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“Buttery biscuit,” he mutters under his breath. I blink rapidly and swat his thigh gently with the end of my tail.
“I’m sorry, what?”
He lifts his chin and repeats, “Buttery biscuit. It was… a safe word I used before. During light contact play. It didn’t last long, though.”
“Because you’re a little buttery biscuit bitch, or because you and your girlfriend realized,oh, no!” I adopt a cutesy, patronizing tone in my voice before continuing my mockery. “Hitting is so vewy scawy!and then went back to your boring vanilla sex?” I admonish.
He doesn’t so much as smirk when he shrugs. “Yeah. Something like that, I guess.”
I huff and tap my foot. “We’re giving you a different safe word because I’m not about to have you scream that at the top of your lungs, which you are definitely going to do.”
“May I ask a question first?” he asks, and I raise a brow.
“Um, yeah. What is it?”
He fidgets in his seat and then says, “You said you can see my soul, how black it is. Can you see the origin of the… er, stains?”
I nod. “Snippets. Like, if I’m dealing with a murderer, then I usually get flashes of what they did.” I grimace at the memory of some the shittier mortals I’ve punished. Yes, it was the job I was literally created for, but I couldn’t scrub the visions of their past from my brain. Wish I could. Humans were absolutely vile.
He nods. “What do you see in me, then?”
Squinting, I inch closer to him. This might be a trick. Humans are crafty little bastards if you aren’t careful, but I didn’t get a good, hard look at his stains earlier. Because if I look too long, too hard at them, I might see something I don’t want to see. Yeah, I might be a demon, but I still have feelings, dammit.
“I see…” I find a brownish smudge located somewhere between his ribcage and his sternum. “You pushed a girl off the swing set in the sixth grade because she said she didn’t like you. What the fuck?”
He chuckles sadly at the memory and shakes his head. “Poor Charolette. Yeah. I remember that. I was such a little asshole.”
But there’s got to be more to it than that. After all, this guy works on the top floor of a major corporation! He goes through women like Kleenex! Squinting harder, I find another smudge, a blacker one, over his heart. Ah, here’s the good stuff. I’m about to see something truly terrible that will make me want to shatter this guy into a thousand pieces.
A woman, standing in the rain, looking down at a child. The child is weeping, no, sobbing into his little dirty hands. She barely gives him a secondary glance before boarding a bus and then riding away, leaving the child behind.
“What is this?” I wonder out loud. “How is this here? It doesn’t even feature you, just a little kid in the rain and a woman on a bus.”
His eyes meet mine, and then I see it: genuine sadness. Pain, and not the fun kind. His heart breaks in front of me all over again, and before I know it, he’s weeping into his hands like that little boy.
“That was you,” I murmur. “That little boy was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he chokes out. “That was my mother.”
“And she left you,” I whisper, and without thinking, place my claws on top of his head. “She left you in the rain. Her son.” Was I punishing the wrong person? I should probably go find that woman, the one who thought it was acceptable to leave a small child behind. I’d love to tie her up over a fire pit and watch her sweat as her insides cook. Then another realization hits me: I really did screw this up. Instead of finding a tarnished soul created through a lifetime of misdeeds, I found a wounded one. Sometimes, it was difficult to distinguish wounded souls from damned souls because their colors were so strikingly alike. I really am an imposter, after all.
The implications scare me. Could I have sent wounded souls to hell instead of damned ones? No, no, I can’t think about that right now. It’s too alarming and there’s too little time.
“Please,” he groans. I let out a sharp gasp when he grabs my hands and squeezes them. “You have to help me forget.”
This might be above my pay grade and totally not what I’m supposed to be doing right now, but it would also be the right thing to do. To help this man, whose soul and entire trajectoryof life has been blackened because of the actions of another. It’s not fair. It’s not right. But what else can we do? It happens to a lot of people. The vast majority of people aren’t born bad. Evil is created. Some decide that the pain that was inflicted on them needs to be paid back tenfold, while others manage to devote their lives to ensuring the shit they endured doesn’t happen to anyone else. I don’t know why humans are like that. I don’t make the rules. I just work here.
“Sure,” I say, running my fingers through his hair. “But you still have to pick a safe word. One that doesn’t make me want to scratch my eyeballs out.”
He grins up at me and says, “Angel.”
“Angel? Those smug winged assholes who toot on little horns and act like they’re so much better than the rest of us?” I ask. He shakes his head. “Then why would you pick that? To taunt me?” I nudge him in the chest with my stiletto and he lets out a groan. “Answer me.”
“Ugh. Fine. It’s… it’s what I think of when I look at you. Angel. I want that to be my safe word, please.”
My chest tightens, and I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I say, “Ugh, fine. Your safe word is angel. But I really, really hope you don’t have to use it.”
Byron chuckles, and heat radiates between my legs. Holy shit. His laughter is throaty, like a growl, and it sends a tingle of lightning straight into my clits. Yes, clits, plural. I need to make him laugh again, because that felt almost… divine. “Since I’m doing you an epic favor, I expect one in turn.”
