email to Patrick telling him I want to have a call tomorrow about Lance. Work is staying at work tonight, the worn out, oversized purse on my shoulder lighter than it has been in months. I wave goodbye to the building security officer, as he offers a kind and tired smile that I try to match.
With all my good intentions this past week, I can’t bring myself to go home. The sidewalks are near empty. A few other business-dressed people move with speed down the pavement, and a couple drunkenly giggle on their way home. Turning left takes me to my bus stop, where I’ll get home in an hour, where my bath is. But if I turn right, it will take me to the library.
For the first time in a week, I turn right.
5
Augustine
2759 days
It has been a week of this incessant ache.
Seven days since I have tasted the sweet nectar of my darling. My library is barren without her and her emotions perfuming the stacks and shelves that surround it. For over a century, that scent has brought me comfort, but now without it coating my very existence, there’s nothing but pain. My teeth, my sands, all of me aches for a woman whose name I do not even know but so desperately want to bind to my eternity to.
It is not even the physical, primal call of the bond that pulses in my sands. The desire that urges me, fights with all of my time-learned sensibilities to hunt her down, that makes me crave her. It is not the lack of a delicious morsel, for the weary who enter the library are sustenance enough.
It is the freedom of my darling’s dreams that I so dearly miss. The wildness that runs through her when she believes no one is watching. In her dreams, I catch glimpses of it. Short bursts that revive a part of me I did not know was dying. The last dream, where I lost my control, convinced myself I could stay a while longer with her and feed and enjoy her dream, was eye-opening.
As if observing Renaissance and Baroque masters converge into an exquisite and beautiful work of art, my morsel came alive in luxurious shades of gold. Some of them were a soft honey, others a deep amber, and even the palest of yellows like the dried petals of chamomile tea. I can still taste her, feel my teeth sinking into the skin of her throat, my talons digging into the soft flesh of her thighs when I can no longer control myself.
Denying the bond is foolish. I was a fool to allow her out of my sight after that moment, so here I remain where she last left me, like a discarded puppy. I know she will return to me, to this library, because the bond must be burning through her the way it does me.
Does she dream of me even though we have not been near?
I daydream of her. As dusk begins to settle over the city and the usual crowd of the library thins to the odd being using the computers, when I slip into my office with the intention to read something from my private collection, my thoughts wander until I envision a beach. The dark waves crash into black sands not unlike my own and my human lies among them, surrounded by them, writhing in the smooth grains that cling to her. Her golden aura is blindingly bright and shines against her naked skin. An animalistic urge takes over me, driving me into a sprint so I may catch her and possess her soul and body for eternity.
Gods, her body.
My jaw clenches, and my hand moves to swipe across my moustache and bottom lip to make sure I have not drooled over my first edition French volumes ofLes Misérables.The delicate pages and hand-marbled paper show enough signs of age, the last thing they need is evidence of my lacklustre control of my urges. I place them carefully back into their box and set them aside on my desk. The analogue clock above my office door claims it is only a quarter to seven. Arlo shall not be arriving for our introduction for another thirty minutes.
Another baser urge.
The mere thought of my darling’s existence, the memory of her joy and her racing heartbeat as she ran down that beach, make my cock harden beyond comprehension. The seam of my trousers is permanently indented into the skin of my shaft after the week it has spent hard and unsatisfied. It is a matter of principle more than anything that I have left it, forcing myself to ignore the rush of heat through my sands that makes my skin tingle. There is nothing abhorrent about self-pleasure, and I have spent plenty of nights discovering the sins of the flesh as they are so called with myself, but under that surface-level urge, there is a deeper one.
It is even more dastardly, one that racks through my sands and makes my cock leak at the images it conjures. My darling,my mate, covered in my essence until she shines with only me, until her own golden aura is obscured byme. I want to cover her in it, bathe her in me until she knows that it is me she truly belongs to. I will be the only being who owns her.
I remove my lenses and toss them aside as my other hand presses into the front of my trousers to soothe my aching cock. Truly today is an example of my weak will, a miracle as to how I have survived this long when I cannot remain celibate for even seven days. Even as I berate myself, the hand on my trousers undoes the buttons, and my head falls back against my chair in relief. I will not be stopped from gaining this ounce of gratification, not now when I can almost clearly see her.
The image of my human that my mind paints is skewed by the way she perceives herself. All dreams are a perception of how one sees the world and their own interactions with it. My darling has a very pragmatic view of herself, an honest one that does not do her glory justice. It means my vision of her obscures the closer I get to her on that beach. Her body has a clear outline, a form that would ruin weaker humans. One made purely for me. The rest of her is a blur, like seeing a painting too close and losing the finer details. I do not know the shape of her breasts or the formation of her stretch marks. I have felt them beneath my hands, traced them with my sands, yet I cannot follow them like a map. I will not truly know her body until she is mine.
My cock jerks at the simple thought.Until she is mine.I stroke myself from the base of my shaft to the tip, pressing my thumb into the soft black quills that cover this side. My sands tremble at the pressure as they flex with resistance. I fist my palm tighter, adding pressure to the quills on the side and bottom of my cock. The pull of my flesh is barely eased by the precum that leaks from my slit. My quills fight against my grip, pushing and expanding as I imagine the wet heat of my darling surrounding me entirely.
How I will coat my sands in her cum, until she is lost in pleasure and cannot think. The only emotions she will feed to me are her desire and satisfaction. I crave them as much as I crave her joy and fear. My fist moves faster, pulling at the short quills with each downward stroke until they are leaking molten gold ichor through my grip. The talons of my fingers dig into the leather arm of my chair and more of my sands release from my body. A band of them tighten around my balls and more of them gather around my asshole. The flat graze against my skin has my mouth opening, sharp teeth on display as I work myself into a frenzy.
My thoughts become more disjointed, frantically jumping from images of my human pinned beneath me with her ass on display, to her stroking my cock with her soft wet tongue pressed to my hole, to how her thighs will wrap around my head and shake as I devour her pussy. There are so many ways I want to feast upon my human, but the one that is my undoing is the dream memory of my teeth pressed into her neck. She is soft and giving and free. Somehow, by the will of the fates or my length of stay in her dream cycle, she was able to get a bit of control and chose to wrap herself around me.
It is the memory of her plush thighs around my hips, her heels digging into my backside, that is my undoing. Her fingers gripping the velvet sheets beneath her, how I long to feel their grip on me. Every part of my body tenses and my sands vibrate under my skin, on my skin, until I am cumming across the surface of my desk. Thick ropes of pearlescent golden fluid dribble down my once-clean desk. If my human was here, I would have her lick my essence clean until it shined anew. Not a drop of me would be wasted.
My cock jerks at the thought of her submission, but a stroke of my talon between my quills sends them quivering with an amount of overstimulation that cools me down. The burning, primal urge of the bond is sedated for now, but I feel I have only opened the floodgates to more and more devious actions. If my darling does not seek me out soon, I will have to enlist the help of Ramón to find her. The tension in my body eases and I stare at the high ceilings above me, ready to get lost in thoughts that will hopefully be more useful to obtaining my human.
A knock on my door makes my sands lash out. My body jerks to sit up straighter, any relief from my manual massage decimated by the intrusion.
“One moment,” I call out, quickly tucking myself away and pulling the spare handkerchief from my top desk drawer. I swipe the mess away and discard the thin cotton material into the trash. A waste, but a necessary one. I toss today’s Gwenmore Guardian over the main surface of my desk to cover up any other evidence of what remains of my slip in control. As I stand, a pleasing rawness rubs between my cheeks, and I have to clear my throat to keep my head on straight. As a final precaution, I run my hands over my tie and put my jacket back on before I open the door to my office.
Looking squarely at the space between his battered boots, stands Arlo O’Shea, ghoul and newest congregation member of Our Lady of Mercy. While tithing at the church has never been a requirement of the monsters in our group, I am sure it adds a mark in Arlo’s favour with Deg’Doriel. The mouse-like ghoul eventually looks up at me, only long enough for his lips to part and then snap shut, his eyes widening. The taste of his fear is like rotted meat and it hits my senses when I realise I haven’t fully righted my appearance. I blink, and the sands that still kept my eyes dark retreat.
I move aside and allow him into my office. He shuffles to sit in front of my desk, his head never turning to look and observe his surroundings. His sallow, sunken skin has no colour, no doubt from lack of a meal. Perhaps he is just exhausted, perhaps he is hiding something. Either way, I will find out.
