Like Blood for Coffee Pt. 01

She hesitated. Then slid her hand up his forearm, caressing his bicep. Trailing her thumb over his chest. She licked her lips.

"And you still want to fuck?" Eiri asked, incredulous. "When you say you know how I hate you?"

"Do you hate me?" She looked into his eyes, but he felt no pull. No hypnotic suggestion. Completely on his own, he remembered the feel of her pinned beneath him, the throb of his cock inside her when the lights shone on the glass and he thought they'd be killed. Wanting to be the last thing she thought of when she died.

"No," he admitted. He reached up and clasped the hand that caressed him, pulling it to his mouth. He kissed her palm. I don't know what it is... The release. The danger. The power. All of it tugged at him in the deepest, most secret places of his heart. Where everything was a blind, raging chaos. He went on kissing her.

She sighed, enjoying the touch. He went on kissing, down her wrist, her arm. She shuddered when he pressed his lips to the inside of her elbow. "Eiri..."

The sound of his name from her mouth made him hard. He stood, unzipping his suit pants, letting his cock shift upward, out of his left pant leg to peek from between the folds. She stared at the hint of skin there, transfixed.

I could put it in her mouth, he thought. Nothing would please him more. But, looking at her moisten her lips with her tongue, he caught the briefest sight of her fangs. And thought better of putting his dick so close to them.

Instead, he reached one hand out, cupped her face. Ran this thumb along her lower lip, inserting just the tip of it. She puckered her lips, kissing his finger.

"Open your mouth," he said.

She did and he put his index and middle fingers onto her tongue. Slid them back along it, deeper into her mouth. Her eyes swung up to him.

Can I trust you? He thought.

She nodded.

"Really?" he said aloud. He looked around, eyes coming to rest on the long candles. They were already an hour gone, beads of wax peppering the tapers. He looked back at her, with his fingers jammed into her mouth, and her eyes widened.

He reached for a candle.

Holding her tongue between his index finger and tongue, he brought the light over her field of vision, the heat of it close to her face. Testing her.

"Show me your tits," he ordered. He kept hold of her tongue, and kept the candle in her face, forcing her to move slowly as she hiked up her top over the high mounds of her breasts. She wore a balconette bra in purple satin with a gold front clasp. He smiled. She knew I'd like that.

Her eyes met his, glittering from the light of the candle. He put her tongue back in her mouth and put just one finger inside with it, thrusting it deep. Let's see if you can keep from biting me... "Hold still."

He titled the candle, positioning it over the creamy half domes above the purple bra. The first blazing drop grazed the skin where it joined to her chest. She gasped, her mouth contracting around his knuckle. A long, sharp tooth grazing him.

"Ah, ah, ah," he scolded her. "I don't want to feel any teeth." He punished her, pinching her tongue, pulling it out of her mouth. "Try again..."

He dribbled more wax onto her left breast. She squirmed, grunted, but kept her mouth still. "Good," he said. He bent, rewarding her with a kiss on her burning red cheek.

Another drop of wax on the right breast. The merest graze of her lower teeth against the nail of his thumb as she rocked back. He punished her, pinching the quivering tongue between his fingers. "I said keep still!"

She moaned around his fingers, wiggling in her seat.

"Take your pants off," he told her, keeping a firm grip on her extended tongue. She hooked her thumbs into the sweats and started to pull them down while trying to rise. He splashed candle wax onto the valley of her cleavage and she cried out, sitting her ass back down on her seat. Forced into using smaller, painfully slower moves to pull the cotton sweats down over her thighs.

He let the wax drip onto them, next. "Spread your legs."

He let go of her, letting her lean a little back from him, forcing her legs out toward him, spreading at the knees. He looked down as he dripped wax high on her inner thigh, and saw she wore matching purple panties cut in an old style that partially covered the tops of the thighs. Between her legs, the fabric darkened, already soaked through with sweat and desire.

"I want it there," she whispered. He looked up, saw her staring at the candle, lips quivering between her teeth as she bit herself, thrusting her hips toward him. Those teeth...

Eiri set the candle back in its holder and knelt between her legs to pull off the sweats. He reached for the band of the panties and pulled those down, keeping the damp satin in his palm as he stood. Stretching the band over her head, he pulled the garment down over her eyes, blinding her, wetting her forehead with her own juices. Casting about, he found his discarded linen napkin on the tabletop, and stuffed it into her mouth, hiding the sight of her teeth.

She did not resist, though her body rocked under the force of his touch. Blinded, gagged, she waited at the edge of her sheet, legs trembling. Eiri stood back to take in the sight of her, stripped nude from the waist down, top pushed up to her armpits. He reached for the closure of her bra, snapping it open with expert fingers, letting her breasts burst down onto her ribs. Now the look is complete.

"Lift up your legs."

She leaned back again, looping her hands under her thighs to lift and open her legs. The thatch of red-brown curls parted to reveal the delicate swatch of flesh hidden there.

He took up the candle again and knelt between her legs. He took his time, admiring her sex, examining it. The outermost lips full and fleshy, flushed dark with arousal. She had only the barest of inner inner lips, the left slightly overlapping the right. The hood over the bud of her clitoris pale and stretched, a tiny divet no larger than the tip of his finger just above it.

She sensed him staring her, clenching her vulva under the intensity of his gaze, moaning. Moisture glistened between the inner lips. Eiri caught the faintest scent of it, musky, intoxicating.

He tilted the candle above her and watched the lips shudder and contract as the wax landed on them. Behind her gag, she cried out. The fingers gripping her curved white thighs tightened, nails digging into her ivory skin.

Eiri moved the candle away. Put his mouth there instead, letting his tongue slide into the little pocket above her clit. Rewarding her. He slid it down, cupping the flat of his tongue against the tight little bud, about the size of a spring pea. Further down, the tip of his tongue grazed the little mouth, pushing the lips aside, tasting sour and sweet.

"Mmmm," she moaned, writhing in her seat as he stroked her with his mouth.

Eiri held the candle over her stomach, dribbling more wax onto the soft flesh that folded there as she doubled her legs back over herself, exposing the full width of her sex to his probing tongue. He delved into it, stroking, licking, applying just the barest pressure to her with his teeth. When the candle burned a little lower, he took back his mouth and brought the blazing tip right beside the dripping cleft of her mons, watching the curling hair tremble and sway in the heat.

He looked up at her face, half-hidden by her underwear. She knew where the candle was going next.

"Noth," he said. He pushed the wick into the wetness, extinguishing the flame in her cum.

...

Work resumed on Fulbright, though a quarter of regular Starbucks employees did not return to work. The catina was closed until further notice, employee meals being served out in the commons. Clan Air only addressed the attack once in a brief all hands, blaming a radical human rights activist group. Eiri didn't notice anything different in the days that followed, except for some of the panelling being replaced with metallic sheets of some flexible material. The walls of the Director's office were fitted with them. But Eiri hardly noticed - he never went in there anymore.

At work, she even seemed to avoid him, declining calendar invites to the weekly sync. Once, Hall tried to schedule her to attend a 1 on 1, but she sent a proxy - a snooty young vampire who interrupted Hall almost as much as Hall interrupted Eiri. The spring tests came back strong and they were cleared to enter the final sprint to launch worldwide.

Just ten days. Eiri thought he'd enter into the state of panic he felt completing his thesis - a mind numbing haze of anxiety and pressure.

But all he thought about was her. Whenever he left the campus - to shower, change, or find food when the cafeteria closed, her car would swoop past him on the street. He'd find her more often than not in the backseat, naked and waiting, not even caring at times to have him tie her hands or pull her hair.

The vintage limousine added another thrill for Eiri - he'd grown up on ancient prints of pre-Collapse moving stories where lovers met in the back seats of cars on cliff sides. Never before Starbucks had he spent so much time inside of the antique vehicles. Now he had a chance to experiment with the thrill of the confined space, so close to exposure with its moving window panes. He delighted in lifting Noth onto his lap, feeling her squirm against his hard cock as he fondled her breasts, stroked the hot, wet crevice between her legs.

He liked to have her resist him in the car, pushing his hands and begging him to stop, saying someone might see them. He peeled more and more of her clothes away with each fake, frantic plea, unless she was already nude. Then he settled for pinching her nipples, her labia. Once, trapped in his lap, he even spread her legs far apart using his knees to wedge open her thighs and he slapped her bare sex until she screamed. Surely the driver heard - but the tinted window between his compartment and theirs remained sealed.

The few times they did make it back to her place without her impaled on his cock, he indulged her - contorting her over tables or chairs, tying her up, tying her down. Pulling her over his knee to spank her bare buttocks with her wooden hairbrush until they flushed a deep, angry red. Winding a leather belt around her face, threaded through her mouth for her to bite down on as he plunged his cock into her from behind, holding the ends in one hand. Shoving a short, thick device into her trembling anus while he fingered her dripping cunt in a steaming hot shower. His favorite was tying her hands behind her back and lifting her up with him inside her, until just his swollen tip fitted into the gaping mouth of her sex - and then he'd let go, watching her slide back down his length, writhing to balance herself with her hands bound, clenching all around him.

He always gagged her, and commanded her not to look at him when they didn't have the blindfold handy. She took it as part of the game, calling him "Master," and keeping her eyes downcast while he stripped her, bound her, beat her. But seeing her delight in it, the flush of her skin, the sheen of sweat glistening over the high color, he found himself losing sight of the boundary between play and reality. He sometimes caught himself glancing at her on campus, as she passed him in the hall, wanting to reach out and slap her, command her to strip.

They were so close to the end. Even Hall was caught in the mania of the final sprint, whirling between meetings like a dervish, eyes always darting to the next task. Eiri tried to keep the pace of meetings and syncs with his team, but it wasn't until three days before launch that he even managed to find ten minutes for Christy and a friendly cup of coffee.

She had fresh bite marks on her neck.

Under his hard stare, she blushed. "Come on, don't be like that... I told you, she's nice about."

"The Director?"

"Yeah," said Christy. "She listens, you know? And we go out to dinner and she talks about all kinds of things. She's over eight hundred years old, did you know?"

Eiri's jealousy pierced the fog of his lust. He tried to tell himself to keep calm, that it didn't matter, that at the very least, they could talk about it later. But he found himself striding to her office, not even bothering to knock as he pushed inside. She was not alone. A tall elf - the same from the night of New Year's party - held her in his arms from behind, his bearded mouth at her neck. Kissing her. She caught sight of him at the door.

"Can I help you, Lao?" she asked. The elf lifted his mighty head and stared.

"Director," he said, unsure. "I... hoped for a moment of your time."

She considered him a moment. Then rested a hand on the forearm of the elf and said, "I'll see you for breakfast, dearest."

"I can't wait, my love." He kissed her again on the cheek and brushed past Eiri on the way out.

Eiri waited until the door closed behind him before uttering a furious exhalation. He stared as hard at her as he had at Christy, disgusted. Horrified. "Who was that?"

"My fiance," she said, cool and correct. She seated herself behind her desk and motioned for him to take one of the chairs. "What's on your mind, my friend?"

Friend? He sat. "Why does my chemical engineer have your teeth marks on her? I thought you didn't feed on coworkers."

"Oh, that?" She smiled. "She's... an edge case."

"Explain," Eiri fumed. He did not like to see her so jovial, so carefree. He preferred to see her stretched over the back of a chair, ass red and raw from his belt. "Do you... do all of that with her too?"

"No, of course not," she said. "Is that it? You're jealous? Don't be. Christy is type AB negative - the rarest blood among humans. I couldn't resist taking the odd sip when she offered. That'd be like turning down a glass of pre-Collapse Yamazaki - ludicrous!"

He didn't like the comparison. "Is that how see us? As sips?"

She sighed, broke eye contact. "I can't change my nature. In any case, if it makes you feel better, I haven't been... intimate with anyone but you."

"And your 'fiance?'"

"Eiri," she said, sternly. "Don't be childish. A business relationship sometimes needs social engineering. When Fulbright debuts, there will be questions. A marriage distracts."

"What kind of questions?"

"About the blood." She locked her eyes onto his; he felt her touch in his mind. "You don't know...? Hall didn't tell you?" Her tone took on a menacing pitch. "I can assume the whole team is in the dark?"

"What does the team need to know?" Eiri asked. "About blood?"

"You really don't know! We use blood to roast Fulbright beans," the Director said. "That's the 'secret' ingredient. Only vampires have the means to source that much blood. Why else would the elves need our help to produce coffee when they've been making it ever since the Collapse?"

Stunned, Eiri put his head in his hands. They didn't tell us. "We were brought onto the project because they felt humans had better insight into human tastes..."

"Elves and their bullshit intrinsic theory," the Director said. " You were hired so they could profile your blood, and send it to us to clone at scale. I'll go over it in the sync - you all should have been informed at kickoff."

"But I don't understand," Eiri said. "Why us? Why our blood?"

She blinked at him, her brow furring with mingled compassion and pity. "Eiri. You're B negative. So is Jaymin. Alan is AB positive. And that intern was O negative. I've known this about you - all of you - since before joining the project. You were selected by blood type, and approved by me as a perfect combination of rare types - we fiddled with it for months to get the right combo for soft boil. I can't believe Hall left you in the dark. That's just fucked up."

"It is!" He felt sick. Angry. "You hired us because of blood type?"

"Oh, it's not just that," she said, trying to comfort him. "Each of you is more than qualified to launch a consumer product! Beijing Design is no joke. And you know how elves are about looks... Even I'm only here because I was considered aesthetically pleasing! My VP couldn't get a visa." She set down her phone. "Calendar invite for a team huddle tomorrow should be in your inbox. I'm very sorry, Eiri. This isn't good management practice. It's below even demon standards."

Eiri didn't respond, at first. Selfishly, he thought only of his own turmoil. Drinking coffee made with human blood... He barely thought of his team. Poor Christy. Just a sip. He stood up. "I'm going home for the day."

She looked at him, eyes full of pity. "Yes. That sounds reasonable."

...

The Director broke the news the next day during a team sync. Hall, sulking, stood behind her, not even bothering to move his lips in sync to the Director's apology. Eiri glanced at the faces of his teammates and saw them paling with the realization that their work hinged on their own bodies. Christy feigned a careless little shrug, but even she was subdued for the rest of the workday.

Eiri thought briefly of rebelling - walking out, quitting. Sabotaging the launch, somehow. Deleting data or leaking it to some human rights activist group. But in a post-Collapse world, he knew that none of it mattered. The elves could replace him; the project would launch with or without him; humans would still drink the coffee even if they were reading the full list of ingredients. He wondered, darkly, if he'd already tasted the coffee made from his own blood from the pots in the office.

He moped through the final days, feeling none of the adrenaline he usually did from completing a project. Even the odd sight of the Director in the halls didn't distract him from his melancholy, though sometimes he caught her gaze lingering on him. When he saw her car in the street, he deliberately walked by it. She did not send her assistant to collect him.

House Air planned a launch party for them the week after they went live. Rather than a company-wide campus happy hour, the invite gave the address somewhere in the Marymoore Copse that didn't show up on Google Maps. Rumors swirled of a mysteries fairy mansion that only appeared under the full moon. A magic place, dark, and secret.

"Great place to celebrate launching a shady project," Alan joked. Christy and Jaymin laughed along with him. No one had seen Tim the intern since the Director broke the news about Fulbright's "secret ingredient."

Eiri considered not going, leaving the calendar invite to languish in his inbox. Christy nudged him on Messenger three separate times in a day, trying to entice him.

"It's just a party," she said. "You're the product designer - how would it look if you don't go??" And, finally, "Wear one of your sexy suits. Rub in their knobby faces. They couldn't have done this without you, Eiri."

He caved and said he'd go with her. At the very least to keep her away from vampires looking for "a sip." Almost as soon as he replied to her, he caught sight of the Director and her assistant strolling to the fishbowl. Eiri decided to trail behind them, wondering if he could catch the vampire's eye - inflict some of his turmoil on her mind.

Her fiance waited for her in the office with two of his own associates. The Director left the glass transparent and Eiri discreetly watched from the mini kitchen as the two conversed. He got the sense it was an argument. The elf did not embrace her as he had before, and she kept a physical distance from her fiance that allowed her to keep her neck neutral instead of tilted up. Keeping some power in the exchange. Eiri also though he recognized the set of her jaw from their play - an arrogant, mocking angle she took to provoke him into hitting her harder.

The elf left without touching her. After a moment, the Director sent her assistant out with a gesture. She was just taking out her phone when her head turned and she saw him, watching her from the kitchen.