Please, I want to go back to the room. I want to be just with you. No one else watching.
SS
The way she held onto him when she was like this made his heart tilt. While it was pretty private here, he understood her request, even if he hadn't been so far into her head it was like having two different minds in his own, side by side. She always had to stay aware of her environment, of who might be in her space. She didn't want to hold onto any of that.
He lifted her in his arms. Vampires were extremely dense, her weight more than he'd expected, but he could carry her as far as she needed. He'd do it or die trying.
He'd collected the pieces of her swimsuit, putting them in the cradle of her body. This lagoon was on the fringes of the adults-only part of the island, so close to the BDSM public play area that nudity and sex play were tolerated. A guy carrying a naked female through it wouldn't cause any problems. Nevertheless, he was glad not to meet anyone along his way and he stuck to the darker, unlit paths, well familiar with them. He took the tunnel back to her suite and, once safely inside, he didn't turn on any lights. With bad vision, he was used to navigating more by shape and shadow, so that wasn't unusual, but it wasn't until he was halfway across the room that he realized he hadn't used the lights for a wholly different reason.
He could see in the dark. Not fully, but like the grey light of dawn. Yet the room was fully dark. Was it his imagination, or did his vision seem sharper?
He pushed that away. It didn't matter now. She was his full focus. This time he'd use a shower to ground and relax her. Going into the bathroom, he put her down on the commode and turned on the shower jets. Making sure of the temperature was a matter of lifting her hand, holding it cradled in his, and putting it under the spray. He felt it register, felt her desire that it be warmer, and accommodated. She was floating again, but basics like physical comforts seemed to be handled by a different department of the mind. He was bemused that he received that information not exactly in words, but in a shared satisfaction with the temperature. Fucking amazing. He could anticipate her every need not only by the instincts that had always served him well, but through the mind-to-mind connection.
Dropping his swim trunks, he got her to her feet. "Here you go, baby. I've got you."
Again her arms slid around him, held, while he moved them under the spray and closed them in. He combed his fingers through her hair, getting the chlorine off her. Despite all the excellent efforts to make the lagoon look like a real live lagoon, even down to the emerald green coloring, they still had to maintain it like a public pool to keep it clean. Particularly given what things humans did in it. Erotic, unforgettable things.
He smiled at that. She stood quietly in his arms, let herself be turned and rinsed. Every once in a while her eyes opened and she focused on him. He stayed hand in hand with her mind to be sure she wasn't thinking, wasn't chewing on any worries. That was where he wanted her, though he saw shadows he wished he could dispel. They were waiting just beyond the fringes to cover her, to turn this into something she needed to worry about. He'd hold that off as long as he could, be her umbrella against the rain. No one had ever taken care of her. Not like this.
Next on the list was drying all that long, silky red hair. He sat her down at the vanity, worked the towel over it, massaged her scalp. Picking up a brush, he began to comb it out. It was startling to see only himself in the mirror. He hadn't been sure what about vampires was fact or fiction, but the lack of reflection part was true.
Even so, he could feel her gaze as he braided her hair, finding a hair band in the well-stocked cabinet which had everything from mousse to ribbons and curling irons. He suspected a vampire's hair dried like silk, but since sleeping on wet hair didn't feel good to anyone, he did the braid.
As he fixed the band to the tail, he realized he'd been doing everything in the dark. He snapped on the shower light. Though it only cast a dim light over the bathroom, it still made him stop, momentarily frozen. He wasn't imagining it. He could see better. Not a hundred percent, but far better than before. Christ. And his hearing...he'd been listening to her inside her mind as well as to her voice, but now he realized he could hear the water dripping down the drain. He'd taken the hearing aids off for the visit to the pool and hadn't put them back in, yet he could hear the plop, plop of those drops, something he might have had trouble detecting even with the hearing aids.
Her hand covered his and he looked down at her face. The shadows were there, but a poignant smile was in her luminous eyes as well. "I'm glad I could give you that, if only for a little while."
She was worried it would affect him the way embracing her submission was affecting her. That it might be worse to do without it after having it again for such a short time.
"Who says it has to be a short time?"
Her gaze dropped and that tension returned to her shoulders. "Because that's the way it has to be, Garron."
Once again, they were back to her not wanting to talk about it, the walls of her mind closing. He tightened his hand on her shoulder, drew her attention back up to him. He shook his head. "You don't hide from me, my lady. We talked about this."
"Do you know with the third mark, a real one, I can destroy your soul, Garron?"
"No one can destroy someone's soul, my lady. You can mangle it, shred it, but in time it knits itself back together. It may not be the same, but it survives everything, just like a cockroach."
"You're so sure. But that was based on what you knew about life before. Now that you've felt me in your soul, you know what I'm telling you is true." Her gaze slid back down. "I've seen a vampire do it. Shred his servant's soul until she was writhing on the ground as if she were trapped in Hell with no way out."
"Why did he do that?"
"Because he could," she said quietly. "Someone at the dinner table, another vampire, doubted it was possible. He was proving it could be done, for their amusement and to satisfy their curiosity. It was early on, before I was an overlord. I had no power, no way to intervene."
He saw how that had damaged her, how a hundred different things over the years had chipped away at her humanity, her belief that anything was possible, that dreams were anything more than wistful fantasies that had to be put aside in favor of survival.
"There are many beautiful things about the vampire world," she said, softening that. "Amazing things. It's not all terrible. But the things that are terrible, are beyond nightmares."
"Yeah." He leaned against the vanity, his stretched leg brushing her knee. "The bomb that blew up my team, blew up part of an apartment building. Families. I remember lying there, the medic working over me, and I was so out of it, but not out of it enough. Some things are so clear, I'll never get them out of my head. My hand passed over something in the wreckage, and I picked it up. At first I thought it was a doll's arm, but a doll's arm isn't soft like that, wet. It doesn't have tiny fingernails like an infant does. It's funny...that's the last thing I saw clearly with these eyes of mine until you gave me that third mark."
As many years as she'd lived, he expected his lady had seen the carnage of war up close and personal. What he was telling her wasn't a new horror, but he saw it still had the ability to touch her. To ease it for both of them, he leaned forward, traced her cheek. "Gotta say, I prefer this view."
She linked hands with him. "Garron."
He shook his head. "It's a shitty world at times. It's also not so shitty other times. What's between you and me, that's a reciprocal arrangement, Master and sub. You have as much capacity to harm me as I do you."
She didn't say anything to that, but he was done talking about it, too. For now. He slid a hand under her hair, massaged, while she continued to play with his fingers. The links of the choker clinked as he stroked, and she tilted her head toward him, responding to the stimulation. She was staring at the waterfall, caught in the reflection of the bathroom mirror. Dawn had come while they were taking care of her shower, and the rays were sparkles across the water. Since he
could see she wanted to go to it, he rose and lifted her again.
"I've never been carried so much in my life."
"Is that bad?"
She shook her head, increased her hold around his neck. When he lowered her to the seat next to the miniature grotto, she hung on so he went to one knee by her, keeping his arm around her waist, the other over her thighs, hand curved over one. She remembered, loosening her legs so if he wanted to go farther between them he had access, but he held off on that now.
Lifting his other hand, he closed it over hers to take it under the water, like he had in the shower, only this time they watched the sun warm her skin and he felt her wistfulness over that. "Magic doesn't exist everywhere," she said.
"Depends on what you call magic. I see it pretty much everywhere."
She closed her eyes. "But there are places where it can't exist."
"Only if you refuse to believe in it." He turned her hand over, watched the water glittering off her wet skin. "Most of us wear different faces to cope with our daily lives, my lady. If we can wear the honest one behind closed doors, with at least one person we can trust, it makes the other faces bearable. Even helps us enjoy them more, see the good things about those different aspects of who we are."
"Have you had someone you can trust?" She sought his gaze. "I never asked if you'd been married, or had someone before."
"A couple relationships, but I was too caught up in my military career to give them the time they deserved. It's only since I've been here that I've realized it's time...to go a different way."
She didn't want to think of other women. He detected an intriguing spurt of bloodlust at the thought, his fiery submissive. But other thoughts poured into her mind. She needed him to need her now, use her now. Make her feel like his submissive. Their conversation unfortunately had reminded her she would have to do without soon enough, making her even hungrier for everything he could demand of her now. She didn't want to sleep, even if the night's exertions and the encroaching sun were trying to pull her into sleep.
He could oblige her, since apparently even a temporary third mark made his cock spring to attention at the mere thought of sex, but he was pretty sure that wasn't what she truly needed. He wasn't going to rush a damn thing, because for him, this wasn't a ten day proposition. He took her back to the bed, though, reattaching the tether to the choker. Feeling her yearning stare, he hooked the chain to the bed post.
"Eyes down, my lady. No looking through my mind. One way only for now."