AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter1
COLOSSUS
Her name is Summer…
Or maybe it’s Daisy, or Sunny, or Dawn. And sometimes, when I’m at my darkest, it is Persephone. But when I see her, her mess of golden waves catches the sunlight on even the most overcast of Pittsburgh days, and her laughter floats up to my stone perch like music from the conservatory’s courtyard. So every day, I name her, again and again, after the lightness she brings to my typically foul mood.
When she returns to her faculty residence for the night, I follow the shadow of her movements behind her sheer curtains. I watch as she prepares dinner for herself. It’s always something quick. I hear the beep of her microwave easily with my heightened senses. She sweeps a small corner of her kitchen table clear of art supplies with her arm before she sets down her plate. She eats slowly. Even in the shadows, I can tell she savors each bite of her food.
I’ve spent years crouched on the ledge of the Fine Art Conservatory’s out-of-commission bell tower, alone, an eight-foot-tall living stone monster in a city filled with inanimate versions of myself, each of them a mocking reminder that I’m the only gargoyle of my kind.
The only one of my kind...I think, but I have no memory to confirm it. My time before guarding the bell tower is lost.
In the quiet moments, the moments withoutherwalking by, without the earthy scent of the clay she teaches with filling my nostrils, my forgotten past comes back to me in flashes. There are images of a grand battle, fought with gargoyles just as alive as me, then blinding pain and a long slumber until I awoke on this tower not more than a few decades ago.
Those moments of either memory or nightmare leave me with the phantom ache for a companionship I’m sure I must’ve felt once, even if it ended in disaster. I’m also certain of one thing: I was created for a purpose, unified with others like me, to protect.
What, orwho, sits on the edge of my consciousness, but even now, I’m pulled to my calling.
Light flares in the corner of my eye and, careful to keep my positioned body still, my gaze returns to Summer/Daisy/Persephone’s apartment window.
Her curtains are open.They’re never open at night.
My brows furrow by millimeters, and my lips flatten with miniscule pressure, all invisible to the human eye.
Where is she?
The light bends to her form as she steps into view. She stops in front of the window and pushes the double frames open, letting in the warm summer breeze. The scent of the oncoming rain is thick in the air. A single lamp glows behind her, turning her white dress sheer, illuminating her voluptuous outline. She’s naked beneath.
What is she doing?
And then…
I’d assumed she didn’t know I existed, didn’t know I was different from the other perpetually frozen gargoyles around the city. But I’m wrong, so unbelievably wrong, because she is staring at me right now. Her pale blue eyes glint like stars in the moonlight as her gaze holds mine.
What is she doing?
My breath, normally so easy to control, quickens.
Her small, round, pink lips curve to one side in a smirk, seeming to dare me to move. Then, I notice her hands. Her fingers, the ones I’ve watched work so skillfully over clay at her potter’s wheel, drift over the sheer fabric of her dress. She starts at her thighs, brushing the tips of her fingers up and over her full hips and gently rounded belly.
What the hell is she doing?
The conservatory is closed for the summer. There’s been no one at the school for days. She should be worried about being all alone on this poorly lit campus. She should be concerned about who might see her up in that window. Still, her eyes stay on mine, the distance of the courtyard between us feeling like inches instead of yards as her hands move further up her body.
Could she know I’m alive? Impossible.
My chest muscles tighten, and I have to work to keep my tail tightly coiled at my feet as the ribbed tip of it heats and swells.
Her fingers slide from her waist, narrowing in at her ribs, gliding up to her small breasts. She cups herself through the fabric, her eyelids fluttering closed as she gently squeezes. When she pinches her hard nipples, she lets out a strangled moan, like she is surprised by the mix of pleasure and pain she inflicted on herself.
“Fuck,” I growl through barely-parted lips.
A human can’t be looking at me like this and not know I’m alive, right?
My cock stirs beneath my leathery loincloth. The raised bumps that circle my length grow so sensitive, I hold back a groan as a summer breeze brushes against me.
Then, she pops open the top button on her dress, then another, and another. Every muscle in my body is drawn so tight, I ache in the struggle to control it. My claws dig into the stone beneath me, marking it with deep grooves. My outstretched wings, webbed like those of a bat, nearly vibrate with the effort it takes not to move.
